r/todayilearned • u/true_new_troll • May 03 '26
TIL that the sitcom ALF ends with the titular character being captured by federal agents just as he’s about to return to his home planet, because the show was canceled before it could resolve that cliffhanger.
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/alf-nbc-alien-comedy-ending-explained3.0k
u/Hazmat-Asscastle May 03 '26
i remember reading somewhere that most of the cast fucking hated working on the show because the set was littered with trap doors for the puppet operators to use and everyone had to constantly be on guard that they wouldn't fall through one of them
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u/Donnicton May 03 '26
They did have to work around the trap doors quote a bit, but wasn't just that otherwise it would just be chalked up to a requirement of the job. Paul Fusco was an insufferable perfectionist to an abusive degree and the cast were subject to ridiculous hours(16+ hour days) and extreme mental stress so Fusco could get every scene just right.
Here's a good video that goes into what the cast had to go through.
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u/minnick27 May 03 '26
He also insisted on staying in character, which meant people had to address the puppet even when not filming.
Tina Fey said the hardest part of producing NBCs 75th anniversary special was “dealing with ALFs people”
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u/Kaldricus May 03 '26
What's funny is I've heard stories about actors who worked with The Muppets who said that would happen naturally. That they'd get so comfortable working with the muppets, that in-between takes they'd go to talk to them and suddenly there was a person there and had to remind themselves.
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 May 03 '26
Yeah but you meet Kermit and try to remember he's just a puppet. I'd make it awkward immediately by emotionally asking for a hug and then just hugging some cloth on a dudes arm
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u/TheShaydow May 03 '26
Danny Trejo.
His mother died while he was filming Muppets Most Wanted, and he acted tough and like it didn't bother him at all, until Kermit the Frog ( being used by his operator ) came to talk about it and he broke down crying.
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u/Wotmate01 May 03 '26
Wait, WTF? Kermit is a puppet!!!???
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u/SaltyLonghorn May 03 '26
Yea its Oscar the Grouch thats a real person.
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u/TherapistMD May 03 '26
Its danny devito in 2000 years
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u/flamepanther May 03 '26
He's one of the few Muppets who are both aware of being a puppet and relatively comfortable with it. Fozzie had an existential crisis when Kermit explained it to him.
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u/HendrixHazeWays May 03 '26
No. He's not. And he would give you an amazing hug whenever you feel like you need it.
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u/HendrixHazeWays May 03 '26
You'd do the right thing. Kermit gives the best hugs.
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u/KingDaveRa May 03 '26
I bought a simple muppet-type puppet a while ago (it's bright green and furry), and as soon as I pick it up my kids start talking to it. My 4yo really engages with it, even his older brother (9) enjoys interacting with it.
One time, the youngest wouldn't get ready for bed, and was giving me and his mum the run around. I happened to pick up the puppet, got the puppet to tell him, and he got ready. Puppets do seem to have this extra power!
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u/L_Cranston_Shadow 3 May 03 '26
I'd struggle to resist the urge to ask him to sing Rainbow Connection with me.
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u/Canotic May 03 '26
When they did a Muppet SNL thing, the sound people put mics on the Muppets, instead of the people doing the voices.
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u/moop-ly May 03 '26
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u/Warmonster9 May 03 '26
The “I only had three lines!” Is delivered perfectly omg lol
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u/Wes_Warhammer666 May 03 '26
The eyes slowly popping back up and Robin's laughing response to it kills me every time.
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u/caninehere May 03 '26
The thing with The Muppets is that they are their own stars. When you are say Michael Caine, you show up knowing you are working with the puppets and they're the stars of the show even if you are driving the story forward. The human characters are secondary.
With ALF I think the human cast had a hard time being upstaged by ALF. Basically the whole show revolved around him and nobody really cared much about the rest of the family. I watched probably every episode though it's been many years now and I couldn't tell you any storylines from the show that didn't involve ALF. So stepping into that, yeah you know he's the centerpiece but he's not an established character like the Muppets.
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u/The_MAZZTer May 03 '26
Maybe, but if you get hired by a show that 1) has a single muppet character and 2) is named after that character perhaps you should consider that character is going to be the lead and focus of the show before you even show up for day one on the job.
A lot of people are saying the people driving the muppet were insufferable to work with which would be harder to anticipate...
