Check out this ALF syndication trifold!

Yeah, I know, my post title sucks, but I don’t really have a running feature on the blog I can tie this to. It’s just a piece of pretty cool television history that I can’t find anywhere on the internet. For all I know, I have the last surviving copy and am therefore morally obligated to drop it into a volcano.

But, what the hell, I’ll archive it for future generations instead.

I saw this at a convention, and Casey Roberson was nice/vindictive enough to buy it for me. The vendor described it as a piece of promotional material sent to networks to see if they wanted to air ALF. He wasn’t wrong, but I assumed he meant for its initial run. Instead this was distributed in 1989, toward the end of the show’s run, promoting the availability (starting fall of 1990) of ALF for strip syndication.

Strip syndication refers to a show’s reruns airing at a fixed time across the entire week, thereby showing up as a long “strip” when laid out on a TV schedule.

Of course that also means the trifold gets to play into the naughty definition of “strip” and present ALF as a Playmate centerfold. This means I own the only official piece of ALF pornography ever produced.

Now you see why I’m bothering to archive it!

Anyway, I’m including pictures, but since I just have an iPhone I’ll also transcribe the text. I intend to be as accurate as possible, right down to any typos or punctuation issues. Feel free to point out any you see in my transcription, though, just in case they’re my own.

I have seen some of the details here in other places (such as ALF’s favorite Melmacian TV shows) but since I can’t find a copy of this anywhere, I assume there was just some overlap with copy found in other materials.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the Tanners aren’t mentioned here at all. This is trying to sell a show without even paying lipservice to four of the five main characters.

That’s our ALF!

Anyway:

Front: The Centerfold


The centerfold features ALF lying naked on a beach. You’re welcome.

The only text is “CELEBRITY OF THE MILLENNIUM” and “MR. TELEVISION.”

There’s also a “Love, ALF” signature. Thanks to this and the next page, we have the best look at his handwriting we could ever want. Analyze away, graphologists!

The copyright notice in the lower right reads:
ALF is a Registered Trademark of Alien Productions ®
© 1987 Alien Productions. All Rights Reserved.

Yes, I know the copyright notice says 1987 and I said it was circulated in 1989, but you’ll see where I got that date later. This must just be the copyright date for the image, as the text is clearly selling the show for syndication in 1990, which is not something they would have been doing in 1987. The text, therefore, may not be copyrighted at all, so feel free to use it to advertise your own show about a farting puppet.

Inside Left: Celebrity Data Sheet


This page features three promotional photos of ALF and one from “Don’t it Make Your Brown Eyes Blue?” where he’s dressed as legendary womanizer Elton John. We also get some definitive MELMAC FACTS regarding his birthday, but I don’t get whatever joke they’re trying to tell by giving him two of them. Then there’s the insight nobody expected that he wants to fuck the cat from the 9Lives cans. (And, I guess, Mr. Ochmonek.)

Anyway, the text:

CELEBRITY DATA SHEET

NICKNAME: ALF REAL NAME: Gordon Shumway
HEAD SIZE: 33″ WAIST: 33″ HIPS: 33″
HEIGHT: 3’2″1”’ WEIGHT: ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nellie
BIRTH DATE: August 12 and October 2, 1757 PLANET: Melmac (Lower East Side)
FAVORITE EXPRESSION: “Curiosity Killed the Cat” (Usually followed by the expression “Pass the Plum Sauce”)
TURN-ONS: Morris the Cat, High Nielsens, Hawaiian Shirts
TURN-OFFS: Empty Fridge, Short Jokes, Alien Task Force
FAVORITE MOVIES: “It Came From Outer Space”, “Mars Needs Women Now” and “Hair”
A GOOD WOMAN IS: Friendly, Funny and Furry
SECRET FANTASY: To be a regional sales manager for Meow Mix

Inside Center


THE HOTTEST THING IN PRIME TIME IS AVAILABLE FOR STRIPPING.

Inside Right: Interview


He’s hip, he’s hot, he’s ALF, the biggest thing to hit television since the remote control. On the occasion of his highly successful NBC-TV prime time smash being made available for strip syndication (starting fall ’90), we interviewed the old ALFer.

We caught up with ALF at the refrigerator on the set for a candid, far-reaching conversation.

