Rubber Forehead Aliens - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Rubber Forehead Alien

This is the forehead that defeated countless enemies and charmed numerous women. But also ended up getting smacked down a lot.

Man, they weren't even trying with this one. I don't know if they were running out of latex or what, but boldly going where people look like they're about to go cross-eyed is not my idea of majestic space opera. Coming soon — aliens with extra-deep upper lip dents.

— Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg, on Bajoran Nose Ridges.

We've hired a pretty girl and I want to keep her that way. Think of something that we can take and make her look a little alien, and still get the idea she's from another planet, but she's still gorgeous.

— Rick Berman to Michael Westmore

when discussing creating the aforementioned makeup.

I'd buy a big prosthetic forehead

And wear it on my real head

Everybody wants prosthetic

Foreheads on their real heads

— They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"

The tendency for all sci-fi alien species to be one facial feature away from humanity.

Sometimes they're not even that far away. They look totally human and sound human. In some cases, this may well be a disguise, but in others this appears to be their natural appearance. See Human Aliens.

You'd think that alien species would be radically different - insectoids, three-legged wombats, giant cats, et cetera - but the effects budget only allows for latex and makeup, so we get humans with brow ridges, humans with extra nostrils, humans with Pointy Ears, humans with bony protrusions, and so on.

Oddly, though the idea turns up now and then in written SF, TV shows and movies never suggest convergent evolution (the principle that different species evolving in similar ecological niches will end up rather similar to each other, as with killer whales and sharks) as a reason why intelligent species tend to share the "humanoid" body structure. It has been compared to how water droplets will attempt to form into the most efficient shape, a sphere, in any environment. It is possible that the humanoid form has enough versatility that only minor variations would be needed to meet environmental demands specific to other planets.

Gene Roddenberry gave more reasons for this in an interview once. Budget constraints aside, if you try to make aliens look completely alien, you'll firstly make them look ridiculous (cf. Doctor Who), and secondly make it doubly hard for the actor playing the alien to do anything mildly resembling acting. This has actually been isolated to extremely specific requirements: if an audience can't see an actor's eyes or mouth, their ability to empathize with or emotionally invest in that character is significantly impaired. This is one reason why Mooks, especially SF mooks like the Cylons or the Imperial Stormtroopers, are so often uniformed in face-obscuring helmets.

It's not entirely impossible to do reasonable aliens on TV, though. It just requires remarkable creativity. The Horta in the original Star Trek's "Devil in the Dark" was a well-done non-humanoid alien, and quite cheap to produce. Doctor Who's Daleks are generally considered to be an extremely successful non-humanoid alien - but were so expensive that few stories had more than three working Daleks. (In fact, the writer who came up with the idea of the Daleks did so specifically to get away from People In Rubber Suits, who in his opinion never looked real.) Farscape did excellent work with puppets created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

Also, with advances in technology, CGI and animatronic aliens are becoming more common.

The Anime equivalent is the alien with pointy ears, colorful facial markings, or fur.

Very occasionally, and mostly in children's media, there is a subtrope with the same logic. In a world where the protaganist species is non-human, the aliens will be ever-so-slightly modified (whatever). Thus, for example, Pigs in Space meet with aliens that are rubber forehead pigs.

The next step past Rubber Forehead Aliens (catlike or buglike or lizardlike aliens that can still sit in chairs and hold weapons) is Humanoid Aliens. Contrast with Starfish Aliens.

Examples:

Advertising

In UK advertising, the Tefal Eggheads. Later parodied by Ant Mc Partlain's actual forehead.

Anime and Manga

The Abh were distinguished by their blue hair though some of them also had pointy ears.
- This one does get justified, though, in that the Abh are in fact genetically altered humans, who even call their stellar nation the "Humankind Empire Abh" (or a variant, depending on how you translate it); the Abh see themselves as basically humans with a few different traits, while their (non-modded) enemies tend to see them as vile aliens, wholly different from humanity. One of the narrative thrusts of the work is examining just how human they really are - or aren't.
The Ctarl Ctarl essentially CatGirls from space.
Mahou Sensei Negima does this with many inhabitants of the magic world; they look like normal people, but with horns or weird shaped ears or something. The rest are Petting Zoo People.
The Saiyans in Dragon Ball Z are pretty much just humans with tails in appearance; that turn into giant apes during a full moon.
- They also have fur instead of hair, which is why it doesn't need to be cut.