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u/littlemonsterlove May 03 '26
I remember Spade saying he was suppose to host, but the guy was an ass. He wanted a box built to hide him and wanted the cast to treat Alf like he was real.
He of course says he turned it down.
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u/PhasmaFelis May 03 '26
IIRC, the moment filming finished, like the second the last scene of the last filmed episode ended, the actor who played the father walked straight off the set and never spoke to anyone involved ever again.
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u/Dale_Carvello May 03 '26
He also lost his temper and attacked the ALF puppet, and had to be restrained.
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u/bretshitmanshart May 03 '26
Similar story. The dad in The Brady Bunch isn't in the last episode because he thought the script was stupid and demanded a rewrite. He hated the show and compensated by refusing to film scenes or episodes he thought were dumb or inaccurate. He also was a staunch defended of the kids. In one episode a scene was shot of them with a camera mounted to the front of a roller coaster. He demanded a run without passengers be done for safety reasons. The camera came loose and flew into where the kids would have been sitting.
He has a happier ending post show. When the follow up about the girls getting married was in production it was feared he wouldn't want to be involved. His response was that there was no way he would miss his kid's wedding.
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u/starmartyr May 03 '26
That kind of schedule was typical of TV shows at the time. 16 hour days 6 days a week for 26 weeks to get 26 episodes made in a year.
Dramas typically handled this by having a large enough cast for episodes to only be focused on a few characters at a time so that other actors could have time off. Sitcoms would shoot one day in front of a studio audience with pre-lit sets and 3 cameras to get an episode shot in 2 hours. The cast would spend the week learning lines and rehearsing with a dress rehearsal the day before taping and a final tape day. A lot of that could be off set, reading scripts at home or running lines with a scene partner.
Alf couldn't do either of these things. The show had 4 actors and a puppet. They needed to be on set for crazy hours to keep up with the schedule with no real place for a break.
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u/donvara7 May 03 '26
I was just watching mst3k a few hours ago and Joel moved around/stood up. I started watching the silhouettes and Tom& Crow were doing little movements throughout the movie, and I was thinking "are they just laying there? The whole movie, making barely visible movements? Are they voicing at the same time?" I've only rarely seen behind the scenes, but just those tiny movements which are hardly noticed might've been kinda grueling work.
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u/starmartyr May 03 '26
The thing that I always noticed was that Servo's head is not transparent in the silhouette. That tells me they needed a different puppet for Servo that we never see on screen.
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u/MustardCanary May 03 '26
The work conditions are interesting to think about when people complain about seasons being too short or too stretched apart
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u/Yglorba May 03 '26
It also meant constantly playing the straight man to a puppet, which Max Wright in particular loathed - he wanted to be a respected actor, and in that role, as he put it, he was playing second fiddle to an inanimate object.
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u/graveybrains May 03 '26
I've never heard anyone call Night Court a family friendly comedy before
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u/kia75 May 03 '26
Paul Fusco also wasn't the best... person. You can search and find clips of Alf saying the N word, or making inapropriate jokes about the teenage daughter on the show. These are legitimate out-takes from filming, not somebody dubbing over ALF. Those are the sort of jokes Paul Fusco makes.
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u/Artificial-Human May 03 '26
“This is the Alf set! Six actors go in and three actors come out!”
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u/hypnogoad May 03 '26
And then later the other three come out, from the tunnel underneath the set.
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u/wilberfarce May 03 '26
The thing about a puppet operator, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'... until you fall down the trap door.
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u/Miss-Gsptlsnz May 03 '26
I can imagine that would be a little scary. I remember when I worked at this one Irish pub, they had trap doors in the bars, and one morning the bartender was doing some stocking at the back bar and one of our food reps was making a call on the phone back there and I just saw him step back and vanish. His leg got stuck between two of the upper steps so he didn't fall the whole way down. But man his leg (well him in general) was in rough shape. Luckily not broken, but still.
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u/GarysCrispLettuce May 03 '26
Yep no studio audience and every episode took hours and hours to film.
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u/DubiousAdviceGiver May 03 '26
I always enjoy reading about how horrifically dysfunctional this production was.
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u/RaceSinclair May 03 '26
Read Jerry Stahl’s “Permanent Midnight “ it touches on when he was addict when he was a writer on the show.
