ALF Reviews: “Baby Love” (season 3, episode 16)

Well, I had an extra week to think up something interesting to say about “Baby Love,” and I’ll warn you right up front that I’ve probably failed. Bad episodes of ALF are a common occurrence, but usually they’re slapped together nonsense (“Strangers in the Night,” “We Are Family”), batshit nonsense (“A Little Bit of Soap,” “Hail to the Chief”), or solid ideas that nevertheless are reduced to nonsense (“Wild Thing,” “Hide Away”).

But, every so often, you get one that’s just…there. It’s an episode. It happens. And then it’s over.

And that’s “Baby Love.”

It opens with Willie and Kate discussing baby names. He proposes Cameron for a boy, or Melissa for a girl, because he’s a big fan of both Full House and Clarissa Explains it All.

The screen grab above says everything about the relationship between these soon-to-be parents of three. Even when she’s heavy with his oily seed, Willie sits apart from his wife, reading from a separate book, even though they’re ostensibly studying up on the same subject.

Man, the love between these two is just incredible. Can we all just pretend the new baby is Mr. Ochmonek’s kid?

Anyway, I guess “Baby Love” is at least somewhat relieving because it reminds us that Kate is still pregnant after all. Good. I was afraid ALF put a stop to that by demonstrating how Houdini died.

It’s damned odd that this is only the second episode in which her pregnancy is so much as mentioned, and the previous one was seven weeks ago. That’s a long time for pre-DVD viewers to keep something like that in mind, especially when the show’s never been much for inter-episode continuity.

Granted, a pregnancy is a pretty major thing, and maybe the show expects us to trust that it won’t just disappear, but that’s exactly why I’d expect it to have at least been mentioned in the intervening weeks. When Lucy Ricardo was pregnant, it wasn’t introduced and forgotten; it changed the kinds of stories the show told, the kinds of jokes it made, and the nature of the setpieces. While I Love Lucy could have coasted on the novelty of a television character just being pregnant — genuinely groundbreaking stuff at the time — the show treated its audience with respect, and wove it into the viewing experience.

It’s not too much then to hope that ALF could at least remember this development. While it would have been nice for the show to begin exploring new angles, centering on different characters, or just making a decent joke about it here and there, I’d settle for it to at least make clear to me that it hasn’t forgotten the fetus developing on set.

Weirdly, though, it doesn’t. It introduced a major change in (ahem) “Changes,” and then went back to business as usual…which is bizarre. Have you ever known a pregnant woman who could go seven weeks without mentioning it? I sure as shit haven’t. And if I did meet somebody like that in real life, I’d probably conclude that she was waiting for an appointment to open up at the abortion clinic.

Also, didn’t ALF move into the attic? What’s with all this change that we never hear of again? I guess he might have and we just haven’t had call to visit him there, but then why bother moving him at all? He might as well have stayed in the laundry room for all the difference it’s made, especially if we’re never going to refer to it again.

Whatever. ALF proposes Rin Tin Tanner for a boy, and Spuds for a girl, because this character, like its puppeteer, can only communicate in references to things other people created.

BABY LOVE, BITCHES

ALF, "Baby Love"

After the credits there’s a scene in which Willie makes coffee, and it’s just as much fun to watch as you’d expect. What a shame this show was cancelled after only four seasons. The world was truly robbed of a creative bounty.

Once that riveting sequence of electric percolation is over, we move the action (well, I say “action”) to the dinner table. Kate talks in detail about her recent ultrasound, and this is indeed more like it, and what we should have been hearing about for the past six weeks. You know what pregnant women are always thinking about? The little human being squirming around in their swollen bodies. It’s not an afterthought. It can’t be an afterthought.

Sure enough, ALF gets pissed off because he has to listen to seven weeks’ worth of bottled-up baby blather. He’s never happy when the attention is removed from him for even a second, because you might miss some of his hilarious antics, like that time last week when he fell asleep in the shed and dreamed of a guy who wasn’t Elvis.

Brian asks if they’ll be able to tell the new baby about ALF, which is pretty much the dumbest fucking thing this kid’s ever said. Does Brian have brain damage? Maybe building the nursery dislodged all the mold spores in his bedroom ceiling.

Of course you have to tell the new kid about ALF. What’s the alternative? Pretend he doesn’t exist so the baby goes insane?

Lynn makes a good point — even if she bizarrely over-enunciates it, like she’s trying to hide the fact that she sat on a thumbtack — that for the baby, ALF will just be a part of life. There won’t be anything weird or new or “alien” about him, because the baby will know him from day one; ALF will always just be a part of the world in his eyes…no more or less worthy of comment than anything else.

It’s a fascinating idea and one that could lead to both interesting consideration and a fun avenue for comedy…or it would be, if any of these assholes actually reacted to ALF like he was different in any way. Instead they treat him like the show does: a guy who sits around being allegedly hilarious while they cater to his every whim.

It’s like they were all born with ALF. In fact, it would be the only possible explanation for why they just accept the fact that this sentient fungus is controlling their lives.

ALF, "Baby Love"

Some neighbors come over and gush about Kate’s pregnancy while making hideous faces.

Women, am I right?!

The Non-Ochmonek is Mrs. Litwack, which is a name we’ve heard before but I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to mention it in any of these actual reviews. I know at some point I thought it was nice that the name recurred, but I didn’t expect to ever meet the person so…whoops.

Mrs. Litwack makes up some cockamamie story about wanting to sell her house, with the intention of getting Kate abandon her dinner to leave her family alone with Mrs. Ochmonek.

So, yeah, Kate still works at the real estate agency…something else that hasn’t been mentioned since it was introduced seven weeks ago. ALF may never treat its audience like it has any intelligence whatsoever, but it sure does bank on it having a great memory.

