Starboppers was a planned television series featuring a cast of alien characters who were loosely based on Freudian ideas. Jim Henson and the Muppet company worked on the series in 1983 and 1984. According to character designer Ron Mueck, "Each group of three characters inhabited a spaceship that was their ‘body’. These characters embodied the ‘mind’ of each ‘body’ and the Freudian principles of Ego, Super Ego and Id." Each ship would have a Captain, a navigator, and a "stoker."
A prototype puppet of Cosmo Bopper was created to film a short test for the series. Cosmo was performed by Jim Henson in the test film which was also introduced by Henson. It was Jim Henson's intention to place these new puppet characters in computer-generated environments for the show.