Comic Books

The Green Lantern series has frequently managed to avoid this trope. While the Corps has its share of Rubber Forehead Aliens, they also have invertebrate Green Lantern, hyper-intelligent chipmunk Green Lanterns, plant Green Lanterns, and, in the case of Mogo, a living planet Green Lantern. The Green Lantern for Earth in the near future, as seen in Animal Man, is a blue whale.
- Let's not forget the Lantern that's a sentient crystal.
- Or the one that's a living mathematical equation.
- Or, for that matter, the one who's a superintelligent smallpox virus.
- ...how do they wear rings?
  - This may explain why the Green Lantern Corps uses rings in the first place. A ring will fit most shapes of aliens. Of course, a living mathematical equation is going a little far...
  - Not really...
  - Ok, now explain how you make it green.
  - Green pen/font colour.
- The DTV animated movie took several of the Rubber Forehead Aliens in the Corps, then weirded them up even further. The Qwardians went from purple elves to insectoids, and Abin Sur gained some facial spikes.
Elves in Elf Quest are basically humans with pointy ears and four fingers. This is partially justified, since their shapeshifting alien ancestors deliberately took on a human-resembling form before landing (they even reshaped their spaceship to look like a palace). Only partially because even before that (flashbacks), said ancestors already looked fairly human in shape, and would have qualified as Humanoid Aliens at least.
Though technically Human Aliens, Viltrumites from Invincible are also Hairy Upper Lip Aliens. All Viltrumites have black hair, and all male Viltrumites have mustaches, which makes it pretty easy to tell them apart from humans. In fact, one character simply removed his fake beard, showing his Viltrumite mustache, in a pretty hilarious reveal.

Film

The movie This Island Earth's aliens were similar to humans except for huge foreheads and white hair. The actors literally wore Rubber Foreheads.
- ...but I'm not an alien!
In Galaxy Quest, the character of Dr. Lazarus (played by Alexander Dane, played by Alan Rickman) is a Rubber Forehead Alien. The Thermians, of course, think he is a real alien.
- The Thermians themselves are a subversion of this. On first appearance, they look like short-ish humans who have Vulcans for hair stylists. However, it turns out it's just an illusion. They're really Starfish Aliens.
The movie Trail of the Screaming Forehead takes this to the logical extreme. The aliens are foreheads that attach themselves to humans. The movie is pure, high quality B grade.
The Fifth Element has a variety of particularly tacky examples. The alien opera-singer sort of looked like a hybrid between an Asari and the Alien.

Literature

Star Wars has a lot of humanoid aliens, most of which find the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere found on human-inhabited planets tolerable, if not comfortable (there are of course exceptions to this rule, such as the Kel Dor, who must wear goggles and breather masks at all times on human-habitable worlds). There are a few, however, non-humanoids, including a handful of insectoids, a lobster-like species, more than a few quadrapeds or hexapeds...and one that looks like nothing so much as a floating brain.
Used in Battlefield Earth. The main distinguishing features of the Psychlos appear to be that they're big, and have eyebrows which join onto their hair.
There was a Spider Man novel in the 90's that used the "convergent evolution" handwave as an explanation why a random alien coincidentally looked a lot like Venom.
Justified in Anathem: the Urnudans, Latierrans etc are humans from the universe next door .
The Classic Space Opera The Lensman Series had human, humanoid and utterly alien species. Of course it also had a guiding sentient race that was controlling evolution on many different planets.
Justified in one of the earliest science fiction novels, "Last and First Men". The varieties of human aliens are a result of original humanity escaping from a dying Earth. For two billion years, humanity evolves through nine different stages and splits off into a smaller set of subgroups.