Once Kate leaves to take care of this clearly fake idiotic bullshit, Mrs. Ochmonek tells Willie what the deal is: they want to throw Kate a surprise baby shower on Saturday, and she mentions inviting all of Kate’s old college friends. How in fuckblazes Mrs. Ochmonek knows any of Kate’s college friends — let alone knows how to get in touch with any of them — is a question I’m sure we’ll never get an answer to, so I’ll focus instead on the possibility of seeing her hallucinating alcoholic chum from “Tequila” again.

That might be interesting, in addition to a desperately needed shred of continuity, if Betty Gumble’s sobered up for this visit but accidentally sees ALF again and realizes that the plot to the last episode she was in was really fucking dumb.

ALF, "Baby Love"

Brian asks “What’s a surprise baby shower?” with a face that would go better with the question “What the fuck do you mean the new baby gets my college fund?”

Brian’s bitchface is now officially my favorite thing about this show. Benji Gregory’s chronic boredom turned to abject rage at some point this season, and I’ll never stop being in love with that.

We’re watching ALF disintegrate around us, folks. We’re approaching the Event Horizon.

ALF, "Baby Love"

All of a sudden it’s Saturday, so I guess this episode wants to get itself over with. I sure as hell can’t blame it.

Mrs. Ochmonek and Mrs. Litwack bicker for a bit about the proper way to hang streamers, and they more or less keep it up for the rest of the episode. I guess this confirms the rumor that “Baby Love” was actually a backdoor pilot for Ochmonek and Litwack: Party Poopin’!

Unsurprisingly, the party is full of people we’ve never seen before and will never see again. So much for seeing Kate reunite with Ol’ Rummy. Or, you know…anyone else we’ve been told was a friend of hers from college.

I actually wish it was a deliberate running gag that every season Kate is reunited with her old college friends, and each time it’s a completely different group of people.

ALF, "Baby Love"

One of the ladies brought her own baby, and as soon as she arrives she asks if there’s somewhere she can lay it down. The Tanners decide to stash it in their new nursery, unsupervised, which shows what wonderful parents they are and will continue to be.

Of course the lady whose baby it is is perfectly happy to ditch it, and to not so much as check on it in a few minutes when there’s a stranger’s voice and the sound of commotion in that very room, so at least they’re all equally horrible.

In the nursery ALF is dancing around with a rattle singing vaguely Native American nonsense.

Why? Who cares. The fake audience of dead people loves it, so get off your high horse!

ALF, "Baby Love"

He hides while they drop off the baby, and after they leave he comes out to accidentally kill it.

One thing I do like about this scene — and the only thing I like about the entire fucking episode — is how happy the baby is when ALF is talking to it. It’s…really adorable. And I say that as somebody who abhors children of all ages, races, and creeds.

To watch the baby coo and reach out to the living, talking stuffed animal beside his crib is infinitely preferable to watching the stuffed animal directly. I have no idea what’s actually going through the kid’s mind, but its reactions are ridiculously cute.

Anyway, ALF starts sneezing all over it like an asshole. The baby is infected with the Melmacian grippe and does not live to see its first birthday.

ALF, "Baby Love"

After the commercial break, everyone at the surprise baby shower stares at each other, wondering who is violently sneezing and screaming in the nursery with the unattended baby. But, like gun control, it’s one of those questions that really isn’t worth doing anything about.

Lynn finally gets up to go check on the kid, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that her body harbors the last remaining shred of humanity in the entire fucking ALF universe. Kate follows her; conspicuously absent from the investigation squad is whomever the fuck this kid’s mother is. Like any great mom, she’s aware of the fact that any issues an unattended baby may be having will eventually go away if you ignore them long enough.

Guys, this episode is horrible. It really is a whole lotta nothin’. Having an alien learn about and react to the human birthing process definitely warrants an episode of its own, but why bother if you’re just going to have him sneeze and be jealous? That isn’t “alien” at all. It’s the same thing you can do — and often do do — on any given shitty sitcom already. Why is this even happening? Why does “Baby Love” exist? Shit…why does ALF exist?

ALF, "Baby Love"

Later on ALF is hiding in Jake’s room. It’s a concept that could — with the right care and attention — fuel a decent episode of its own. It wouldn’t be anything original, or even creative, but a half-hour’s worth of Odd Couple exchanges between ALF and Jake could be funny or cute enough to be worth watching.

Of course, we’re getting this with something like three seconds left in the episode, so you can guess exactly how much care and attention went into it.

It’s also strange for another reason, as the main joke seems to be that ALF doesn’t feel comfortable in Jake’s room, because he prefers living in a messy environment. That’s standard Oscar/Felix stuff, so I’d have no problem with it, but the fact is that Jake’s room is a shithole. You can’t have an Oscar/Felix relationship between two Oscars.

I think this is the first time we’ve seen Jake’s room, which means it would have been built and designed specifically for this episode. So why (always that question…WHY) didn’t the set designers and the writers communicate in any way? ALF messing up the room is part of the gag, but it doesn’t register because it’s not in any way distinguishable from the mess that’s already there.

Could that be part of the joke?

Yes. In a sitcom that paid attention to what it was doing, of course it could.

Instead: you’re watching ALF.

So, yes, this whole situation sucks dick, but it does give us this episode’s only good line: ALF, upon insisting that he’s going to bunk with Jake now, asks, “Which side of the bed do you want?”

I guess you can see just how great the rest of the episode is when that qualifies as the high-water mark.

ALF, "Baby Love"

After the party Willie and Brian put the food away. Brian asks why sliced meats are called cold cuts, which is a perfectly innocent question that he for some reason delivers with the expression of a man dunking the Big Lebowski’s head in a toilet bowl.

Willie hems and haws as though he’s building up to a big punchline…but he’s not. He just eventually says, “I don’t know. I don’t know nothing.”

It’s just a waste of time. There’s not even an anti-joke here. He’s just asked a question he doesn’t know the answer to, which no doubt happens to real life dads every day. And, hey, fine. Real life dads don’t need to know this shit.

Is it too much to ask that a sitcom dad, though, has some kind of reply? You know…considering that he has an entire staff of writers cashing paychecks for the specific reason that he will always have some kind of reply?

If Willie just shrugs, why the fuck are we watching him? Brian might as well have asked the cat.

There is a decent moment that Brian gets here. Jake comes in and is unable to rat ALF out, because he promised he wouldn’t, so he tells Willie that something is missing. He says Willie should try to guess what it is, and Jake will tell him whether he’s hot or cold.

Willie makes a dismissive gesture and starts to walk away, because somebody is trying to interact with him and he hates that.

But Brian, as soon as he’s informed that something is missing, guesses “ALF.” It’s not that bad, and Brian shows some unexpectedly good timing with his delivery.

I’m liking this kind of joke. Kate had one (“Say hi to ALF for me…”) in “Fight Back,” and it was good there, too. It’s a better runner than season three’s other innovation: characters grabbing Lynn by the back of the head and grinding her face into a plate of mashed potatoes.

ALF, "Baby Love"

Willie wedges himself into the door of Jake’s room and shouts, “Come home with me this instant!”

The episode doesn’t acknowledge it, but what must that look and sound like to the Ochmoneks? Really now, what could possibly be creepier than catching Max Wright skulking around your house, attempting to seduce your children?

He sits and talks to ALF for a while and ALF sneezes some more. Because ALF is so allergic to babies, you see, that he can’t even hear about babies without sneezing. That’s also why we can no longer use the word “peanut” in schools.

Willie tells him that his sneezing is psychosomatic, and ALF asks if that’s the name of the food processor at the Bates Motel. I hope you enjoyed the single most labored joke in TVhistory.

Willie explains that “hhitt maahy meanyou thinnnk that this bahyyy-bee is goingto take-yhourr place!!ALF never acknowledges it, but this man’s line deliveries have me convinced that the character lives every day of his life plagued by delirium tremens.

Anyway, they have some longass conversation in which Willie tries to convince ALF that they all love him, even Kate the haggy castrating ice-bitch shrew-nag from hell. They pretty much just babble like this forever, like it’s just another conversation on another day, which shows that the characters gave no more thought to this situation than the writers. This withered old pederast is hanging out with a space alien in his teenage neighbor’s bedroom for fuck’s sake.

ALF, "Baby Love"

Mrs. Ochmonek does eventually come to the door and asks Willie what the fuck he’s doing in there secretly rooting through her nephew’s underwear drawer.

Willie says he’s looking for his cat. She buys that and leaves him alone, just as you would in this situation I’m sure.

Then she closes the door and leaves, and he says, “Have a nice day!!” as though she’s been a raging bitch to him or something. Asshole, you’re lucky she didn’t call the cops. Why do you have to be such a dick to them all the time?

ALF says to Willie that they should go home and burp the baby. Willie tells him the baby’s not born yet, so ALF says, “Then let’s just go home and burp!”

What an ending.

What does that even mean? Why is the thought of ALF burping inherently funny? Why is it so funny that it gets to be the punchline of the entire episode?

I don’t even fucking know what I watched. I guess ALF’s imaginary burp is as fitting an ending as anything else could have been. Willie could turn into a lobster before my eyes and it wouldn’t make any less sense.

In the short scene before the credits…

ALF, "Baby Love"

Oh, fuck you.

ALF lives in the attic now, you fucking dumbass piece of shit show.

Just fucking fuck you Christ my God, you cunting ass bullshit piece of garbage show.

MELMAC FACTS: On Melmac they used baby powder instead of non-dairy creamer on their tacos. YOU CUNTING ASS BULLSHIT PIECE OF GARBAGE SHOW

Guest Post: ALF Insight from Bernie Brillstein

ALF, "Weird Science"

A guest submission today from Justin B. Justin commented a few weeks back about having some insight from Bernie Brillstein, and I’ve asked him to expand his thoughts into a full post. I hope you enjoy. This also buys me another week to figure out how to make “Baby Love” interesting, so I’m not complaining…

—-

ALF has always fascinated me, though the reasons for that fascination have varied quite a bit. As a child, I was naturally amused by ALF’s catchphrases and tendency to eat the family pets. Later, upon reevaluating the show in college and as an adult, what I found interesting was just how truly terrible the show was and always wondered why it was so bad.

There are so many shows from that era which hold up and continue to be just as funny today. There’s a reason why The Golden Girls, Fresh Prince and Seinfeld are consistently some of the most valuable syndication properties – the humor holds up. ALF on the other hand is truly a lazy show. Other than the fact he ate cats and was from outer space, I think most viewers would be hard pressed to think of anything else memorable about it.

Certainly nothing about the supporting characters (truly a set of people nobody cared about developing), the plots (unoriginal recycled material from previous sitcoms), or the production quality (it was made for like seventeen dollars; insert obvious joke about Max Wright getting paid in crack and hobos). Just about the only impressive thing was the puppetry involved in bringing the main character to life. Max Wright claimed in an interview years later that he once saw ALF blush. It really was a very emotive little puppet.

Later, once I moved to LA and got involved in the industry, I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time with Bernie Brillstein, who packaged the show and helped sell it to NBC. He was credited as an Executive Producer on the series. Prior to ALF, his career was legendary managing many luminaries and developing classic shows like Saturday Night Live, The Muppet Show and NewsRadio. In film, he did Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers and many more. One of the things I had to ask him about was ALF, which was brought to him by Paul Fusco in 1984.

When Fusco pitched the idea, ALF (the character) was basically a Don Rickles puppet. The fact he was an alien was secondary. Fusco’s humor was “as mean and nasty as humanly possible.” Brillstein found the idea hysterical and very different from what Henson was doing with the Muppets, which he’d also helped sell. Since Paul Fusco had zero writing or showrunning experience, Tom Patchett was brought in to serve as Executive Producer, as he’d executive produced The Bob Newhart Show, along with Brillstein’s Buffalo Bill, as a way to lend some experience to the project.

They went to NBC in Burbank to pitch the series and upon explaining their idea were met with a lot of blank stares. Bernie Brillstein kicked Fusco under the table, who pulled out ALF from a garbage bag. The puppet proceeded to sneeze and wipe it off on Brandon Tartikoff’s suit jacket, then verbally attack everybody in the room. Show sold.

In trying to understand what the show became, the crucial aspect of the above pitch was that ALF was basically an insult comedian. Never was it about the family and how they relate to an alien house guest, but rather in Fusco’s mind the Tanners were simply a vehicle for ALF to offend, insult and injure.

Watching the show today it is impossible not to take note of Max Wright’s performance. It is beyond over the top. He’s one of the stagiest actors I’ve ever seen, especially as Willie. To be fair, he’s playing a straight man and delivering the world’s most boring dialogue to a puppet. It’s not an easy task and there’s only so much you can do.

Having said that, the early reviews of the series praise Wright’s performance. After all, it was the quality of his work landed him the role, without even having to audition. He had been in Buffalo Bill, where Tom Patchett had worked with him, in addition to an award-winning performance as Nazi doctor Josef Mengle and in Fosse’s classic All That Jazz. He’s even Tony Award-nominated for his role in Ivanov. The biggest problem for me is the lack of any substance to these characters. We know nothing about them and they serve no purpose in the show except to get ALF to his next punchline. It’s even worse with Lynn and Brian.

Naturally I asked Bernie Brillstein about all of this and he admitted that ALF is quite literally the worst casting he’s ever overseen. It simply did not work. There was no chemistry between the leads, the kids were not particularly good and by season four everybody hated each other with a burning passion.

Adding to this was the fact that an objectively funny script would come out on a Monday and by Friday, Fusco would have the writers take any funny lines the family had and move them to ALF, leaving everybody else with dreadful expository dialogue. It pissed everybody off, from the series regulars to the guest actors. Character actor Dean Cameron, who starred on three episodes later in the show’s run, echoed this in an interview he recently gave: “The scripts were really funny on Monday. By the time tape day comes around, ALF has all the good lines and the rest of the script is horrible. It was bumming me out after a couple of weeks. Imagine what it was like working on the thing for [four] years. Imagine.” Adding to this was the fact it took 20-25 hours to shoot a single episode.

There’s a legendary story which I’ve heard from two different people and was even discussed briefly on Howard Stern: By the end of season four, tensions were so high that Max Wright had a serious meltdown on the set. Who knows if it was chemically induced or not, but he began physically attacking the ALF puppet and screaming “PUT US ON STICKS! WE’RE ALL PUPPETS HERE!” Truly, truly a great moment.

The whole thing got so heated that it was agreed between the producers that should the series get a fifth season order the Tanners would be completely written out of the show. ALF would be taken to the “Alien Task Force” headquarters and the show was to become a McHale’s Navy– or Hogan’s Heroes-type comedy, set on a military base.

I’ll leave you with this gem of a Benji Gregory interview. It’s not my normal practice to mock twelve-year-old kids, but Gregory can hardly string a sentence together. Why in the world he was cast on a major NBC show is beyond me. I’ve always wondered if he was secretly a good little child actor and they just didn’t know what to do with him. That, thankfully, appears not to be the case. He had zero charm, except perhaps he could scratch his armpit on cue.

Have Your Say: 3rd Annual Xmas Bash!!

A Very Fabiola XmasWell, it’s the middle of June, which means everyone’s thoughts are turned to the holiday season. Or maybe I’m just insane.

Either way, I’ve been working on some ideas for this coming year’s Xmas Bash!!, which is bound to be a good thing, as it means I won’t go nuts trying to slap something together in the hours before the stream is supposed to go live.

With this much time to plan, I figured I’d open it up to viewer feedback.

For those of you who haven’t attended either of the past events, the Noiseless Chatter Xmas Bash!! is a live-streamed charity event. The main feature is a surprise assortment of horrible (horrible…) Xmas specials that I’ve unearthed for the sole purpose of making you hate television. There are host segments, music, and other goodies throughout. Last year I added some vintage toy commercials to the mix, and opened up donations to The Trevor Project as well. Oh, and, through it all, there’s a chatroom, which I think it’s safe to say ends up being more entertaining than all of the specials combined.

This year, I’d like to make it even better. I have a few ideas of my own (which won’t be spoiler’d in this post), but I want to hear from you, the folks who will actually be attending. And, hopefully, some of the folks who haven’t attended.

In a comment below, let me know the following:

  1. Any features of the stream (either year) that you really liked or disliked.
  2. How you feel about the length of the stream. Should it be longer? Shorter?
  3. I’m thinking of hosting the stream the weekend before Xmas this year (Dec 18-20, somewhere in there). Thoughts?
  4. How you would feel about an “encore showing.” It’d allow more people to attend, but it’d also split the viewership. Does that diminish its status as an Event?
  5. Last year we had a few outside contributors, performing music, magic tricks, and more. Is this a tradition you’d like me to keep up?
  6. And pretty much any other thoughts for improvements.

If you’d prefer, for any reason, that your response not be public, drop me an email at reed.philipj at gmail dot com.

Your feedback is strongly appreciated, and thanks again for making these past two years such an awesome success. Judging by the specials I’ve dug up for this year, I think we’ve all got great, great, terrible things to look forward to together.

I’ll see you there!

ALF Reviews: “Suspicious Minds” (season 3, episode 15)

It’s the only way in which ALF has ever been reliable: a good episode is always, every time, followed by a lousy one.

It goes all the way back to the show’s first great installment, “For Your Eyes Only.” This was followed by “Help Me, Rhonda.” At that moment, the precedent was set.

“For Your Eyes Only” > “Help Me, Rhonda”
“Going Out of My Head Over You” > “Lookin’ Through the Windows”
“La Cuckaracha” > “Come Fly With Me”
“Working My Way Back to You” > “Somewhere Over the Rerun”
“Oh, Pretty Woman” > “Something’s Wrong With Me”
“Night Train” > “Isn’t it Romantic?”
“I’m Your Puppet” > “Tequila”
“Alone Again, Naturally” > “Do You Believe in Magic?”

I’d have loved it — genuinely loved it — if “Suspicious Minds” had bucked this trend. But when the premise of the episode is that ALF fucks around for a while in Elvis’s living room, I knew better than to get my hopes up. Sure enough, the pleasant surprise that was “Fight Back” — without question this season’s best episode — gives way to this insulting piece of nonsensical garbage. It’s as though ALF could never bear to make its audience happy two weeks in a row.

What puzzles me about “Suspicious Minds” isn’t the fact that it sucks. It’s the way in which it sucks. I’m sure you can think of a thousand ways that The King of Rock and Roll meeting an aardvark from space can go wrong, but “Suspicious Minds” finds the one possibility I’d never have expected: nothing happens.

It’s a failure of imagination in perhaps its purest form yet. The writers build an entire episode around the appearance of an American cultural icon, and then do nothing with it. Arguably, they do even less than nothing…but you’ll see why when you reach the end of the review.

The episode opens with ALF reading from some kind of magazine. He tells the family that if you look really closely, you can see Elvis in one of the crowd scenes in Gandhi. It’s a funny line, but when we cut to a tighter shot of ALF we get a great visual joke: the magazine he’s reading is called ELVIS IS ALIVE. I’M REALLY REALLY SURE.

While he reads the family is putting their groceries away, so Kate’s habit of buying him supermarket tabloids to keep him occupied has carried over from “Alone Again, Naturally,” and I really like that little sliver of continuity.

Just kidding. Kate asks him where he got the magazine and he says he joined the Legend of the Month Club. So the whole thing is really just one big, frustrating coincidence.

This would have been a perfect time to connect two episodes and give the show some sense, at least, of an internal reality. All of the pieces are already there for crying out loud. Kate just went shopping; ALF is reading a tabloid. What do you need, a road map?

All it would have taken is one writer to say, “Hey, a few episodes ago we did pretty much the same thing, and explained it this way.” That’s it. Nothing needs to be written, and no additional effort needs to be expended. All you need to do is not provide a different explanation this time around, and let the audience pick up on the connection.

Sustaining this idea across episodes could have had larger positive consequences as well. ALF reading tabloids could have become a running gag. Maybe it would provide fuel for future episodes (I, for one, would love to see ALF and Willie get attacked by the Bat Boy), but at the very least it could have just led to a few jokes here and there. ALF’s fascination with tabloids could have become an identifying trait for him, instead of a thing that coincidentally happened twice.

It’s disappointing. This show so many times has just barely approached good ideas…its writers grasping in the dark for something and so nearly finding it…only for the search to be aborted and started over somewhere else.

ALF tells the family that the magazine has evidence that Elvis is alive: a photo of him at a swapmeet. Brian looks at the picture and asks, “What’s he buying? A hubcap?” To which ALF replies, “That’s a belt buckle!!!!!!” because Elvis was fat and you’re watching ALF.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

After the titles, ALF does funny faces and makes noise.

Well, that killed three minutes.

With more than a tenth of the episode out of the way, Mrs. Ochmonek realizes that she’d better kick this plot into gear, because there’s no way these assholes are going to do it. She comes over and tells a joke about Rambo 3 being shit, then says that someone rented the old house on the other side of theirs.

Kate asks about the renter and Mrs. Ochmonek, in a genuinely good joke that nearly atones for the Rambo one, pulls out a small notepad and reads that his name is Aaron King, he has a Southern accent, he’s in his early 50s, and he sings in the shower. She then says, “That’s all I know,” and puts the pad away.

I honestly wonder how many people my age know of Elvis entirely because of cartoons and sitcoms. By now, of course, I’ve heard a good deal of his actual recordings, but when I was young I knew more about him than I knew about probably any other celebrity, living or dead, and I think it was because of episodes like this, the ubiquitous “Elvis impersonator” comedy staple, the constant fawning of Uncle Jesse in Full House, and pop culture nonsense like that.

I wouldn’t have known anything about the quality of his music, but I could have rattled off a laundry list of character traits. Like the historical Jesus, King Arthur, Johnny Appleseed, Santa Claus, or Robin Hood, some small germ of real-world truth grew, after death, into the literal stuff of legend. Elvis is as much a fictional character as anyone else in this show…perhaps even moreso, because I can describe his character.

Whether or not the sustained cultural image of Elvis has anything to do with who he actually was or how he actually behaved is irrelevant. He was, obviously, something. But after death, he transitioned into the realm of folk memory. He’s a figure. An icon. A still-expanding legend that exists, and will continue to exist, outside of boundaries of time itself.

ALF, surprising no-one, gravitates strongly toward the cultural identity of Elvis rather than anything personal, or human. Which is by no means the fault only of ALF (nor even an inherent fault in itself), but it does represent a frustratingly missed opportunity. “Suspicious Minds” aired only around twelve years after Elvis died. This means that a huge portion of its viewing audience actually remembered Elvis, had personal recollections of and associations with his music, could still feel the tragic shock of his death.

