Stranger in A Strange Land

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Yo, Skip! Yo, Rhonda!,

I don't know if this radiocast will reach you guys way out there in your spaceship, but I really miss you. You're still the only other beings from Melmac who I know survived when the planet blew up. A lot of amazing things have happened to your old buddy Gordo since you last heard my signal, soon after I crash-landed through the Tanner family's garage roof and decided to stay here in sunny California. There are drawbacks: this place earth is so outsville you can't buy a whisker omelet or a tabby-paw pie. Here, when people stroke cats, they aren't even trying to get the meat tender for sauteing. Yet they eat armored slugs that they call escargots! And they never heard of sloppy joes with fiber glass.

But who am I to complain? Under my new name ALF -- for Alien Life Form -- I'm now a bigger star than Alpha Centauri. My half hour on Monday nights on the NBC-TV network sometimes hits the Top Ten in the Nielsen ratings (just like ours, except recorded electronically instead of with marshmallows and thumbtacks) and is playing in about 50 countries. The show is the story of my life in a typical suburban household -- working dad, nonworking mom, teenage daughter just out of braces, chirpy son who dresses up as a vegetable for the school play, and yours truly, the alien who has to hide in the laundry room when anyone comes to call. My Saturday-morning cartoon reminiscences about Melmac have become one of the three most popular TV shows for children. A movie about my journey from Melmac to earth is planned for later this year.

The biggest bucks (wernicks to you) come from marketing. Toymakers and schlockmeisters are peddling me via 250 items with total sales above $200 million. There are storytelling dolls, skateboards, backpacks, comic books, coffee mugs, party hats, and chewing gum complete with cards for bouillabaseball -- that's right, I'm introducing our old national pastime, fish and all. My favorite item is a T shirt showing me in X-ray glasses saying to passersby, "Hey, nice underwear." Haaah! I kill me! All in all, I am the busiest long-shnozzed, four-toothed, 3-ft. 2-in. creature with burnt-siena fur anywhere on earth. Of course, there aren't many talking life forms here that look like me. I am continually being mistaken for an anteater, a dwarf orangutan or an aardvark, which on Melmac we encountered only in crossword puzzles.

Part of the reason for this mistaken identity is that my very existence has to remain a secret to keep the government scientists off my case. I have managed it through a brilliant scam: practically everyone thinks I'm a puppet! Sustaining this conspiracy takes a few collaborators. My main partner is a onetime comic magician named Paul Fusco. He actually claims to have invented me. Sure, he talks like me, laughs like me, jokes like me, even sort of looks like me. But I'm 230 years old and he's 35, barely old enough to have a bar catzvah back home. Also important is Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, who admits I am a personal favorite. We keep everyone off the set, supposedly to maintain the illusion that I'm real but actually to maintain the illusion that I'm an illusion. This reporter from TIME (here it's a magazine, not a dental drill) called Tartikoff to kvetch about that, so he agreed to describe the set: "There are all these holes for the uh, er, puppet. Holes in the couch, holes in the bed, holes in the floor. Trapdoors everywhere. It looks like a family of gophers live there." Together, we've concocted this great cover story. Supposedly Fusco came to pitch the idea of an alien moving in on a nice, normal family and driving them crazy with his rudeness and irresponsibility -- whaddaya want, we had to spice it up, it's entertainment -- and the NBC guys were nodding off because the idea was too, like, subtle for them. So Fusco reached into a green plastic trash bag, pulled me out, made me sneeze, and I wiped my nose on Tartikoff's sleeve. Haaah! He loved it! Well, I guess you can tell, we actually didn't make that part up. Or the trash bag.

The indignities never stop. At the Tanners', I sleep in the garage or the laundry room. At NBC, I share my dressing room with a mop and bucket. The one saving grace to this abuse is that it helps fool even the cast into thinking I really am a puppet, including Anne Schedeen, who plays the real-life Kate Tanner, and the guy who plays Willie, this dithery product of Hesitation ( School named Max Wright. He must have mastered the Dramatic Pause (wake me up at half time!) during his years on the stage at places like Yale and Harvard, schools as prestigious as Podunk and Dingaling on Melmac. Listen to him drivel: "There are moments when ALF's reality is so overwhelming, you have to catch your breath. He picked up a lingerie catalog one day, and you could see his blood changing, his temperature going up. How did he do that? ALF has eyes of stone, literally cold black eyes, and sometimes, whether they catch the light or not, they warm just like a person's eyes." Do I have the man in knots or what?

I am still an instigator. If I fall in love with a show called Gilligan's Island, I'll turn the Tanners' backyard into a lagoon. If I don't like the President's policy on nuclear arms, I'll phone him on Air Force One and explain how we incinerated Melmac. Still the same old me: no moral compass, no sense of proportion, no fear. I still break things a lot too. I learned the hard way that you can't smoke fish in a toaster, puree a rock in a blender or light an oven an hour after you turn on the gas. I even accidentally scared an old man to death and discovered that makes earthlings sad instead of happy for the guy that he'll never be late to work again.

People are full of theories about my popularity. Some compare me to Rocky and Bullwinkle -- you remember, the plucky squirrel and the jug-eared moose -- or some klutz named Mork from Ork, because these bozos seemed to be entertaining children while really offering sophisticated satire of politics and pop culture. One notion is that because I am a shut-in, to stay hidden, and learn everything I know about the world from TV, I constitute some sort of commentary on what children learn from watching the box. Another idea is that I am sort of a metaphorical child myself, but treated more honestly than these sentimental earthlings would treat anyone without fur. Emotionally, they say, I am like a gifted eight-year-old, inclined to get into trouble because I am smart and energetic, even if my intentions are good. The people who push this idea say that in about half the shows I am bored, frustrated or hurt and trying to run away from home, something children do here a lot. Remember how on Melmac it was always parents who wanted to run away -- at least at my house?

Some see me as cuddly like a dog; others with more sense recognize I am bringing insult comedy back to TV for a world that loves nicknames and ^ invective. Fusco goes Freudian and burbles like this: "I think we all need magic and fantasy in our lives. ALF brings out the little girl or boy in people. He touches something inside you that you can go back to and remember." Sure -- blind fear of the dark! Haaah! I still kill me.

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles