List of ALF Characters - ALF

ALF (a nickname for "Alien Life Form"), is an alien from the planet Melmac. ALF's real name is Gordon Shumway; he was given the nickname "ALF" by Willie Tanner in the pilot episode.

ALF was born on October 28, 1756 (though he mentions that his birthday is in August in Episode 7, "Help Me Rhonda") on the Lower East Side of the planet. Melmac was located six parsecs past the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster and had a green sky, pink grass and a purple sun. The commonly-used currency is Wernicks, and the substance we call foam is revealed by Alf in the first season episode, "Baby, you can drive my car", to be as precious on Melmac as gold is on Earth. Lint also has value on Melmac as hinted in the cold open of the same episode, though Alf did not reveal what it corresponded to on Earth in terms of value.

ALF's body is covered with rust-colored fur (he once described his color as burnt sienna). He has a rippled snout, facial moles, eight stomachs, his heart is apparently located in his head, and he likes to eat cats and had a best friend on his home planet named Malhar Naik. He attended high school for 122 years and was captain of a Bouillabaisseball team (which is played on a normal baseball diamond using fish parts as a ball). He has at least two cousins "Pretty Boy Shumway" and "Blinky", and has had liposuction. During a bout of amnesia, he believed he was an insurance salesman named Wayne Schlegel.

ALF is troublesome, sarcastic and cynical, and sometimes he puts himself at the risk of being discovered while doing some of his often unintentional pranks. However, if things have gone too far, he does as much as possible to make up for his mistakes, generally with good results. In one episode, he tried to help Brian to gain confidence during a school show, because he was too afraid to perform. In another occasion, he helped Dorothy to deal with her husband's death and move on and accept another man's friendship. He also helped Raquel Ochmonek deal with a depression she suffered after she became the laughing stock in a TV show.

Before his life on Earth, ALF was an Orbit Guard for Melmac and was often called upon to fight the villain calling himself "Versus, the Evil Larson Petty". During one such battle, nuclear missiles are used to try to quell the threat of Versus once and for all. Unknown to everyone, the missiles would not only destroy Versus, but the entire planet along with the Melmacians trying to defend their planet. When Melmac exploded, it threw a few orbit guard ships into space, one of them being ALF's. The ship drifted through space for about a year before picking up Willie Tanner's radio transmission and crash landing on earth.

ALF is generally regarded as one of the only Melmacians to survive his home planet's cataclysm. However, a few other Melmacians were shown to have survived the cataclysm. Skip and Rhonda had escaped the explosion in an interstellar space craft. It is stated in the episode titled "Help Me Rhonda" that ALF's other friend Rick got married to a Melmacian named Stella, who opened a tanning parlor on Mercury. In the episode titled "Alone Again, Naturally" ALF sees his cousin "Blinky" in a car on the highway, but Willy says that they haven't seen a car for hours and ALF was just daydreaming, so it's really left up to the viewer if ALF saw Blinky or not. Any other surviving Melmacians are unknown at this point although it is possible that more exist as many other orbit guard ships could have suffered the same fate as ALF's, stranded on other unknown planets.

Being a live-hand puppet, Paul Fusco is assisted in performing ALF by Bob Fappiano and Lisa Buckley. Michu Meszaros stood in for the ALF puppet when full-body shots were needed by wearing an ALF costume, although this idea was ditched in later seasons.

TV Guide ranked ALF # 8 on its "25 Greatest Sci-Fi Legends" list.