Q: Thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule to do this interview.
ALF: No problem. Mind if I eat a pot roast while we chat?
Q: Not at all. Were you ever on television before you got your own series?
ALF: Yes. I was a contestant on Melmac’s most successful game show, “Wheel of Cheese.” I won a sofa, a set of mock luggage and a styrofoam goat.
Q: Pretty impressive. Were you the biggest winner?
ALF: No, actually Tyrone Split was the biggest winner. He was seven foot three and weighed three-hundred and forty-seven pounds. Ha! I kill me!
Q: And us as well. Are you the only Shumway to enter show business?
ALF: Oh, no! My Uncle Goomer Shumway was a famous actor. He starred in great Melmacian movies like “Cat on a Hot Tin Griddle,” “Gone With the Fish,” and “Luncheon Counters of the Worse Kind.”
Q: Let’s talk about your amazing success on television. Your popularity on NBC has been growing stronger each week, your demographics show that you have a perfect audience composition, and now you are destined to become a hit in syndication. Why do you think that you made such a huge impression on our whole planet?
ALF: I hit it pretty hard when I crash landed. Hey, if I wasn’t wearing my seat belt, I’d look like Sean Penn.
Q: What do you think of earth television?
ALF: Hey, by watching television I learned that the world was black and white before 1953! But television on Melmac was funnier. Shows like “I Dream of Homer,” “Bowling for Rice,” and “As The World Explodes.” Even though the last one hits a little close to home now.
Q: Sounds interesting.
ALF: It does? Is this going to take a lot longer? I have a drumstick here that’s growing bacteria!
Q: Just a few more questions. You’re entering the syndication marketplace next to shows like “Cosby” and “M*A*S*H.”
ALF: I can see the line-up now. Huxtable, Hawkeye and Hairball! Ha! I kill me!
Q: You’ll be making lots of money.
ALF: Yes, but it’s only paper. On Melmac we paid with fur. If you over-spent, you went bald. And we don’t want station managers going bald. I realize in some instances we may be a bit late.
Q: Well, ALF, I’ll wrap this up. You’re an alien who has it all. A hit network show, the admiration of millions…
ALF: This drumstick that’s hardening before my eyes…
Q: But what’s next for ALF? What are your dreams?
ALF: I do have one recurring dream about showing up for work and realizing that I’m not wearing any pants. But then I remeber that I don’t work and I never wear any pants.
Q: Thanks for your time, ALF. Many thanks for this revealing interview.
ALF: My pleasure. Sure you don’t want some pot roast?
Q: No, thanks. There’s no silverware.
ALF: So?

ALF
alien productions

LORIMAR™
SYNDICATION
A LORIMAR TELEPICTURES COMPANY

So, yeah, there you go! It’s actually pretty cool. It was wrapped in plastic when we bought it, so I didn’t get a good look at it until later. The Playboy similarities are pretty tame, and it’s nothing a child would recognize, so I can imagine this was a really nice take-home for station managers whose kids loved the show. It’s a cool bit of very rare memorabilia, and if I had gotten my hands on it as a kid I would have thought it was great.

Does anyone else know more about this? I wonder what other bits of ALF ephemera are lost to the ages.

It’s laminated like a restaurant menu, which means it’s stayed in pretty good shape through the years, and I’m both happy to have it and thrilled that I get to be the one to preserve it online. Mainly, though, I hope you are as upset as I am that this is the third different “here’s what Melmacians used for currency” joke. Whoever wrote this should be FIRED FROM ALF.

Not as Intriguing a Question as You Seem to Think

The image above is a screengrab of an ad I came across while doing some linkbuilding. It hopes to get me to click it by enticing me with the following question:

What do Bing Crosby, Jimi Hendrix and Yanni have in common?

Well, they’re all musicians. So…done?

I’m sure there’s some more interesting and obscure connection between them — or I assume there has to be, by mere virtue of the fact that the question was posed at all — but doesn’t this enticement fall at the first hurdle when all three things are immediately connected anyway?

After all, it’s not like these three individuals had minor, relatively-unknown careers in music before they became famous for something else…music is the first thing anybody thinks of when they hear those names.

Maybe the advertiser just doesn’t understand how these things are meant to work. You can’t ask something like “What do bananas, coconuts and oranges have in common?” and expect people to give you the chance to say “They all have inedible rinds” or something. They’re going to say, “They’re all fruits.”

