This is the final version of Phungus almost completely rigged for animation. Very recently he went through a few subtle changes, but if we go way back, when I first thought of the character, he went through a fundamental remake.

The only thing my first Phungus version ever has in common with the final one is the colour yellow (then: hair, now: skin), and a space suit.

Back in 1998 when I started learning Flash, I wanted to find out whether it would be feasible to make a Flash animation with narration and everything for the Web. So I created the duo Phungus & Mowld, and made a 30 second version of a story I didn’t even know how it would end. The reason I didn’t even consider creating a video instead was that most people back then were still using 56k modems, even in Japan, and the bandwith for videos just wasn’t there yet.

When I considered reviving the duo a few years ago, I first thought I’d just update both characters a little. Here are some first sketches of new Phungus:

But somehow, I thought, if this was going to be a sci-fi series, I wanted to have an alien as a main character. I could make Phungus more interesting as an alien, with many open questions, where does he come from? What species is he? How does he eat? How does he procreate? And so on. So what kind of alien would I want to have as a main character? Surely it would have to be non threatening, likeable… I thought having him wear a space suit at all times might makes sense, he could come from a planet with different pressure, gravity or atmosphere, and the space suit could be a means to regulate the environment for him. For some odd reason the first idea that sprung to my mind was the Pyro character of Team Fortress 2…

Putting him in a full space suit doesn’t really make sense, because it would limit his facial expressions and nobody would know he’s an alien in the first place. So I took off his helmet, gave him stalked eyes, and then it was a done deal: Phungus would be some kind of Mollusk alien, with a mix of features taken from snails, octopuses, squids, you name it. Most mollusks aren’t necessarily amicable, so I went with the snail look, because snails are somewhat helpless and less super alien looking as an octopus or squid.

And of course his “hands” were feelers, with no separate digits. I’m pretty sure that typing isn’t the only thing he’ll be very slow at.