Live Action TV

In Star Trek, Klingons, Vulcans, Bajorans, Ferengi, and Cardassians, just to name a few. In fact, the majority of all races encountered in every Star Trek series has two arms, two legs, a head, and a general chest area. The exceptions are usually Monster Of The Week types.
- The Bajorans are the worst example. Small ridges on the nose are the only differences between Bajorans and humans. They once had tiny notches above the nose, but those disappeared after a few episodes.
  - Of course, there is a reason for this, as noted above: the Bajoran makeup was designed the way it is specifically to make sure that the (numerous) Bajoran females who would appear in the franchise would all still be good-looking. Whether or not this is a good justification is an exercise left to each individual troper.
  - There is a further, even better explanation as well; the simple Bajoran makeup was easy to apply to young children with a minimum of fuss and difficulty (and didn't present any problems with child acting/labor laws). As the Bajorans were introduced to Trek as a race of woobies, in a sense, makeup that could be applied to alien kids with relative ease was of paramount importance.
- In the original Star Trek, if it's not Rubber Forehead Aliens, it will almost certainly be energy beings, which may or may not be using psychic powers to disguise themselves as normal humans. Although on one occasion their true forms turned out to be tiny creatures apparently made of pipe cleaners.
- The Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Chase" provides a tidy explanation (part Ret Con, part Lampshade Hanging) for the prevalence of Rubber Forehead Aliens in the Star Trek universe. All the main races in the universe were created from "seeds" placed in their respective worlds' primordial oceans by an even more ancient humanoid race.
- There's another Lampshade Hanging when the Bajoran Ro Laren, who has something of a chip on her shoulder, refers to herself as "the token bumpy-forehead".
- Parodied in this article from The Onion.
- Of course, Klingons only gained their rubber foreheads when the movies' increased budget permitted it. Prior to the Ret Con, they were Entire Bottle of Bronzer and Upswept Eyebrows Aliens. In fact, until attention was called to it in Deep Space Nine, the Literary Agent Hypothesis was the official explanation: in-universe, they weren't considered to look exactly like humans. There just wasn't the budget to portray them as they actually looked. (There's actually an onscreen reference, sort of: a Klingon posing as a human was said to have been surgically altered to appear human (if we take what's onscreen at face value, it wouldn't take surgery, just a haircut.)
- The 2009 movie seems to be going out of its way to give us a new variation with the large eyed aliens.
  - It also makes the Romulans worse than the Klingons in the "where'd the foreheads come from?" department. Romulans now don't have ridges, but what looks like complex tattoos - which means they went from having ridges to to not having them to having them again to having lost them again. What the hell? Also, keep in mind that while Klingons' gaining ridges after TOS has been referenced, and explained much later, there has never been any onscreen acknowledgement of the changes in Romulans.
Although Doctor Who has had a few examples over its long run, it mostly avoided this for either straight Human Aliens or People In Rubber Suits.
- Dubious continuity books suggest that the early Time Lords tinkered with evolution to produce alien races which all looked vaguely like them. Thus everything actually looks like Gallifreyans. However, this can only be justification.
It's not a Rubber Forehead, but the early 1970s Roddenberry production Genesis II had post-humans with two navels as their "distinguishing characteristic"!
- That was mostly a "screw you" towards the censors. For some reason, up until then navels were considered taboo.
Babylon 5 had the Centauri, Narn, and Minbari, as well as quite a few (less-central) non-humanoid aliens.
- The Centauri are closer to being Human Aliens thanks to the only real (visible and exterior) difference being the pointed teeth, ridiculous haircuts aside. The Narn are closer to Humanoid Aliens thanks to a more clearly alien look to them, despite a similar biological configuration (curiously, the Narn are one of the few species with eyes that aren't exactly the same as human eyes. A majority of B5 aliens, however, do fit this trope.
  - Straczynski had a lot of fun with this concerning the Centauri: when they made first contact with Earth, they actually claimed that Earth was a long-lost colony, due to the external similarities between the two species! Once the humans gave the Centauri a physical, however...
- The episode "There All the Honor Lies" lampshades and inverts this trope: an official Babylon 5 gift shop is opened in the station, and they sell very high quality alien species masks—but also human masks for aliens to wear!
The Twilight Zone episode titled "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up— double. No, I don't believe that the Eminem album was a reference to this episode. The setting of this episode is a rural restaurant. During the 25 minute episode, we wonder which one among a group of people is the alien. It turns out, we were seeing the alien all along, and that there were two of them. One alien has two extra arms (this one is from Venus). The other one has a third eye (he's from Mars).
- Actually it was the other way around. The Martian had the extra arm (but only one extra, not two) and the Venusian had the third eye.
Most "aliens" in the Stargate Verse are just humans, transported from Earth in antiquity. But of those that don't, some - particularly other species used as hosts by the Goa'uld - still fit this Trope. The Unas are just Humans with Scales, for example.
- The Jaffa sort of count also, in that they aren't humans, but rather descendants of humans genetically altered by the Goa'uld. Most (if not all) Jaffa have a mark on their forehead that serves as the symbol of their Goa'uld lord.
  - The symbol is a tattoo, (or in the case of the first primes, a cut in the flesh who is filled with molten gold). The Jaffa's real Rubber Forehead is a pouch in their belly, containing a Goa'uld symbiont. Also, since the mark is a tattoo, it's allowed humans to impersonate Jaffas.
Parodied by Bill Bailey in Space Cadets. Interlock fingers of both hands. Place palms on foreheads. Voila! Instant Klingon.
Space Precinct loves it some actors with rubber heads on. The sheer contrast between big rubber head and undisguised human body gives the whole thing a farcical charm.
Alien Nation
Used in Power Rangers on those rare occasions when aliens aren't either people in full-body rubber suits or regular actors using a silly name. Aquitarans, for example, have a purple... thing on their head (external braincase?), and Xybrians have a gem embedded in their forehead, along with unnatural hair colors.
Farscape has quite a few species of these floating around.
- Luxans, who look like humans with armor plated noses, a long pointed chin, a ridged brow, and a few dreadlock-esque tentacles.
- Nebari look like they are in permanent black and white.
- Delvians look like hairless, blue, scaly humans.
- Khalish have intense blue-green eyes and scales on their temples.
Nobody's mentioned the Buffy and Angel vampires yet?