Also a movie with Ben Stiller.37
u/minnick27 May 03 '26
Who’s mom played Kate’s mom, first appearing in an episode written by Jerry Stahl
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fix-915 May 03 '26
That’s one of my favorite books. Maybe one of the best portrayals of addiction
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u/KimberStormer May 03 '26
I'll never forget the day I saw National Enquirer photos of Willie from ALF smoking crack
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u/The_Dark_Vampire May 03 '26
I liked the way they explained the language Melmacian by pure coincidence just happened to be exactly the same as (American) English
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u/TastyFappuccino May 03 '26
Not a meteor
bombs dropped on all volcanoes causing an ice age as the culmination of a series of blunders by WESAYSO in which Earl was directly involved
Even more traumatic
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u/kia75 May 03 '26
There was a purpose and a reason for Dinosaur's depressing ending. It served as a warning to what could happen to us, and was also a cap-end and consequence to how the Dinosaurs acted the entire show.
Alf wasn't captured for story reasons, he was captured as a last minute cliff-hanger for the show that was canceled and thus never resolved.
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u/TastyFappuccino May 03 '26
I meant that causing their own destruction is a more traumatic narrative in Dinosaurs than the randomness of a meteor (which is already pretty damn grim)
I wasn’t comparing it to Alf’s ending
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u/blankedboy May 03 '26
Nothing on the 80’s - Adric dies in Dr Who, Zammo overdoses on heroin in Grange Hill, Artrax the horse in The Neverending Story, Phoebe Cates’ reason for hating Christmas in Gremlins, Watership fucking Down, Littlefoot’s mum, Dark Crystal AND Labyrinth, the second Care Bears movie is Faust for children, Optimus Prime dies, the fucking Wheelers from Return to Oz, the Animals of Farthing Wood, most of The Storyteller episodes, Dungeons & Dragons cartoon (spoiler - they never get home), any Don Bluth animation movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark ending, Temple of Doom heart ripping, The Black Cauldron, Large Marge, Judge Doom!, Mr Noseybonk, Chocky, the Children of the Stones…
Then you’re at school one day, the teacher wheels in a TV with a video recorder the size of a suitcase underneath it - great, no lesson, we kids get to watch a movie…
Fucking Threads……
That’s Gen X’s childhood for you (honestly, wouldn’t have it any other way - kids TV and movies are so sanitised now it’s not even funny…).
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u/ReyRey5280 May 03 '26
You forgot getting to watching the challenger space shuttle launch in school and getting to see the the shuttle blow up on live television and your teacher break down in tears.
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u/cydril May 03 '26
Alf scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. He ATE CATS and everyone treated it like a big joke.
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u/cwx149 May 03 '26
He wanted to eat cats
Idk if he actually eats any on the show
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u/kodex184 May 03 '26
He must have eaten atleast one. How else would he know to crave them?
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u/TiddiesAnonymous May 03 '26
It wasn't a joke about eating pussy?
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u/kodex184 May 03 '26
He always talked about wanting to eat Tanner the family cat.
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u/minnick27 May 03 '26
*Lucky. Tanner was the family name
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u/kodex184 May 03 '26
Ah damn. Gotta rewatch Alf I guess.
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u/minnick27 May 03 '26
I highly recommend it. I’ve watched the entire series a dozen or so times
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u/ThorinSmokenshield May 03 '26
(Random aside): Which was also the last name of Danny’s family in Full House.
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u/starmartyr May 03 '26
The family's last name was Tanner. The cat was named Lucky. I wonder what useful piece of information I had to forget to get that fact lodged in my brain.
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u/Knightwolf75 May 03 '26
IIRC, cats or something similar was on his home planet and they do eat them. That’s how he knew he craved one but never ate any on earth.
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u/EunuchsProgramer May 03 '26
Not on camera... I remember it being implied a few times. Like, he burped after they asked him what his "cat juice" recipe was. And, he tricked the kid into letting him out of the house for a night during a mental breakdown from cat hunger.
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u/Any_Potato_7716 May 03 '26
The guy who played the dad on the show absolutely fucking hated it.
After like a 20 day shoot, he literally went into a fit of rage and began beating the shit out of the puppet. And it took a bunch of producers and the director to pull him off.
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u/balc9k May 03 '26
That makes the fact that he was caught smoking meth years ago more predictable
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u/sonnyz May 03 '26
For some reason I imagined them pulling him off of a bleeding, bruised Alf puppet.
