'ALF' Creator Trying To Make 'ALF' Movie Happen
There's still time to give the next generation a dead-eyed alien that eats cats.
In a weirdly lengthy ALF piece in the Hollywood Reporter, ALF creator Paul Fusco dropped some fairly big news in the subsection "** ALF's Comeback **" (below "** ALF in Space **"): he's pitching an ALF movie.
Fusco doesn't mention who he's meeting with to pitch an ALF movie, nor when that pitch will happen, but one would think it should probably be soon because, in his own words, "the timing is right," and he was still talking about this ALF movie idea when he said that. "I think it could be a homerun on a lot of levels," Fusco continued, imagining a future in which an ALF movie is a triumph commercially and critically, but also successful on other, maybe deeper planes.
For those too young to remember, ALF was a late '80s sitcom about the eponymous puppet, a wise-cracking Alien Life Form (get it?) from planet Melmac that crash-landed on Earth and took residence in a suburban home, where he tried to avoid detection by the neighbors while making recurring jokes about eating cats. The character was briefly popular enough to spawn an animated series, Marvel comic book, and an unspeakable slew of merchandise--like a stuffed toy that would say "I kill me" as a morbid reminder of ALF enjoying himself. A TV movie was already attempted as a comeback in 1996, and in 2004, TV Land ran seven episodes of a revival series titled ALF's Hit Talk Show, which was not a hit but was a talk show hosted by ALF.
But Fusco's latest attempt at bringing life back to ALF's matted, shriveled form differs from those prior resurrections in that he hopes to update the character this time. Times have apparently changed enough that now ALF will be unrestricted in telling it like it is:
"ALF could be more outspoken now than ever, because the world is a whole different place than the 80s. And I think the character still stands up and certainly has more to say now than ever," he says. "I think we would approach it in a fresh way. I don't think we would duplicate the TV show, but I think we would maybe put it in a storyline where we would explain how ALF got here and put him with a new family and let the character speak for himself.
Time for ALF to get real about 9/11.
