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 insurance agent Willie (Max Wright), his social worker 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 Three of Season One ALF tries to convince the president of the USA to stop the nuclear program, as ALF fears that Earth might suffer a fate similar to Melmac's. ALF was off the planet when it was destroyed 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 Alf makes a call to an astronomical organization and states that "Dave" is known by the organization, Willie comes to believe that "Dave" could have been the planetoid Chiron, or "Object Kowal," after its discoverer. Alf then shows Willie exactly where "Dave" is on an intergalactic Rand-McNally map of the universe. This occurred in the first season episode Weird Science and was one of the first instances of other worlds beyond Earth, and Melmac being given any focus verbally or physically.
The original series spans 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 outside of 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 En-Dor, 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 (Josh Blake), 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 occur 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 this 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. When ALF acquires a new cat with the intent of eating it, he actually grows fond of it and allows it to be adopted by the family, although he admits to the Tanners he has become the worst kind of Melmackian, 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 U.S. military, and the viewer is left to ponder ALF's ultimate fate.[5] This was apparently not supposed to be the finale, as the original airing ended with the words "To Be Continued" on the screen. The producers supposedly had a verbal agreement with NBC to produce at least one more episode to resolve the cliffhanger. NBC never made good on the deal, and the series was canceled. However, the story was concluded in the TV movie Project ALF.
[edit] ALF characterGordon Shumway is an alien, nicknamed ALF (an acronym for Alien Life Form) by William Tanner in the pilot episode. ALF was born on October 28, 1756 on the Lower East Side of the planet Melmac, though he mentions that his birthday is in August in Episode 7 ("Help Me Rhonda"). Melmac was located six parsecs past the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster, and had a green sky, blue grass and a purple sun. The commonly-used currency is a "Wernick" (named after producer Sandy Wernick) which is equal to ten Earth dollars, and the substances we call lint, gravel, and foam are as precious on Melmac as gold is on Earth (whereas gold and platinum are so common that they're used in place of porcelain to make toilets and sinks, as seen in the episode where ALF sells the gold and platinum plumbing in his ship to buy a Ferrari for Lynn).
ALF's body is covered with a ginger/rust-colored fur (he once described his color as burnt sienna). He has a rippled snout, facial moles, eight stomachs, his heart is apparently located in his head, and he likes to burp, eat cats, can whistle without opening his mouth and had a best friend on his home planet named Malhar Naik. He has a friend named Skip and a girlfriend named Rhonda, both of whom also escaped the explosion. He attended high school for 122 years and was captain of a Bouillabaisseball team (which is played on ice using shellfish as a ball).
ALF has an enormous appetite (eating everything he can get his hands on); he is also troublesome, sarcastic, slovenly and cynical, and sometimes he puts himself at the risk of being discovered while perpetrating some of his often-unintentional pranks. However, if things have gone too far, he does as much as possible to make up for his mistakes, generally with positive results. In one episode, he tried to help Brian, too afraid to perform, to gain confidence during a school show by giving him a "lucky tooth" which ALF claimed helped him be a star of the stage on Melmac. In another occasion, he helped Dorothy deal with Sparky's death and move on and accept Whizzer's friendship. After neighbor Raquel Ochmonek claims to see ALF and is ridiculed on a television show, ALF calls in to the TV show to defend her.
He has at least 30 relatives: cousins "Pretty Boy" Shumway and Blinky; two uncles, Tinkle and Goome; a Grandma Shumway; a brother Curtis; parents Bob and Flo Shumway; and aunts Bubba, Wagner and Eugene. In a commercial for the NFL that ran during Super Bowl XLV on February 6, 2011, it was confirmed that ALF is a Carolina Panthers fan.