The fact that ALF is already treating him like nothing more than a collection of quirks means we don’t get any kind of unique perspective about what it might have been like to see the man rise scandalously, fall sharply, reinvent himself for a new kind of stardom, and then die suddenly, leaving the world with an echoing collection of ephemera and nobody to attach it to.

Today any show can sketch Elvis in broad outlines, and that’s fine, because we’re removed from his death by almost four decades. Most people watching any given show haven’t had first-hand experience of him.

ALF, therefore, could given us a fascinating time-capsule of the precise moment at which the historical Elvis was supplanted permanently by a cartoon. Unfortunately, for ALF everyone was a cartoon, and the insight was lost forever.

ALF overhears Mrs. Ochmonek, and becomes convinced the the handful of details she shared means the new neighbor is Elvis. Willie tells him that’s pretty obviously bullshit, so ALF makes funny faces and noises again until we pass the six minute mark.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

ALF physically assaults Willie for a while, then throws him against the wall. When Willie leaves ALF gloats about getting his watch. Why is this happening? What the fuck am I watching? Why are we spending so much time in the Elvis episode watching an alien gurn and grunt while physically battering the man he lives with?

It’s really odd. I get that slapstick can be funny, but this is no more slapstick than punching a coworker in the back of the head is slapstick. You’re just a fucking dick.

Later on we get an establishing shot of the house, and we hear Willie scream. I was expecting to cut to the Tanner bathroom in which we’d see ALF skinning Willie alive with a vegetable peeler, but instead the guy just slipped and fell on a banana peel.

Lynn comes to help him up, but nobody else appears. I guess after you live with ALF for a while you get so used to hearing your family screaming in agony that it no longer has meaning.

Willie makes a comment about not knowing why people find banana peel pratfalls so amusing, and Lynn stifles a laugh. It’s actually pretty cute, and decently human. In fact, I think Lynn gets the best line in the episode off the back of this: when Willie looks angrily at her, she says, “I’m sorry. I was just thinking of a joke I heard on A Different World.” He keeps staring, and she says, “No, really. There was one.”

In fact, that “No really…” bit might elevate the joke (in a technical sense at least) beyond its equivalent from The Simpsons. Yes, if you’re anything like me, you thought immediately of Lisa’s line from “Duffless”: “I was just thinking of a joke I saw on Herman’s Head.” And it’s no coincidence, I’m sure.

Al Jean and Mike Reiss wrote this episode of ALF, and were showrunners for that episode of The Simpsons. It’s possible that they pitched a similar joke without even realizing it, or maybe on the assumption that it had been cut from the final edit of ALF. Either way, Lisa’s line excuses her laughter, but otherwise doesn’t do much more than wink knowingly at Yeardley Smith’s secondary role on that other show. Lynn’s line actually is a joke in itself, and I find that to be an interesting difference.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

Willie goes into the garage to beat SPEWEY to death with a rake, and gets a load of crappy conspiracy crap which he stands there and listens to for reasons un-fucking-known. This monster from beyond the stars just beat the living fuck out of him in his dining room, then left bananas everywhere so that he’d fall and shatter his coccyx in the kitchen, but his anger is defused immediately because the script now wants him to sit quietly while ALF talks about Elvis.

This is a really, really bad episode, and this scene does a great job of making that clear. Not only does Willie behave like an entirely different person in the transition between one scene and another (as jarring a change as if we watched a fireman walk into a burning room, and then switched cameras to reveal that he’s actually a police officer arresting a robber at the bank), but we make concrete the episode’s approach to dealing with Elvis: a series of rattled-off factoids. No insight, no subversion, no cleverness. The characters just say things and we’re supposed to laugh because we recognize them.

Oddly, that means that you could write your own ALF ‘n’ Elvis show in less time than it would take you to watch theirs. Just write down everything you learned about Elvis from cartoons, avoid all conflict, stakes, or connecting dialogue, and you’re set.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but here’s the list of Mrs. Ochmonek’s factoids from the first scene:

  • The name Aaron King: Elvis’s middle name was Aron, and the surname King refers to his nickname “The King of Rock and Roll.”
  • Southern accent: Elvis was born in Mississippi and moved to Tennessee; as such he developed a very famous and very Southern drawl.
  • Early 50s: Elvis would have been 54 the year this episode aired.
  • Singing in the shower: ELVIS WAS A SINGER

Add to this ALF’s earlier observation:

  • The hubcap belt-buckle: Elvis, late in his life and career, was pretty pudgy.

Now we get another list in this scene:

  • “Blue Suede Shoes”: ALF found a pair of red corduroy slippers in King’s trash, which he thinks were changed from blue suede shoes to throw people off the trail.
  • Peanut butter and banana sandwiches: a favorite snack of the King; had he not fried them he probably would have been a pretty healthy dude.
  • “Heartbreak Hotel”: Mr. King finding “a new place to dwell.” Willie even completes the lyric.
  • Anagram: ALF’s anagram is a lifeless (ahem) riff on the famous ELVIS LIVES.

So, yeah. Doing an Elvis episode in a show about an alien has a lot of potential to be something unique, if not necessary good. The writers must have consciously resisted every creative impulse in order to give us “Suspicious Minds,” which is literally nothing more than a longform recitation of everything the writers think they remember about The King.

(“Suspicious Minds” is itself, of course, an Elvis reference; in fact, it’s my favorite song of his. I’m not a huge Presley fan by any means, but “Suspicious Minds” is a damned good, damned catchy, and decently insightful song about a toxic relationship. In other words, it’s very appropriate for an episode of ALF.)

