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"He's just like E.T.," says a character of the fuzzy
extraterrestrial stranded on Earth in the pilot episode of ALF. But the
fun of this late 1980s family sitcom is that the sardonic ALF (an acronym for
Alien Life Form) is nothing like the interplanetary innocent of Steven
Spielberg's classic. With his whiplash wit and huckster sensibility, ALF (real
name: Gordon Shumway from the late planet Melmac, Lower East Side) enters the
lives of the Tanner family as a fully formed rascal whose spacecraft crashes
into their garage one night. Worried that the feds will chop ALF up for research
purposes, the Tanners--father Willie (Max Wright), a cautious civil servant who
doesn't like a lot of fuss at home; wife Kate (Anne Shedeen), and kids Lynn
(Andrea Elson) and Brian (Benji Gregory)--reluctantly take ALF in like a
shambling, profligate uncle who cracks wise despite having fallen on hard times. |
