Alfschadenfreude!

Why ALF, I ask you. Why? Responding to the demand of literally ones of fans and in a move certain to befuddle the rest of us, Warner Bros. is considering a reboot of the series. So if you're anything like me, and I suspect you are, you're probably saying to yourself: huh?

"Huh?"

-You, me, everybody

Looking back, the premise seems fairly
unbelievable. I mean, a middle class family?

Yeah. huh. If you don't remember ALF, shame on you. It was an 80's merchandising shitstorm of toys, albums, t-shirts, everything. It was everywhere and it all centered around a sit-com about the titular alien who crashes into the garage of middle-class family in California. Instead of immediately calling NASA or dying from radiation poisoning, the family decides to adopt this super-advanced, extraterrestrial life-form like it's a collie. Then they change his name from the surprisingly simple Gordon to ALF (alien life form) and go about their day. Hijinks ensue.

Pictured: Archetypical Mrs. Kravitz,
hilariously doubting her own sanity.

It's part of weird and kind of unsettling genre of sci-fi/fantasy sitcoms. Bewtiched and Mork and Mindy, Out of this World; they were almost always about the average American family harboring some paranormal secret. The humor comes from them trying to keep it under wraps, usually from some nosey neighbor who is constantly peeking in through the window whenever something sci-fi-ish was happening. Then the family would have to trick them into thinking they're crazy, often resulting in the victim taking up drinking just to cope with the fact that no one believes them.

The truth, be it a literal witch or an alien and all the startling, world changing implications these things entail is right there, staring Mrs. Kravitz or whomever in the face but instead of watching then rock the world with news of their remarkable discovery we spend the duration of the story watching them get gaslighted. In many ways, it's a lot like watching Sarah Sanders hold a press conference.

"Regardless of what the President said on camera in front of millions of people,
what he meant was the exact opposite and you're all a bunch of goddamn liars."

-Sarah Huckabee Sanders,

in a typical press conference

Like the running gag about how
ALF's people eat cats. Aliens, amiright?

Anyway, ALF had a similar set-up although with a greater emphasis on the threat of exposure hanging over the Tanner family at all times. It wasn't just nosey neighbors, but nosey NASA scientists and sometimes nosey FBI agents. Although they were just investigating a terrorist threat. No really, ALF threatened the President once. But it also had an anti-nuclear message, ALF being one of the few survivors of the nuclear holocaust that destroyed his home planet. Like I said, this was a comedy because ALF was a puppet and you know, there were jokes.

Check out all the zany characters!
You know, before they're incinerated.

In case you're curious about what life was like on ALF's home world, check out the Alf animated series. Oh yes, ALF-mania was so vast in the twilight years of the 1980's that the ALF expanded universe included a prequel series. It was children's show about ALF's adventures during the final days of planet Melmac...uh-huh...a planet that was home to a civilization of adorable furry space aardvarks which according to ALF canon, would go on to annihilate itself in a global nuclear war. You'd think it'd lighten up from there, but you'd be wrong.

Surprisingly, and traumatically, the series ended with ALF being captured by the Air Force and presumably hauled off to a black site for vivisection. Because again, comedy. He was ultimately freed in a made-for-TV movie, but by then most of us had moved on, and so for us ALF just ended up in a bunch of specimen jars. 

In their defense, as far as the Air Force was concerned that this heretofore un-encountered
life form could be the vanguard of an invasion force or that he carried a world-ending plague.
So in many ways, they'd have been remise not to dissect America's favorite wise-cracking alien.

Here, for no reason:
Terminator Genysis.

Am I a jerk for assuming that any kind of ALF reboot will fail to attract the kind of fandom it did in the 80's? I mean, I may sound irrationally pessimistic about a TV show from my childhood, and please don't interpret that as any kind of attachment to ALF as a thing, but I guess that on some level I just enjoy predicting disaster for shameless cash-ins. Well, in this case a shameless cash-in on people's nostalgia for a shameless cash-in. Is that schadenfreude? Maybe. It's just that watching pop-culture eat itself like this kind of ticks all the boxes for me. A reboot nobody really asked for: check. Charming Henson-ian puppet that's almost certainly going to be replaced by soulless CGI: check. The hubris on the part of someone at Warner Bros. that thinks all they need is a fondly-remembered IP to recapture the inexplicable success of the original: double check.