Anyway, ALF called Mr. King at 3 a.m. and recorded his voice. He plays the recording for Willie and, yep, it sure sounds like a sitcom Elvis impersonator. Willie inexplicably listens to this instead of beating the fuck out of him for wandering around the neighborhood and digging through strangers’ trash at night.

ALF promised Mr. King a fruitbasket, and Lynn conveniently arrives in the garage to tell her father they have a visitor. Get your pencils ready, because we can add more factoids to the list with Mr. King’s arrival!

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

Add:

  • Sideburns
  • Sunglasses
  • The “point”: Mr. King does a swivelly little Elvis-style point at the peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
  • “Elvis has left the building”: A line that became something of a catchphrase after announcers used it to keep throngs of fans from hanging around for another encore; ALF says it after Mr. King leaves the garage, in a hilarious example of somebody saying something that somebody else once said.

Don’t put your pencils away; we’ll get many more later on.

So, yeah, Mr. King comes over, and he prefers the peanut butter and banana sandwiches to the fruit basket. When Willie gives him one he says:

  • “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

If anyone has bingo, just shout.

Mr. King looks kind of like an Elvis impersonator wearing a trucker costume over his Elvis costume, and nothing really happens here. He takes a sandwich and goes, just as I would certainly do if I found unwrapped food sitting in some stranger’s shed.

After he leaves Willie still isn’t convinced, so ALF says, “I won’t rest until I prove this man is Elvis Presley, but first I think I’ll take a nap.”

It’s a really good line. It’s also the last thing of true merit in the entire episode.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

Later that night ALF is skulking openly around the neighborhood, because that’s what he already told Willie he was doing and the guy didn’t think it was worth punishing him for.

Parenting!

Anyway, the Alien Task Force receives a tip, shows up, and flays ALF alive in Mr. King’s driveway.

End of ALF. Thank you for joining me on this series of reviews!

…sadly, no. ALF peeks through the window, pushes the door open, and walks right into the guy’s house.

This show is fucking shit, dudes. I’m sorry. You can’t expect us to care about ALF being picked up by the Alien Task Force if he’s walking freely into other people’s homes. If you want to hide ALF, hide ALF. If you don’t, don’t. But “whether or not the main character can leave the house” is a pretty important thing to establish and stick with…especially when it’s the closest thing your show has to a premise. If you keep sliding back and forth, people don’t just get confused; they stop caring.

Tell me there’s an alien in your show and he must avoid the government at all costs. I’ll invest in that. But don’t follow it up by having the alien go on a very public, very naked stroll through the neighborhood and slip into the homes of strangers. That’s you telling me you don’t care…and if you don’t care, why in the hell would I?

Anyway, there’s a bunch of Elvis shit in the house so ALF proclaims loudly that the guy must be Elvis because fuck it all go to hell.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

Elvis or whomever the fuck he’ll turn out to be comes home and ALF hides behind a table. Elvis walks around with an armful of groceries and just kind of silently paces for a bit.

Why is this episode so padded? They literally didn’t even try to spin a plot. It’s a story about a space alien and the motherfucking King of Rock and Roll. Did they just think the idea was so incredible that all they had to do was have the characters make funny faces and walk in circles?

It’s insulting how little effort was put into this. If it was full of jokes that sucked, so be it. Instead, it’s not full of anything.

Anyway, ALF knocks a whole bunch of shit over, then stands there while the guy confronts him.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

Usually in this show when somebody sees ALF for the first time (a rite of passage for every character, apparently), they have some kind of realistic reaction. Fleeing, going crazy, dropping dead, demanding it be killed for their entertainment, turning it in for a reward, and so on. We’ve had a nice number of disparate reactions to ALF, but almost uniformly they’ve come from a believable place. Here the Elvis guy just asks him what he is, and then has a conversation with it. This episode goes from zero to fuck you in 2.1 seconds.

Instead of worrying too much about the identity of the talking merkin in his living room, Mr. King protests that he’s not the guy who very publicly dropped dead over a decade ago. He does mention that he’s been to Las Vegas, though, and ALF pounces: “You’ve been to Vegas? That proves it!” I’d say it’s the best line in the episode, but it doesn’t get a laugh for some reason. Oh well. The fake audience of dead people certainly knows comedy better than I do.

Let’s add a few more things to the list of non-joke Elvis references before we forget them:

  • Pompadour
  • “Hound Dog”: one of Elvis’s most famous songs; ALF claims he ain’t nothin’ but one when he meets Mr. King.
  • Vegas: Elvis’s second wind, career-wise, saw him reinvent himself as a gaudy, Las Vegas entertainer in a sequined jumpsuit. It is this phase of Presley’s career that’s usually embodied by impersonators.

Anyway, ALF openly tells him that he’s an alien from Melmac, just to further prevent any of you from caring anymore what happens in this fucking garbage show. Seriously, if the Alien Task Force can’t track down this naked mole rat that runs around town telling everyone he meets that he’s an alien they can turn in for a massive reward, then they can’t really be much of a threat.

If you want us to worry — at all, even for comedic purposes — about the Alien Task Force picking up ALF, but you’re willing to sacrifice that worry for the sake of having him meet fucking Elvis, you’ve made it very clear just how disposable the idea was to begin with.

The guy asks if he can pet him, and ALF replies, “Only above the waist.” So if you were hoping that this episode would end with Elvis giving ALF a handjob, you’re out of luck.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

EAP and ALF sit down at a table for some refreshing Diet Soda Cola, and to mention pink Cadillacs, because the episode is ending soon and they haven’t said that yet.

Let’s play catchup, then.