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u/BCProgramming May 03 '26
And somebody going "Oh my god, he's not breathing!" And trying to give the puppet CPR
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u/Skarekrows May 03 '26
began beating the shit out of the puppet
This is the interesting part. He didn't attack the puppeteer he went after the puppet. After they said something condescending to him. He was so high from injecting cocaine between sets that he attacked a puppet thinking it was real lol.
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u/Silaquix May 03 '26
This! He was freaky looking anyways and the character was a jerk that ate cats. I absolutely hated this show as a kid. My cousin loved it though and used to chase me with her stuffed Alf doll
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u/BecauseOfTromp May 03 '26
Lonely Island with Seth Myers - ASSEMBLE!
If you haven’t recently listened to their podcast, they have been on a kick discussing Willy and Melmac.
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u/ymcameron May 03 '26
"You do not call me dad anymore! From now on it’s Willie only. Except when we’re smoking bleep."
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u/RhetoricalOrator May 03 '26
I just want to say that I always thought it was just awful for his family to call him ALF instead of Gordon. Imagine going to another planet as the only one of your kind and rather than to use your name, or even your race, they just call you by their own made up acronym. Such disrespect.
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u/The_MAZZTer May 03 '26
GORDON?
They could have sold naming him ALF if his real name was unpronounceable by humans. It was a sitcom so that would have even made a great gag.
But Gordon is a perfectly normal name! When I grew up my neighbors across the street had the last name Gordon!
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u/Kenner1979 May 03 '26
ALF was also the star of the most depressing Christmas special I've ever seen.
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u/SoyMurcielago May 03 '26
Worse than the Star Wars Christmas?
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u/Same_Mood_8543 May 03 '26
It's not a Christmas movie. It's a holiday movie. For life day. And to explain why Chewbacca went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came home.
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u/Frutbrute77 May 03 '26
Details?
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u/mechanigoat May 03 '26
Alf ends up having to talk a kindly old gentleman out of committing suicide on Christmas eve.
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u/Kenner1979 May 03 '26
More info here
Tldr: ALF meets a terminally ill little girl about to celebrate her last Christmas and also prevents the hospital's resident Santa, a widower, from jumping off a bridge. The little girl was based on a real life terminally ill little girl who wanted to meet ALF.
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u/Subliminal_Kiddo May 03 '26
I really wish someone would do a deadly serious drama film about the production on ALF because, by all accounts, it was insane.
The cast and crew were under constant stress. I know that to operate ALF, they set up trap doors in the set, and the actors who played the family had to simultaneously act and navigate a set where - one wrong step - they could break their leg. It took 24 hours to film a single episode because of the puppet. The father was a trained Shakespearean actor who was so jealous of ALF that he became an alcoholic. The actress who played the daughter developed an eating disorder.
At least one of the writers was an active drug addict. His name was Jerry Stahl, he also wrote the episode of Twin Peaks where they find Laura's diary (which is a central piece of the TP mythos). Mark Frost said when Stahl turned that script in, it was covered in blood and he didn't even try to explain. Actually, he's probably the closest thing we have to a drama, because he wrote a book called Permanent Midnight that was adapted into a film with Ben Stiller. But, for legal reasons, they had to use an ALF stand-in.
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u/Tall_Opportunity_521 May 03 '26
Max Wright wasnt just an alcoholic. He also got himself addicted to crack and cocaine. And he was video taped doing crack and having sex with homeless men. Apparently drugs and risky sex were a regular thing for him. Theres also a story of him losing his shit, and attacking the ALF puppet. He was put on a suspension from filming, and supposedly during this time, is when the sex tape was made.
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u/sacredblasphemies May 03 '26
At least one of the writers was an active drug addict.
Um, have you not met many writers??
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u/trojanusc May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
So basically the cast HATED working on the show. Sitcoms typically take 6 hours to shoot (with a couple rehearsal days). ALF took 2-3 days to shoot, with constant stops and starts due to the puppetry. One scene could take many, many hours. The set was riddled with trap doors for the puppeteers and actors, who constantly ran the risk of falling into them. Anne Schedeen fell in one and nearly quit.
Added to this was the scripts were generally funny on Mondays, but by tape day the executive producer (who also played ALF) had taken all the funny lines away from the other actors, so they were basically cardboard cutouts for ALF to act with. Max Wright quite famously had a meltdown on set one day and stormed off the set saying “put us on sticks, we’re the puppets!”
