Strange Facts That Prove ALF Was Darker Than Many Of Us Noticed The First Time
If you grew up in the ’80s, you probably have a soft spot for ALF, the wacky Alien Life Form who endlessly frustrated one suburban family. But should you watch the show as an adult, you might notice some disturbing things lurking behind the laughter. And once you know about the tension behind the scenes, it gets even worse! Actress Anne Schedeen told People magazine in June 2000, “Word never got out [about] what a mess our set really was.” But now it has.
ALF and his puppeteer had a strange relationship
The man who operated and voiced ALF really seemed to believe it was a living entity in some sense. Paul Fusco not only gave the puppet its (his?) own dressing room, as he told the Hollywood Reporter magazine in 2012, he also used to chat to it. “When I used to write an episode and couldn’t come up with a line for ALF,” he explained, I needed something really funny, I would actually ask ALF.” Just to make things even weirder, one episode saw ALF get a puppet called Paul.
Two dark warnings were hidden in plain sight
The Cold War was still going on when ALF was released, and the writers deliberately invoked nuclear war when ALF talked about the destruction of his home planet. But they also used the lovable alien to bring attention to environmental matters, and put him in a PSA where he warned viewers that if they weren’t careful, Earth could suffer the same fate as the planet Melmac.
Max Wright hated being on the show
Max Wright, who played the Tanner family patriarch Willie, was nowhere near as fond of the weird alien as he appeared to be. When People magazine tracked him down for a “Where are they now?” feature in 2000, he told them the show was “hard work and very grim” and he was “hugely eager to have it over with.”
The show drove German fans to crime
ALF was absolutely massive in Germany, and fans there were willing to do all sorts of strange things to show their support. There’s actually a city in Germany called Alf, and fans took to stealing its sign… stealing it so much, in fact, that officials had to have a whole lot of new ones made because they were disappearing at such a rate.