That’s that. The question is answered. There’s no incentive to await further information because the question, as you posed it, was hardly a question at all. It was just a list of three things that slot quite obviously into the same, universally-acknowledged list.

I don’t know. It’s interesting to me when advertisers miss the mark, and I always feel compelled to dissect it when it happens. After all, it’s the job of an advertiser to be smarter than the consumer, to anticipate attention and behavior. Here, it just makes them sound dumb, and that disappoints me enormously. If advertisers can afford to come across as sounding dumb, what does that say about the people they need to be smarter than?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to pondering what pigeons, robins and bluejays have in common. I’ve nearly cracked it.

Survival of the fittest ads

When I was linkbuilding this past week, I came across this:

It’s sweet and all, but do me a favor: if I ever die unexpectedly and you’d like to turn my blog into a tribute to me, please remove from the sidebar whatever bikini babe weight loss ads might be undercutting the solemnity.

After all, if you have access to my blog and can therefore post those mournful goodbyes, you can also delete my Google adsense code. I won’t need the twelve cents a year anymore. Thank you in advance, from this side of the veil of tears.

10 Great Songs We Ruined By Forcing Them to Advertise Bullshit

It should be clear to readers of this blog that music is extremely important to me — what with the fact that a whole two previous posts were tagged as having to do with music and they both consist entirely of context-free YouTube clips — and so nothing bothers me more than seeing it disrespected.

Of course, being human beings (and, more to the point, being Americans), disrespecting something is the first thing we do when money is involved, and compromising artistic integrity is a close second. Hence the use — or misuse, or abuse — of excellent songs in commercials that seem to be suspiciously engineered to retroactively drain respectability from anyone who ever enjoyed the songs therein.

Here are ten of the worst offenders that come to mind. Please feel free to leave more in the comments, so that I can become even more upset, and have another reason to stomp loudly in small circles around my house.

1) “Boom Boom,” John Lee Hooker, 1962. Ruined by Chili’s.


I won’t pretend to know what “Boom Boom” is about, if, of course, it’s about anything. But I will absolutely guarantee that it’s not about the mediocre defrosted dinner platters they serve at Chili’s for the scarily inexpensive price of $20 for two. To say that John Lee Hooker helped shape rock and roll is to sell him short. To say that John Lee Hooker was a blues guitar god is closer to the truth, but still not enough. “Boom Boom” has a lot of Hooker’s great musicianship on display, so much so that it’s really just an excuse to jam, but that doesn’t stop Chili’s from appropriating his signature “a-haw haw haw haw” to make it sound less like he’s lusting after the irresistible sexiness of a woman strutting past him in the bar and more like he’s craving some artless slab of heat-lamp meat. Cue inappropriately excitable solo, I guess.

2) “Bargain,” The Who, 1971. Ruined by Nissan.


I couldn’t find a video for this one, but you can reconstruct it in your mind: a 2000 Nissan Pathfinder drives through puddles and around a mountain while a great but irrelevant song plays behind it. Absolutely worth the money, Nissan, as you mean to assure us, I guess, that the sticker price of your forgettable SUV is “a bargain.” And not just any bargain, but the best bargain I’ve ever had! Well, I have no idea how much this particular gas guzzler sold for so I’m not sure it was cheap, but what they did to this song sure was. Pete Townshend has probably single-handedly written a larger number of truly brilliant spiritual rock songs than any other human being on the planet, and that’s due in part to the fact that he knows how to write them without tipping anyone off that they’re spiritual. That includes a huge number of his most popular songs, including “Baba O’Riley,” “Join Together,” “The Seeker,” and, yes, “Bargain.” What, you thought it was about love? Well, it was. It was about God’s love. And now it’s about the love of the warm engine of a sports utility vehicle. Looks like you lost that enlightenment before you ever knew you had it.

3) “Use Me,” Bill Withers, 1972. Ruined by Pringles.


