"Huh?"
-You, me, everybody
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Looking back, the premise seems fairly unbelievable. I mean, a middle class family? |
Pictured: Archetypical Mrs. Kravitz, hilariously doubting her own sanity. |
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.
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. |
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.
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.
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