Metaphorical Migrant, Literal Libs
The programming built into the programming...1980s alien edition.
We are facing a widespread pop culture reckoning, but none of my fellow yellow journalists are going deep enough, far enough… back to the 1980s… back to the depravity that aired every Monday night on NBC at 8 PM Eastern, from 1986 to 1990—the hit television show ALF.
As an innocent lad in the ‘80s, I loved this show, but it had escaped my memory until recently, when my youngest son (age 10) discovered all the episodes streaming on Amazon’s Freevee. Like most Gen Xers, nothing shoots dopamine faster through my system than nostalgia, so I couldn’t wait to dive into this father-son TV bonding binge… only to discover something sinister.
This show is not just criminally “cringe,” as the kids say, it’s a vehicle for some very suspicious messaging.
The main character is a spoof of the most famous fictional alien of the period, E.T., from the 1982 movie of the same name. Whereas “E.T.”, of course, stands for “extra terrestrial, “ALF” is an acronym for “alien life form.” Both beings are about three feet tall, but unlike the quasi-reptilian E.T., ALF seems to be mammalian, with the appearance of an elephant’s stool sample dropped on a busy barber shop floor.
The premise of ALF is strikingly similar to that of E.T. as well. Both of the eponymous “heroes” come from their distant solar systems to find themselves stranded in—where else?—California. After this, though, the famous plot of E.T., with the touching relationships and broken home, is abandoned in favor of sit-com tropes—and the aforementioned sinister messaging.
ALF finds himself among the Tanners, a comes-with-the-frame family of four, who forego executing the undocumented celestial migrant with a couple hundred cases of Roundup, and instead agree to harbor him in their home. Steeped in liberal lore of the period, the Tanners fear Reagan and his federal henchmen will cage the free-range cosmic horror and perform experiments on his flea-bitten body.
Willie Tanner, the chinless father, is naturally employed as a social worker. His wife, Kate, is a homemaker with side aspirations of becoming a girlboss real estate agent. The children consist of young Brian, a mostly ignored playpal for ALF and Lynn, a high school honor student who never makes a mistake, and has an uncomfortable coziness with the long-schnozzed invader.
What plays out over the show’s four seasons is a subtle but unmistakable—possibly even an unconscious—metaphor for liberals’ entire relationship with their beloved migrants.
ALF is worse for the Earthlings’ household than an infestation of cockroaches. Most sitcoms are based around absurd misunderstandings, but the laughs from this show result simply from the alien’s abuse of his hosts. The most famous running gag from the series is ALF’s constant attempts to eat the family cat, and the alien generally has free rein to eat them out of house and home, rack up huge phone bills, order items from TV ads, physically destroy the furniture and fixtures, and generally fuck up the lives of Willie’s actual children.
There’s even an episode where Lynn gains admission to her dream college but is forced to go to a shitty local school because Willie and Kate busted their budget feeding and cleaning up after ALF.
In spite of this, weak-faced Willie lays down only one rule for his brown buddy: hide in the kitchen, or elsewhere, when neighbors visit. Notice the rule only serves to protect the “undocumented citizen seeking a better life,” and does nothing for the Tanners…aside from stroke the parents’ shitlib savior complexes.
As a kid, like my 10-year-old son today, I enjoyed the Dennis the Menace antics of ALF. It’s easy comedy for a little boy, but annoying as fuck for a grown man. Aside from his general antisocial behavior, ALF delights the family and, in turn, we the audience with lame one-liners throughout each episode. His catchphrase, after delivering some sardonic comment, is “Ha! I kill me!” His derisive humor could, in fact, be seen as ethnically colored, given certain stereotypical physical features, and being that the alien’s real name, on his home planet of Melmac, is Gordon Shumway.
As a side note, in true liberal fashion, the story of ALF only becomes more demented as you peel back the layers. Max Wright, the chinless actor who played the father, had what may be the most uncharacteristic sex-tape scandal imaginable after the show went off the air. Apparently, the middle aged mediocrity was filmed smoking crack and letting dudes have their way with him. It seems, considering his on-screen relationship with ALF, that he was a method actor.
I was also surprised to learn that ALF wasn’t merely a puppet from the Muppets section of a Dollar General. A literal circus sideshow midget named Michu Meszaros, who was a stunning 2’9” tall and weighed in at 25 lbs, wore the furry suit. And naturally, the child-sized performer caught the eye of, and became creepily close to, Michael Jackson. The actor was an adult, so I guess to Jackson he was sort of a Diet Coke—gave the experience of the real thing, but without the risk of indictment.
But, as with most other popular media—the recent Dan Schneider and P-Diddy scandals being obvious examples—it’s no longer surprising to learn about pitch blackness lurking beneath light-hearted performances.
What is surprising, as I revisit this product of a more innocent era, is its deeper meaning. An all-American family sidelines their own well-being, basic comfort, and possibly even their futures, to benefit an actual alien, even as he verbally abuses them and crassly takes advantage of them in every way possible—all facilitated by a proto-cuck father, on the basis of “humanitarian” values that aren’t even being applied to a human. Instead, they’re applied to a soulless monster whose species literally destroyed its own planet, before cozying up to ours.
Is this messaging subconscious or completely deliberate? Is it psychological programming or psychological projection? Perhaps we’ll never know. What we do know is that the stage was being set long ago, literally and figuratively, for the extremes of the liberal mental illness.
This is what people don't seem to realise when they say things like "I want to go back to the 90's when the world was sane!"
The rot had set in long before the 90's, even before the 80's! We've been on a certain trajectory since the 1940's in fact. The 1950's was the last decent decade by my reckoning and even that is debatable.
It is surprisingly interesting to go back and watch older programs with today's eyes. I recently cued up the classic "Ben-Hur", and after suffering about 30-40 mins of it, I shut it off, unable to take it anymore. I suspect that in many ways, this is the same principle as "you can never go home again", or "never meet your heroes".
The programming has been going on for many decades, and subtle as it may have been, it has obviously had a great impact on our culture, and societal norms.
I've been doing some deep dives of older content too, but I try to stick with the stuff that I'm confident has meaning and purpose, and was not a vehicle for propaganda, but every now and then... you're hit square in the face with what was there all along, but remained hidden minus modern scrutiny.