This is actually the usage that inspired this article, as “Use Me” pleasantly surprised me on my iPod and I started wishing I could hear this song again without imagining a sentient pipe of Pringles singing it to me. Was this one really worth co-opting to advertise your pressed potato dust, guys? It’s a song sung by a guy who enjoys fucking his girlfriend so much that he doesn’t really care that she’s sapping the life out of him. Its porno thump adds an erotic emphasis to a tragic situation, and it’s eminently grooveable. So why did we need to stage a pool party where Mr. Pringles is the guest of honor, serenading his fans as they reach into his greasy hole for another helping? Bill Withers was an accomplished lyricist and a truly blessed musician. He crafted pop songs that revealed themselves layer by layer, and that easily hold up through the best that any subsequent generation has to offer. He married complex but engaging arrangements to unforgettable lyrical hooks, and tapped into emotions so simple that only the truly gifted songwriters could serviceably explore them. Also, a Pringles can is singing it in a pool. Because of course it fucking is.

4) “Revolution,” The Beatles, 1968. Ruined by Nike.


Okay, so “Use Me” might have been the first example of a great song ruined by commercial usage to come to mind for me, but for nearly everybody else who was alive to see it, this would be the headliner. I was too young to really understand The Beatles when this happened, and even I remember feeling dirty having watched it. “Revolution” is nowhere near the best that music’s most important band had to offer, but it was a pretty clear and concise statement on the part of John Lennon, a snarky and already fed-up “fuck you” to the still-burgeoning Woodstock generation. You want a revolution? Start one. Don’t talk about it, don’t fuck around, don’t sit in your mother’s basement all day smoking up. Get off your ass — or I guess he’d say arse — and do something. “Do something like buy some shoes?” Nike asked. Lennon, being long dead, hesitated to reply and that was confirmation enough for them. Yes, “Revolution” stands in stark contrast to his later love-in anthems “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine,” so I can understand that some listeners might come away from Lennon’s output with a muddled view of what the man actually wanted. Was he peacemaker or revolutionary? You’ll get a different answer depending upon which decade of his music you consult, but I think it’s safe to conclude that “shoe salesman” was never on his list.

5) “Like a Rock,” Bob Seger, 1986. Ruined by Chevrolet.


I could fill this article easily with automobile commercials alone, but there’s probably no more deserving representation than what Chevy did to Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock.” The song has been the theme song for Chevy’s truck commercials for more than a decade, and the title has become their slogan. In other words, this isn’t just the irrelevant score to some rolling footage…this is theirs now, so much so that you’re far more likely to encounter it on television than you are the radio. Which is a shame, because “Like a Rock” is actually a pretty great song, which I’m embarrassed to say because it’s difficult to disassociate it from its marketing purposes. Bob Seger built an entire career out of these nostalgic, looking-backward songs, including “Against the Wind,” “Night Moves,” “Still the Same,” and even the maddeningly shitty “Old Time Rock and Roll.” And they all seem to get used (and overused) in television shows, films, commercials, and anything else that seeks to tap into our nostalgic impulses for better days long gone. Bob Seger was making songs that felt old fashioned even when they were new. The problem was that he was good at it, and you can’t be good at anything for long without somebody stepping in for a cut. Bob Seger’s songs feel like quaint punchlines now, when they were once evocative of real memories, real feelings, and real emotion. Perhaps they should have been confined to classic rock radio, where they really belonged.

6) “I Melt With You,” Modern English, 1982. Ruined by Hershey’s.


This one might be a bit of a cheat as I don’t think I can call “I Melt With You” a great song and keep a straight face, but it’s certainly some sturdy, serviceable pop, and it has its charm and its appeal. It’s effortlessly fluffy and utterly hollow, but its “to hell with everything, we’ve got each other and we can do anything” moral is wish-fulfillment on a pretty universal scale, and I mean that as a compliment. Enter Hershey’s, who crafts the creepiest damn characters since Duracell’s Putterman family and asks these dripping humanoid chocolate monstrosities to sing “I Melt With You” as though that might be something even remotely pleasant for a creature made of candy to consider. Embedded above is the holiday variation of this commercial, with overdubbed sleighbells, in which the family is singing it together as a carol, just in case there was anyone out there who wasn’t totally convinced already that Hershey didn’t give a fuck what things it was cramming together in order to sell chocolate bars.

7) “Brown Sugar,” The Rolling Stones, 1971. Ruined by Pepsi.