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40000 doesn't shy away from this, either - one of its most significant races, the Eldar, are thin, graceful, pointy-eared humans - Elf expies In Space!. Other aliens, such as the Tau (short humanoids with grey skin and hooves) the Orks (large humanoids with green skin), the Kroot (gangly humanoids with avian features) and so on and so forth better qualify as Humanoid Aliens. Most of the races in Warhammer 40000 were created by the Old Ones which is why they share (very vaguely, they all look radically different - compare a Tau to an Ork to a Kroot) similar physiology. However there are aliens in the setting with radically different physiologies, most notably the Tyranids.
- Lampshaded in the Xenology book. The researcher was actually pretty freaked out (his mind actually snaps by the end for this and other reasons) when he realized that there was absolutely no reason for so many races to have the same basic shape. Internally, they are all completely different.
- Also it goes into detailed on how far the Eldar are in The Uncanny Valley.
Space Munchkin the RPG parodies this trope with the "Bumpy Headed Alien" racial choice. You choose, among other things, your facial bumps, the concept your entire species is devoted to, and the one aspect of human culture your species doesn't understand ("we do not have a word for this thing you call 'hygiene'")

Video Games

The dominant race in the Jak And Daxter series are basically humans with excessively long pointy ears.
Subverted in Phantasy Star with Newmans/Numans, and later Beasts in Phantasy Star Universe. Sure, they look human enough, save for their ears and (in the case of Beasts) their harelips and eyes ... but they aren't actually aliens at all. They're actually genetically engineered humans.
- Played straight, though: The three planets' humanoid species are Parmanian/Palmanian (humans), Motavian (furred, beaked humanoids), and Dezolisian/Dezorisian (Rubber Forehead Aliens with green skin).
Mass Effect. Asari fit the trope perfectly, being blue-skinned alien space babes.
- Fanon portrayal of quarians (who do not appear without helmets on in the first game) usually portrays quarians this way. Their lower legs are somewhat differently connected to the upper part, and they've got two toes on each foot. We do know that they are mammals, even if they are mammals whose proteins are mirrorwise to those of humans and asari.
  - You can see Tali's face with the right combination of lighting and armor, she looks human.
- The Batarians are essentially humans with an taller head, weird yellowish skin and 4 eyes,
In the Star Ocean games, Nedians and Expellians are identical to humans, while Roakians all have tails (and there are "Lesser Fellpool" who are more similar to cats, including cat ears. Interestingly, Roddick makes sure the Earthlings know that they're related to cats rather than monkeys, seeming to indicate that they descended from them. The third game introduced a bunch more alien species, some of which are humanoid dolphins, dwarves and such, others of which look practically identical to humans.
- Somewhat subverted in the Star Ocean: the Second Story when you find out that the ancient Nedians were playing at being gods of the universe and were responsible for seeding life onto most of the planets of the universe...
  - Further subverted when in Star Ocean: Til the End of Time, when you find out that the Star Ocean universe is itself a universe sized programmed MMORPG called the Eternal Sphere by it's higher dimension 4D residents, who are all Human Aliens, with everyone that the cast knows, including themselves, being either an automonous learning AI or a 4D being's in-game avatar character.
Miriam in Shining Force Feather might be a living Lampshade Hanging. She meets our protagonists and is immediately amazed, as she hasn't ever seen a human before. Never mind that Miriam is an elf, and that the only difference between her and Jin are her pointy ears, slanted eyes, and skinnier build. One scene later, she meets Alfin and is equally wowed, as she's never seen a Core Unit before, despite that Core Units are... Ridiculously Human Robots. Meanwhile, she meets all the varieties of Petting Zoo People with no more than chipper enthusiasm.

Webcomics

Subverted in Freefall: Sam Starfall looks humanoid, but it's really a suit to let him operate in an Earthlike enviroment. We don't get to see his true appearance, but it involves tentacles, and humans apparently find it disgusting.

Western Animation

Warhok and Warmonga, the Proud Warrior Race aliens who appear in season four of Kim Possible are an animated version of this. They're nine feet tall and have green skin.
In another animated example, the cast of Futurama is virtually all two-arms two-legs one-head humanoid (for most of the time). This is probably more to make it easier to animate jokes for them than anything else, as the show has otherwise shown a fair amount of ingenuity in depicting odd aliens (sentient nebulae, swarms of flies, etc).
Starlee from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward. Her race look almost exactly like humans, except for having blue skin and pointy ears.