Michu Meszaros was the actor within the Alf costume. Paul Fusco operated the Alf puppet, supplied Alf's voice and co-produced the series.
The title character is Gordon Shumway, a little alien nick-named A.L.F. (Alien Life Form). He was born 229 years ago on the Lower East side of the planet Melmac. The planet Melmac was located six parsecs past the Hydra Centauras Super Cluster and had a green sky and blue grass.
Alf's body is covered with orange fur. He has a rippled snout, eight stomachs and likes to eat cats. He attended high school for 122 years and was captain of a Bouillabaiseball team (which is played on ice using shellfish as a ball).
Following a ham radio signal, he crash-landed into the garage of the Tanners, a suburbian middle-class family including the social worker Willie (Max Wright), his wife Kate (Anne Schedeen), their children Lynn (Andrea Elson), Brian (Benji Gregory) and Lucky (a cat).
Unsure what to do, the Tanners take ALF into their home and hide him from NASA, the Military, and their nosy neighbors until he can repair his spacecraft. It became known that Melmak had exploded, so ALF was without a home. He became a permanent member of the family even though his smart alec attitude and frequent mischief-making causes difficulty for the Tanners.
Two spinoff animated series arose. The first, set on ALF's home planet of Melmak, ran on Saturday daytime in 1988. A later second series, AlfTales, ran alongside the older cartoon and eventually outlived it. AlfTales took Gordon and his familiar cohorts on Melmak and placed them as characters in classic (Earthly) fairy tales.
In 1996 a 90 minutes TV-movie named Project: ALF was aired on ABC.
At the time that the original TV series was popular, some ALF-related merchandise was sold, including a 1988 calendar with Melmak's planetary holidays (such as Shout at a Shrub Day) prominently marked.
Recently, ALF has been appearing in one of the numerous long-distance dialing plan commercials on American television. Alf has made many appearances on Hollywood Squares, including the current version.
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