The Rolling Stones are no strangers to having their songs reappropriated for marketing purposes, what with Microsoft Windows all too happy to suggest that their operating system is capable of making a dead man cum, but they’ve actually been pretty lucky overall. If I were making a list of good uses of great songs in commercials, for instance, I’d absolutely have to include Apple’s “She’s a Rainbow” ads, showcasing the amount of colors in which you could buy their products. It’s every bit as shallow in theory as anything else on this list, but in practice it was the perfect marriage of visual concept and aural emphasis. It was short, it was cute, it was bubbly, and it was fun. It was also, obviously, memorable. Unfortunately, so is this Pepsi commercial, in which a mosquito drinks some flat pop off a filthy counter and immediately starts singing about giving enthusiastic oral sex to a slutty black chick. “Wait,” says a voice from 1990-something. “Were we supposed to listen to these songs before or after we bought the rights to them?” But there is no reply, and he will never know.

8) “Lust For Life,” Iggy Pop, 1977. Ruined by Royal Caribbean.


Speaking of not listening to these songs, does Royal Caribbean really want people to associate it with “liquor and drugs” as a lifestyle choice? The commercial emphasizes the enormous variety of experiences you can have aboard their luxury liners, which is probably not something that will benefit passengers who spend the entire trip on the floor of their cabin with needles in their arms. In all seriousness, why would any company in their right mind, particularly one advertising family vacations, want to align themselves professionally with an overt paean to heroin addiction? The image of Iggy Pop shuffling shirtlessly across the shuffleboard deck and gyrating all up on grandma is likely to make people give up on cruises as vacation options altogether. Which, hey, isn’t actually such a bad thing. Gyrate on, Iggy Pop. Gyrate on.

9) “Gimme Some Money,” Spinal Tap, 1984. Ruined by American Express.


To this day I’m not sure that American Express is aware that this isn’t a real song. Or maybe I should say that Spinal Tap isn’t a real band. It’s possible that somebody in their marketing department thought that this could work as a knowing nod to the comedy-savvy consumers in the audience (who also, hopefully, needed credit cards with terrifying terms and conditions), but even if I was supremely generous and willing to grant that, what point does this make? “Gimme Some Money” is, like all of the songs in that film, a genre pastiche at best. It’s not particularly funny on its own…it was meant to be representative of a type of music that a type of band was writing in a particular cultural climate. It’s not even representative of the present-day band in the film…so what is it doing here? I keep thinking about the great featurette Mark Mothersbaugh provided for The Life Aquatic. He talks about how nice it is — or, sadly, was — working with Wes Anderson, because the score was always an organic part of the creative process and not something slapped on after the fact. He lamented the fact that there is computer software available to film makers that allows them to input whatever situations they like (his example was “he’s putting on a red bow-tie”) and have it generate a list of pop songs with similar things happening in their lyrics, so that nobody involved in the production would have to give the soundtrack much thought at all. I think that’s what happened here. The song has “money” in the title and “money” in the lyrics, and AmEx had their mind on that money and that money on their mind. Dog.

10) “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” Marvin Gaye, 1968. Ruined by The California Raisin Advisory Board.


Yes, I know Marvin Gaye didn’t write this one, but it’s his version most of us remember. Or, it would be, if it weren’t for the claymation racial caricatures that caused this song to become forever associated with raisins. As much as I claimed “Like a Rock” was actually a good song stripped of its reputation by a truck commercial, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” is a certified masterpiece. It’s a disarming dirge about a man who finds out that he’s been cuckolded, but he doesn’t even find this out first-hand: he hears it from everybody else first. His life has come crashing down, and he was the last to know. How long could this have continued? How long has he been living a lie? And what does he do now? The singer seems to be fixated on the fact that he wasn’t told first-hand, and he pretends to be getting upset about that, but that’s a psychological sleight of hand that prevents him from having to address the core truth: he doesn’t have her anymore. It’s a great song and one of the true classics of popular music, so of course we had to put it in the mouths of these purple Al Jolson heads as they perform their little minstrel show. The obvious blackface caricatures that were the California Raisins make this reappropriation an only slightly less racist marketing move than if the Board had additionally adopted the slogan “Raisins! Like watermelon seeds you can eat!” Some might say that Marvin Gaye’s greatest misfortune was when he was murdered in cold blood by his own father. But we know better, dear reader. Yes, we do.

Oh, and also, here’s an 11th and I don’t care. “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” It’s a genuinely brilliant song. Stop putting it in every fucking commercial that can’t come up with its own music. THANKS.