The Many Faces of ALF

I know there was a lot of cocaine floating around in the 1980s, but even that doesn’t explain the popularity of the television show ALF.

Out of This World Ratings

Debuting in 1986, ALF – a clever acronym for “Alien Life Form” – told the story of a short, furry, cat-eating alien creature from the planet Melmac who is stranded on Earth and is taken in by the Tanner family in suburban California. It’s a typical “fish out of water” story that, like these stories often do, wound up reflecting the oddities of American culture back at its audience. And there was an audience for this show!

In its first season on NBC, the show averaged 16.5 million people watching it every week. By the second season, it was getting 18.8 million people on average, with a handful of episodes reaching over 20 million viewers. During this peak, it was the tenth most popular show on television, tied with The Wonder Years for that spot.  With the third season, viewership dropped to 17.7 million, forcing it out of the Top 10 shows on television, but only falling to #13.  However, the audience was ready to move on by the fourth and final season in 1989, when the show only had 13.7 million viewers every week, forcing it down to the #39 spot for the year.

To give you some idea of how the television landscape has changed, the current #1 show that is not a news broadcast is America’s Got Talent, which is averaging 4.5 million people per episode. Can you believe that 4 times as many people tuned into ALF every week?

Production

The show was co-created by puppeteer Paul Fusco, who also played the titular alien in puppet form (full body scenes were filmed by little person Michu Meszaros in an uncredited role), and Tom Patchett, who was one of the writers of The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan.  

The human stars of ALF consisted of Max Wright as Willie Tanner; Anne Schedeen as Kate Tanner; Andrea Elson as older daughter Lynn; Benji Gregory as younger brother Brian; and Charles Nickerson played baby Eric who came along in the finale of Season 3.  As is common knowledge among TV fans, introducing a baby (or younger cousin that comes to stay with the family for a while) is usually a bad sign that the show has “jumped the shark” and with ALF that was no exception. In the season 3 finale, young Eric Tanner was born, but the show was not renewed for a fourth season.

For a variety of reasons, production of the show was quite difficult.  Aside from Fusco, puppeteer Lisa Buckley controlled ALF’s left arm and hand, while Bob Fappiano controlled ALF’s face and ears by remote control.  Coordinating three people to perform was difficult, so mistakes and timing issues were common.  According to Anne Schedeen, “a 30-minute show took 20, 25 hours to shoot.”  

The stressful production was just one of the reasons that Max Wright hated being on ALF.  While the show was on the air, he rarely did interviews, he rarely did any promotions.  Wright hated the fact that he was playing second fiddle to a puppet who got all the good lines.  According to his co-stars, when Wright was finished with the last scene he would be in for the series finale, he walked off the set, went straight to his dressing room to pack his bags, and left the studio without another word.  He hated the show and, admittedly, it did ruin his career as he very rarely worked in the industry again afterwards.  Wright would go on to have problems with drugs and alcohol that would plague him for years.  He died in 2019 at the age of 75. 

Further Alien Adventures

Thanks to the success of the sitcom, ALF was adapted into a comic book series from Marvel as well as two different animated spin-offs, ALF: The Animated Series (26 episodes) and ALF Tales (21 episodes). 

The live-action sitcom ended on a cliffhanger in 1990, but in 1996, the TV movie Project ALF was released to try to bring closure to the series.  However, fans were left disappointed, as none of the original human co-stars came back for the movie. 

ALF was briefly given his own talk show on TV Land in 2004, called ALF’s Hit Talk Show, which, ironically, was not a hit at all, and was canceled after 7 episodes.  Since then, series co-creator Fusco has been trying to get another ALF project off the ground, but, thus far, has been unsuccessful.  

THE Target Audience

As an 11-year old boy in 1986, I was absolutely the target audience for a show like ALF.  I’m sure there were a handful of jokes or plotlines that went over my head, but I loved the smart-assed little guy.  I used to be quite proud of my ALF impression on the school bus, though all I could ever really say in his voice was, “HA!  I kill me!”  I always wanted one of the ubiquitous dolls that still appear on Facebook Marketplace on a regular basis all these years later, but my parents never got one for me.  Then again, I really only watched the sitcom for the first couple of seasons, then caught a handful of episodes of the original animated show, before moving on.  My fascination with the character died out pretty quickly.  I haven’t even bothered to revisit any of the shows, though I have been curious to see if it holds up at all or is better left in the past. 

The Many Faces of ALF

During the height of ALF-mania in 1988, the show teamed up with Burger King for a promotional campaign called “The Many Faces of ALF”, featuring the furry alien trying on different earthly personalities.  For $2.99, a BK customer could get an ALF hand puppet dressed up as either a baseball player, a chef, a Bruce Springsteen-style rocker, or a Hawaiian shirt-wearing surfer dude.  Each puppet came with its own cardboard “flexi-disc” record that played a parody song based around the personality of the puppet.

The songs included:

Take Me ALF to the Ballgame

Cookin’ with ALF

Melmac Rocks

Melmac Girls

I dig flexi-discs and have been trying to add more to my record collection since they’ve become such an oddly forgotten object of nostalgia.  So, when I heard there were records and puppets based around ALF, I had to start tracking them down.  

Thus far I have two out of the four records – Melmac Girls and Cookin’ with ALF – that I was able to pick up in an eBay auction for only $10, including shipping.  Typically these sell for about $8 – $15 each, plus shipping, so it was a pretty solid bargain.

I lucked out even more when I was able to get three of the four puppets in one auction for only $7, including shipping.  (And that auction came with bonus fast food tie-in toys, some of which are going to become their own blog post at some point.)  

I’m still on the lookout for a good deal for the last two records and the last puppet, so I’ll update this post when I finally grab them.

Legacy

While any tween kid in the late-80s knows exactly who ALF is, I’m not sure the show has had much staying power in the cultural landscape.  There have been a few tie-in products in recent years – most notably a series of action figures from NECA, including one in his “Born to Rock” persona – but I don’t think kids today have any idea who or what he is. 

And, honestly, I can’t blame them. 

ALF was a singular, bizarre show that could have only existed in primetime, network television during the 1980s.  The mix of novelty, proto-X-Files government conspiracies, and sarcasm made for a bafflingly popular sitcom that defies explanation even to this day.