PS-51
Characters
HUMAN KIDS
LUCA (5) is an extremely friendly curly-haired boy who is curious about the world and especially his alien friends. He absolutely loves that he is in a school with such wonderfully weird peers. He can’t decide which of his alien classmates is his best friend because they’re all so cool. He's a natural leader but certainly not perfect.
REAGAN (6) is adorable. She only dresses in overalls and with a bow in her hair and whatever color alien the bow matches, that’s her best friend for the day. She’s the most compassionate kid around, always able to understand how another kid, or alien kid, is feeling.
LOGAN (6) is Reagan’s twin brother. He’s a bit more cautious when interacting with his alien classmates. That’s frankly understandable because he once walked into the living room in the middle of the night to see his parent’s watching Godzilla vs. Megalon. He's a hint large for his age but that doesn't stop him from being extremely capable in all physical activities.
JORDAN (4) is a bit of a gifted child with amazing mental capabilities. She was speaking at 2. She was spelling at 3. She was doing differential calculus at 4. But she doesn’t yet know just how much smarter she is than everyone else. Is it possible that she had a little alien intelligence rub off on her? Unfortunately, there are one or two things she is not good at - like tying shoelaces.
HALEY (5) is the class clown. She has a hearing disability and therefore speaks sign language. And some of the aliens speak it too, as they have a hard time pronouncing certain words. It means that she is occasionally the primary communicator with the alien kids. Her family is also hearing impaired.
WILL (7) is a tough guy, thanks to his grandfather’s bravado (he was the Air Force pilot who first encountered the aliens). Will thinks is he the leader of the group. But, as often is the case, there is the person who thinks they are the leader and then there are the real leaders (in our world, that’s Luca and Reagan).
ALIEN KIDS
BERT & BART are two aliens can actually fuse together at will, becoming… Bert-bart. Together they are U-shaped but every once in a while, the fusion doesn’t go as planned and they end up as completely random and ridiculous shapes.
XIYTHAN is an alien that will only wear pants. And we don’t mean it wears pants on its legs. This alien always wears pants as a shirt, a hat, gloves, shoes and earrings. But for some reason, never over his legs. Happily, there’s nothing to see.
KOZZY is a shapeshifter, but for unknown reasons, every third shape she turns into is a random kitchen appliance.
THURBER is a short purple alien that loves his adopted green human glasses. He is incredibly smart and usually has the perfect answer for any problem or situation. Unfortunately, he always talks in reverse (topics, not words), sometimes even starting the day with ‘goodnight’ and ending it by talking about breakfast. By the way, Thurber loves sports but thinks that all the games are just one big game, so he mixes baseball with pool, soccer with darts, etc.
BEEBVEEB has skin and muscles that are made out of an alien material that can best be described on earth as a rainbow-ish Saran Wrap. Yes, you can see its alien insides. All the time. Unless it decides to make those invisible too, which it can and does whenever someone has to do something sneaky. And Beebveeb is kind of a menace, so sneaky works for it. The problem is that being invisible makes it cough rainbows.
SzQoejgouk is alien with multiple arms that never stop moving. He is always taking something, handing it to other hands around his back, and then giving it back to you on the other side, as if it were a gift. Think of him as a rubbery C-3PO.
XOXOX (pronounced “Kso-Ksox”) is an alien that only talks in numbers. So she’s basically silent except for when anyone asks a question that can be answered with a number. And she always gets it right. Oh…. Also, gravity is reversed for her, so she is always on the ceiling, top of town bubble, etc.
BAZZ accidentally explodes whenever he sneezes. This is unfortunate, since he is allergic to many things on earth, including the color yellow. Happily, he pops back into existence a bit later.
FLURB is from a nearby solar system to Bazz and shares many similar traits. She is see-through and therefore we are always bumping into her at the wrong moments. The good thing is that bumping makes her hiccup and hiccuping makes her visible, for a few seconds anyway. And, as you can imagine, she is a bit bummed that she never gets called on in class.
RANDALL is a species of alien that doesn’t have names, so this is the name that his human classmates gave him. He really can only say his name so he is mostly considered a pet. Although he is an incredibly smart pet and frequently is the only one that knows solutions to big problems. But how can it communicate the answers?
NAGOL is always a bit off in time, meaning it operates a bit too early or late for events. It is convinced that his human classmate Logan is his best friend and savior, but only because Logan is his name said backwards.