  • Above the waist: A reference to Elvis’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, during which he was filmed above the waist as his hip movements we deemed to be too provocative for audiences of the time.
  • Pink Cadillacs: Elvis drove one, and it served as a gift for his mother. The “pink” was actually a custom color designed especially for Elvis.
  • TV: ALF mentions sitting around the house all day watching TV, and Mr. King says that makes him sound like Elvis. Sure enough, this was essentially Elvis’s routine late in life. He’d watch with a handgun, and shot out several TVs when he didn’t like what they were showing. Most famously he pulled the trigger on a performance by Robert Goulet, but he reportedly also did this to Mel Torme and Frank Sinatra so Robert didn’t take it personally.

With most of the episode out of the way, Mrs. Ochmonek realizes that she’d better wrap this plot up, because there’s no way these assholes are going to do it.

She comes over with some food she made for Mr. King, and there’s a decently funny line when he says he didn’t recognize her without her binoculars…but it’s not great, and it only reminds us of how fucking absurd it is that ALF gets away with climbing into and out of houses in the first place.

Why does ALF care about Elvis, anyway? In the other tabloid episode, ALF endangered himself for the sake of (potentially) meeting his lost cousin…who would also happen to be one of the last survivors of the Melmapocalypse. It makes sense that he’d take such a risk for a potential reward of that magnitude.

Here, though, he’s endangering himself for…what? The chance to prove that Al Jean memorized a lot of Elvis facts from the backs of bubblegum cards?

Mrs. Ochmonek tries to invite herself in but Elvis informs her that he’s currently fucking the tits off of some bangin’ chick, so she leaves.

Add to the list:

  • Elvis sometimes had sex.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

Back in the house Elvis proves he Elvisn’t by playing a really shitty version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Man, ALF is a pretty fucking awful show to begin with, but this episode makes me grateful we have it instead of The Fusco Puppeteerium Presents: Elvis Jokes A-Go-Go.

Anyway, ALF doesn’t like his performance so he says, “Stink-a-roni!” which I’m nearly positive caught on as a huge catchphrase.

So, yeah, the guitar playing was shit. But the real Elvis wasn’t much of a guitarist anyway.

It didn’t take long for the instrument to become more of a prop to him, as he was certainly better at singing and entertaining than he was at strumming or picking. The scene would work a little better if the guy were trying to prove he wasn’t Jimi Hendrix or something, but if you asked a thousand Elvis fans what they loved about the guy, “musicianship” wouldn’t be mentioned once, making it an odd litmus test.

Also, if he was trying to prove he wasn’t Elvis, why would he do so by demonstrating a thorough familiarity with one of his songs? If he’d played a mariachi tune or something else that was completely out of Presley’s reach, that would have worked much better.

But, whatever, he sucks dick at the guitar, which he says proves he’s not some other guy who sucked dick at the guitar. He says he’s Clarence Williams III, a truck driver from Tupelo. ALF laughs and repeats what he said in order to meet the show’s contracted running time.

Add to the list:

  • Tupelo: The Mississippi city in which Elvis was born.
  • “Heartbreak Hotel”: A song Elvis made famous which is now frequently used to convince aliens that you’re not who they think you are. It was referenced earlier in the episode, but Jean is running out of memories.

ALF is still convinced this guy is Elvis. He swears to it. And then…

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

Oh shitting come the shitting fuck on.

This was a cunting dream sequence? What is it with this show and dream sequences? Did the writers really need to make this episode more meaningless?

I mean, yes, it excuses some of the earlier niggles like ALF taking midnight struts into other people’s homes, but it introduces a much bigger one by revealing that the episode was one long middle finger that now gets jammed into the eye of the viewer.

Dream sequences make sense (quality notwithstanding) when it’s something like ALF running for president, or Willie getting metaphorically castrated by the guys who banged his wife, because those are things you couldn’t otherwise do within the reality of the show.

But a guy not being Elvis? We really needed to slip into the realm of fantasy for that? For fuck’s sake, ALF. And if it was a dream, why didn’t you make him the real Elvis?

Whatever. Who cares. This shit is over. Let’s enjoy the screenshot above, in which Brian has some major bitchface.

Remember how this kid always used to look miserable? Now he always looks angry. I love that working on this garbage show has finally taken a toll even on the little boy who’s barely in it.

Brian tells ALF to wake his worthless ass up, because lunch is ready. ALF replies, “Great! A hunk-a burnin’ food!”

Add to the list:

  • “Burning Love”: A hunk-a hunk-a fuck-a you.

ALF, "Suspicious Minds"

In the short scene before the credits ALF talks to Kate about wanting to break into Elvis’s house for real, and Kate somehow doesn’t punch his skull in.

So how much of that was a dream? Did Mr. King really come over for the fruit basket? Did ALF call him? Did any of the unfunny shit we just sat through even happen? If none of it was even, in any way at all, consequential to the episode in which it happened, how is it possible to view this as anything more respectful of an audience’s time than a slap in the dick would have been?

Mrs. Ochmonek appears and says that Aaron King moved out in the middle of the night, so the guy who definitely wasn’t Elvis and who we probably didn’t even see will never be referred to again under penalty of torture.

Stink-a-roni.

Go Read: Star Trek: The Animated Series Reviews

Star Trek: The Animated Series
Many of you no doubt know commenter Sarah Portland, a longstanding, intelligent, periodically evil presence on this blog. Well, she runs her own episodic review site, focusing on Star Trek, the original series. Just recently, however, she finished that classic show, and moved on to its…marginally less-classic Animated Series spinoff.

So, yes, utterly shameless plug, because her Star Trek reviews were great and I expect these will be too. Check them out.

Today saw her first post about the cartoon adventures of the Enterprise crew, which according to the picture above consists of Uhura, a butter sculpture of Mr. Spock, Chevy Chase circa 1982, Jar Jar Binks, Zapp Brannigan, the painting lion from Zoobilee Zoo, Bruce Lee, Tommy Wiseau, and Anne Heche.

So, go read that while I try to muster up the energy to write about Fallout 3.