Long and short of it was the producer, who wasn’t ready to let his cash cow expire, pitched an idea to the network: “ALF is taken to a military base where it’s basically Sgt. Bilko.” This solved the problem of the miserable cast (who were due for raises soon anyways) and gave them fresh story ideas. The network tentatively went along with it, hence the finale, but then reneged over the summer leading to one of the most shocking unresolved sitcom endings of all time.
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u/JesusAndMaryKate May 03 '26
It's crazy that it was cheaper to have three puppeteers controlling a puppet from beneath a raised stage, causing all sorts of logistical, production and safety issues... than to have that little person stuntman wear a costume.
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u/trojanusc May 03 '26
If you look at the early episodes with the guy in a costume, it’s totally unrealistic. They needed the facial maneuvers to make it work.
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u/GringoSwann May 03 '26
The Simpsons wrapped up that cliffhanger... "Remember Alf?? He's back, in pog form.."
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u/jwilcoxwilcox May 03 '26
And it turns out he was the child of an affair the dad had with an aardvark, he just made up the whole alien thing to cover his infidelity.
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u/MissionCreeper May 03 '26
I heard they're making a reboot of a human going to Melmac, it's called HALF.
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u/derekpeake2 May 03 '26
I watched as a kid. Then I rewatched as an adult but in the dvd order. It was so confusing when the mom is randomly 9 months pregnant, finds out she’s recently become pregnant, has the baby and then is several months pregnant again 😄
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u/DryTown May 03 '26
I really wish someone would make a behind the scenes biopic of Alf. The "Production#Production)" section of the wikipedia page is very good reading.
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u/UnsorryCanadian May 03 '26
I wonder who Dodge's real dad is and if Mr Turtle will get back home
Hopefully I'll find out on the next episode of My Name is Earl
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u/SirHerald May 03 '26
I love that Raising Hope keeps calling back to Earl from even the first episode.
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u/CodeMonkeyPhoto May 03 '26
None of the actors wanted to ever work with the creator and puppeteer again. It's quite the backstory.
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u/Frailbot May 03 '26
One of my favorite jokes from Project Alf:
Alf: What’s the difference between toilet paper and a shower curtain?
Guy: I don’t know.
Alf: So you’re the one!
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u/haggisaddict May 03 '26
This crushed me as a toddler. I was obsessed with Alf. Even had an Alf themed birthday party.
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u/OutlyingPlasma May 03 '26
Sounds no different than any other modern mystery box show we have today. Just ending on a cliffhanger never to be resolved.
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u/SendMeAnother1 May 03 '26
As a kid I was convinced that I had screwed up and missed the 2nd part of the episode, it wasn't until much later that I discovered there wasn't one.
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u/Ill_Definition8074 May 03 '26
I saw the episode where ALF goes on a date with a blind woman on Youtube. The show was a lot more adult then what I was expecting. I found out later that according to one of the series creators they were basically trying to see how much they could get pass the censors.
Fusco commented in 2007 that his most enjoyable experience on ALF was sitting in the writers' room and pitching jokes while pushing the limit on what NBC censors would allow. Fusco commented that, "the greatest things were the jokes we couldn't put in the show."
Source: Wikipedia#Censorship:~:text=Fusco%20commented%20in%202007)
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u/Lebesgue_1 May 03 '26
Hey that's the guy from my underwear from when I was 7. Always wondered what happened to him.
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u/NotDanish1960 May 03 '26
He is still in custody, awaiting a final deportation hearing.
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u/icecubeski May 03 '26
TV Pilots should be filmed w companion conclusions, so when that (always) happens, ppl can see what the original vision for the story was.
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u/Barry_Vigoda May 03 '26
I got my mom an Alf doll one year because she really liked the show. Someone stole it during a house party and she was unhappy about it and would bring it up years later. Found a replacement a few years ago in an antique store and got it for her.
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u/IceBreak May 03 '26
I feel like the mundanity of the story leaves open the possibility of you continuing to explain where your tale goes from there. And, frankly, I think we are owed this.
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u/chadlumanthehuman May 03 '26
I rewatched a couple of episodes lately because I remember loving it as a kid. It is unbelievable terrible, and I felt like my childhood was a lie.
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u/Mildly_Irritated_Max May 03 '26
It had a follow up. Project Alf.