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Alf(1986)


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[align=center]ALF(Alien Life Form)[/align]

[align=center]alf2.jpg[/align]

ALF (Paul Fusco) follows an amateur radio signal to Earth and crash-lands into the garage of the Tanners. The Tanners are a suburban middle class family in Los Angeles, California. The family consists of social worker Willie (Max Wright), his wife Kate (Anne Schedeen), their teenage daughter Lynn (Andrea Elson), younger son Brian (Benji Gregory), and their cat Lucky.

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 Raquel Ochmonek (John LaMotta and Liz Sheridan), until he can repair his spacecraft. He generally hides in the kitchen. It is eventually revealed that ALF's home planet, Melmac, exploded because of a catastrophe involving nuclear war. In episode four of season one ALF tries to convince the president of the USA to stop the nuclear program as ALF is afraid that Earth might suffer a doom similar to Melmac's. ALF was off the planet because he was part of the Melmac Orbit Guard. ALF (a.k.a. Gordon Shumway) is homeless, but he isn't the last survivor of his species. He becomes a permanent member of the family, although his culture shock, survivor guilt, general boredom, despair, and loneliness frequently cause difficulty for the Tanners.

While most of the science fiction of ALF was played for comedic value, there were a few references to actual topics in space exploration, for example ALF's using a radio signal as a beacon in the pilot episode. In the episode "Weird Science", ALF told Brian, who was building a model of the solar system for his science project, that there were two planets beyond Pluto called "Dave" and "Alvin", which gets Brian in trouble at school. However, after Willie makes a call to an astronomical organization, he explains to Brian and ALF that "Dave" could have been the planetoid Chiron, or "Object Kowal", after its discoverer.

The original series spans over four seasons and 102 episodes (each episode's name is also the name of a song relevant to the episode's plot), in which ALF learns about Earth culture and makes new friends both within and without the Tanner family, including Willie's brother Neal (Jim J. Bullock), Kate's mother Dorothy (Anne Meara) (with whom ALF has a love-hate relationship — he refers to her as the Wicked Witch of the West or the Witch of Endor, and she in turn threatens to either make ALF a rug or chauffeur him to an Army base), her boyfriend (later husband) Whizzer (Paul Dooley), the Ochmoneks' nephew Jake, a psychologist named Larry (Bill Daily), and a blind woman named Jody (Andrea Covell) (who never quite figures out that ALF isn't human, though she is aware through touch that he is short and very hairy). Changes pass within the Tanner household over the course of the series, including the birth of a new child, Eric (the reason for adding a baby in the series being that Anne Schedeen was pregnant at the time); ALF's move from his initial quarters in the laundry room to the attic, which he and Willie converted into an "apartment", and the death of Lucky the cat; in the final instance, ALF finds that, despite his occasional attempts to catch Lucky with the intention of making the cat a meal, he has come to love and respect the family pet too much to do anything untoward with Lucky's remains, although he admits to the Tanners he has become the worst kind of Melmacian, a "cat lover".

In the series finale, ALF is about to be rescued by other survivors of his home planet, but is instead captured by the American military, and the viewer is left to ponder ALF's ultimate fate. This was not supposed to be the finale, as the original airing ended on a "To Be Continued" note. The producers supposedly had a verbal agreement with NBC to get at least one more episode to resolve the cliffhanger. NBC never made good on the deal, and the series was cancelled. However, the story was concluded in the TV-movie Project ALF.

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