TERRYBOB is an alien that can conjure up anything out of thin air. But she always accidentally makes the opposite of what you ask. Everyone knows this now, so they try to think of the opposite in advance to ask for that, in hopes so they get what they really want or need.
It’s admittedly impossible to keep track who is who, but a polka-dotted alien can split apart into different smaller aliens. Each polka dot is it’s own alien. Their names? That part’s easy: MARY, GARY, LARRY, SHERRY, JERRY, TERRY, BARRY, and HARRY.
HUMAN ADULTS
MR. LANCASTER (35) is the 2nd grade homeroom teacher. He never signed up to be a teacher in Area-51. His father is a scientist in town. Nevertheless, Mr. Lancaster is very understanding of the communication problems and issues that arise in a half-human, half-alien classroom. The thing is, he is only aware of about 3.7% of what actually happens. If he knew it all, his blood pressure medicine would quit. Also, Mr. Lancaster has a pet dog at home that seems to believe the aliens in town are there to take over the world and the dog reacts accordingly. Mr. Lancaster is human, but his teaching assistant is an alien named Jemmifer (spelling correct).
PRINCIPAL DARIUS (52) is the head of PS-51 and, as you can imagine, has an inflated sense of importance. In fact, he sees his role as temporary…. A stepping stone to becoming selected as the first human to travel outside our solar system to meet the rest of the aliens that have visited earth. Pretty much everything he does is in pursuit of that goal, one which he considers his destiny.
THATCHER (77) is the school’s Janitor and it’s clear that he knows much more about the universe - including physics and interstellar travel - than the school’s principal. Thatcher always finds a way to describe the complexity of a situation using the most common and unsophisticated tools and tasks at hand. He’s been around the block. In fact, we later learn that he’s been around the solar system. You see, he keeps it quiet, but he was once NASA’s best astronaut.
TRUDY McRUDY is the school’s language teacher and she is WAY out of her depth when attempting to grasp the dozens of aliens dialects surrounding her. Imagine being an English speaker trying to teach Mandarin to an alien kid from planet Itch.
MR. ZIALYZOCK is the PS-51 Science teacher. He is always proud of the experiments he shows the kids in attempt to wow them, but is continually flattened by the fact that the alien kids always one-up him. For example, one day he proudly showed the kids how to make a pickle glow by passing an electrical current through it. In response, a few of the alien kids got together and re-routed the town’s power source to a 10-foot long kilowatt-producing pickle which they created by infusing with quarks from the Andromeda galaxy.
BEVERLY is Luca’s mom. She’s a single mom, a financial whiz, taking care of all aspects of the town’s needs. She orders all the supplies and therefore the kids occasionally sneak into her order things they need for their shenanigans. Or cookies.
STACY AND ROBERT SMITH are Reagan and Logan’s mom and dad. Stacey’s father was one of Area-51’s first doctors and she followed in his footsteps, becoming the doctor for the town. Human patients are easy. The aliens? Not so much. Robert is an engineer. He is constantly perplexed and amazed by alien technology.
ALIEN ADULTS
JEMMIFER (spelling correct, age unknown) is an extremely large and extremely slippery purple alien that can barely fit through the door. She rarely speaks but is always helpful. Jennifer is aware of everything that happens in the class, but is reluctant to tell Mr. Lancaster for fear of him having a coronary. Also, her alien tongue can’t say the letter ’n’, hence her unusual name.
GREEBLE & GROK are the parents of Bert and Bart. Like their kids, they can fuse together to become Greeble-Grok. And unfortunately they suffer from the same problem of occasionally fusing into unpredictable shapes. But they make a great team and work together in the town’s science lab. There, they help the humans adapt alien technology. They just have to do it a little bit at a time, so the humans don’t get suspicious about huge technological advances. So they can’t fix global warming, but they are very proud of creating the flexible straw. And doesn’t that make the world a better place?
MS. PTHTPZPTH is the school’s counselor. She frequently is called in to help the alien kids navigate the strange customs and rules on earth and specifically, at PS-51. And she is regularly called to clear up misunderstandings, fix battered friendships, etc.
OOQOO UEP is the town’s mayor. It was decided that having an alien mayor would be best for morale. He is obsessed with human toilets, as his home planet has nothing like them. So he is always showing off his toilet (proudly placed in the middle of his office) and is constantly shopping for new ones.
Format
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11 min x 26 episodes, HD.
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Created with motion capture and programatic animation in real-time UNREAL game engine.
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Simultaneous production of linear TV show and Metaverse world (with storylines).