The Somewhat Ambitious

I never really got Alf. Granted, there was an extended period where I ate cats, but it was the early nineties. I was so coked up I could barely see straight.*

Alf, if you’re not in the know, was a show that ran for four seasons, chronicling the misadventures of a furry alien from a planet called Melmac. An earth family, the Tanners (no relation to the Saget-helmed Bradyesque nightmare that was Full House), pretty much took him in and hid him from the government and douchebag neighbours. Here’s a quick synopsis.

Unsure what to do, the Tanners take ALF into their home and hide him from the Alien Task Force (a part of the U.S. military) and their nosy neighbors Trevor and Racquel Ochmonek (John LaMotta and Liz Sheridan), until he can repair his spacecraft. He generally hid in the kitchen. It was eventually revealed that ALF’s home planet, Melmac, exploded because of a catastrophe involving nuclear bombs. In episode four of season one ALF tries to convince the president of the USA to stop the nuclear program as he is afraid that Earth might share Melmac’s fate. He became a permanent member of the family, although his culture shock, survivor guilt, general boredom, despair, and loneliness frequently caused difficulty for the Tanners.

So try and imagine The Omega Man meets A Muppet Christmas Carol. Once you’ve recovered from profusely throwing up, you’ll probably be asking the same question I did last last night, after spending a solid hour (post-Reggie Watts) watching Alf clips online: how did this get made? Well to be honest, novelty and a smidgen of comic charm fuelled it throughout its four year run, and largely explains the massive run of comics released by Marvel, and to a lesser degree the TV movie. What it doesn’t explain, however, is Alf’s Hit Talk Show.

I won’t go into detail, largely because I can’t bring myself to because last time I tried, I couldn’t seem to stop haemhorraging blood. Sufficed to say, Alf’s Hit Talk show was:

- Not a hit,
- Ran for a grand total of seven episodes,
- And starred Ed McMahon as Alf’s sidekick, who introduced the show, and fought down bewilderment at how he landed a gig introducing a cat-eating puppet.

Below is a clip from the show. Again, there have been far worse things on television. But not by much. To be fair, the premise is awesome (puppet based on the Fonz has his own talk show with crusty Ed MCMahon) but it doesn’t, and probably couldn’t, follow through. Oh, and it ran in 2004. Which is probably why I remember being so cripplingly enui-ridden that year.

*cough*

/Paul

*I spent most of the Barcelona olympics partying with the Boston Celtics, totally out of my gourd. Granted I was around ten years old at the time, but hell, I was wild.