What We Talk About When We Talk About ALF

I want to talk to you about ALF. When I say “you,” I mean, you. Personally. I will talk to anyone about ALF. I will talk to you about ALF at a party. I will talk to you about ALF while I am aborting your child. I am never not in the mood to talk about ALF. 

In quiet moments, which comprise the majority of my single, childless life, my thoughts often return to ALF. I do not think I particularly like ALF, although the titular character’s surly, sarcastic demeanor was surely a key component of my comedic development. 

(Side note: Speaking of comedic development, I realized the other day that my comic sensibility and reference points are generationally incorrect (i.e., why the mere sentence “Abe Vigoda as Fish“ functions as a joke in my eyes) because my comedic development was hijacked by a bunch of Boomer Harvard graduates while my brain was still developing in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this, and I don’t know what to do with this realization. I do, however, know we should save Tony Orlando’s house.)

I know more about tensions on the set of ALF than I do about my own ancestry. Whenever I tell people how to pronounce my last name they generally ask something along the lines of “But...are you sure?” And I reply I am not, I’m not sure, I just say it how my father’s side of the family said it, and they were probably wrong, but I’ll never know why because they’re all either deceased or dead to me. I finally broke down and took one of those 23 and Me tests last year because it was half off at Target and I wanted to know what I was made of—no one ever told me and it was too late to ask. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the idea of a start up owning my molecular data, nor was I enthusiastic about the police having access to said data, but I justified spitting into the tube by telling myself I had no intention of ever killing someone and attempting to keep it a secret so I had no use for anonymous DNA. It turned out I am more French than I thought, in that I am at all French. Italian, too. Could have fooled me. I’ve always primarily identified as Greek because that was the only ancestry I knew for a fact I had. But I was even wrong in this regard—I’m more Turkish than Greek, for genocidal reasons. 

There is something that happened on the (again, tense) set of ALF that I think about with intense regularity. The something is this: after the director called “Cut” on the last scene of the last show they ever shot, the man who played Willie (ALF’s primary comedic foil, a classically trained actor who loathed playing second fiddle to a precocious puppet so much he once attempted to choke said puppet) walked directly off set, collected his personal effects from his dressing room, went to his car and drove away without a word. In my mind’s eye, this scene plays out as a tracking shot; some real male auteur shit. I think about this scene often because it is incredibly funny, funnier than anything someone attempting to come up with something funny could ever conjure. It is as human as it is dark.

It has been said that every 30 minute episode of ALF took upwards of 30 hours to shoot, on account of the technical nightmare having a puppet engage with humans in the humans’ own environment entailed. For the first season, a little person in an ALF costume was used in wide shots to lighten the load, but that ceased in subsequent ones—the little person in the costume didn’t look exactly like ALF, and ALF’s (ethically questionable) creator insisted on ALF’s look being consistent, so a set was built four feet off the ground on a soundstage in Culver City with holes in the floor for ALF’s puppeteers to be mobile. Sometimes the sleep-deprived actors would fall in the holes. This is what you learn when you, in the vacuous silence of your own home, learn about ALF because you cannot learn more about yourself. 

Whenever I get a bee in my bonnet to read more about ALF I always discover more and it is never good. Everyone involved in the production is either dead or destroyed. Willie (he would hate me referring to him as Willie, but, Willie) died last year, and a video of him smoking crack is easily accessible to anyone interested. The (no longer young) man who played Brian’s Facebook page is public, which is why I know he is a recovering drug addict who has been selling ALF-related ephemera on eBay for a depressingly cheap price. 

There is always more to discover on the internet about things that don’t involve you and have no real consequence on your life. The algorithm wants you to continue discovering these things because the more you click, the more you see “Doctors HATE this one trick” ads with saucepans of banana slices boiling in them. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about this, but the hunt gives me something to do when there is nothing to do, which is often. 

One can only learn so much about one’s self. I want to tell you more about tensions on the set of ALF but I also want to allow you the joy and heartbreak that is learning about tensions on the set of ALF. I want to give you the semblance of agency that is learning more about ALF. Take it if you need it.