I love an obscure bit of
Star Trek merchandise, and something that caught my eye in the hunt for such oddities recently is
Kevin Francis Ceramics' range of Star Trek toby jugs. Or almost range: While the company worked up designs for at least eleven different
TOS and
TNG characters, only four ever appear to have made it into production - And all of those were in limited editions of between 350 and 650 a piece, so even they are quite illusive items. Continue below to have a look back at what could have been an ambitious and distinctive
Star Trek collection.
Toby jugs, for the unfamiliar, are normally a ceramic mug in the form of a character, traditionally a sitting rotund man with his own mug of ale in hand. They can be practical drinking vessels, but they're more often produced to be novelties and collectors items. A few companies have had a go a some form of character or figural mug in the
Star Trek realm before, perhaps most notably Applause, who produced quite
a fairly large range of character's heads as mugs. A couple of years before them though (circa 1995), Kevin Francis went down a far more ambitious and artisan path.
You can get a really good sense of what they were creating in one of the designs they did manage to get to market, the
Borg drone toby mug - As you can see, he's barely a mug at all! This tall standing character casts aside the typical constrains and practicalities of the toby mug format to focus on delivering an impressive ceramic sculpture. Setting this apart from your usual figurine though, at the back of this character you find a Borg Cube streaking through space; this is the handle. A hole at the top of the head allows liquid to be poured in and drunk out from, and so this is still a functional mug (if maybe slightly difficultly so).
