Hacker Cinema
ALF
1986 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Paul Fusco, Tom Patchett
ComedyFamilyScience FictionFantasy
A furry alien wiseguy comes to live with a terran family after crashing into their garage.
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11 comments on Hacker News
From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF
Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.
And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)
that's america for me when I was a kid
That's a problem that predates streaming.
There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.
(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)
> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?
The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.
Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.
Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.
People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.
Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.
Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.
Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.
Alf was pretty big all over the world, we even had a dubbed version here in South Africa. It was no fun as an adult to see the movie version and have him sound so weird.
I was sick the other day and slept in our guest room to spare my family. I only get OTA TV in that room. I realized MeTV was back in our area on a different channel. When I used to live alone, I would sleep with the TV on for background noise to make me feel like the place was not empty.
Anyway left the TV on MeTV overnight Friday and woke up Saturday to ALF. Really hadn’t seen an episode since it was first aired. Going to Wikipedia, I was blown away that it was on for four seasons, was cancelled at the end of the fourth, and the season four finale was never intended to be the last episode. Years later they tied up the ending of the show.
I swear up and down it felt like the show was on for more than four years. I also remembered my first dog died during one of the episodes of Alf I watched as a kid, so that wound was opened again. :(
There was a fantastic indie movie in the 90s called Permanent Midnight. It starred Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl who wrote for Alf and had a pretty heavy drug habit. Funny how Stahl only gets a passing mention in the article.
I've never seen a cockroach in my whole life and never heard of anyone having problems with them. I only know about them from American movies and TV series (e.g. ALF).
“Beige. Now there’s a committment to colour.”
— Alf, Season 2, episode 24, “Tequila” (1988).
Gordon Shumway was the name of the main character in the TV show "Alf". This was the joke behind the name.
Firefly is great, albeit short.
I was forced to watch Buffy, but while the first season makes you cringe, it is pretty good. Not as stellar as people claim, but really good. I think Joss Whedans masterpiece wasn't Buffy, it was Toy Story. But do watch the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling"!
Babylon 5, of course, if you can tolerate the (even for the time) bad CGI.
I've just watched DS9 from beginning to end, something I had wanted to do for 15 years now. Hasn't aged well, and I hadn't seen it in English before. Avery Brooks' overpronunciation is painful, but it is the best Star Trek series by far.
Friends was something I've enjoyed as a teen, and later as an adult. It was a totally different experience as an adult. I think that's worth a lot, to have a depth that appeals differently to you in different stages of your life.
Modern Family was way better than expected.
ALF is a bit painful to watch nowadays, it also hasn't aged well.
Golden Girls are probably still great, The Cosby Show definitely is!
Boston Legal is fun, fun, fun! Hey, why shouldn't Nantucket be allowed to habe its own nuclear weapons? But do watch all the newer Star Trek series before BL, so you can appreciate the ST heavy cast.
Dallas! Oh my. Incredible how old Victoria Principal is today.
ER was great, but I haven't seen much of the last seasons. I also liked Chicago Hope, but it clearly lost.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Probably the most modern TV series of its time, great themes and issues, pretty current, fantastic buildup to the big finale and then... disappointment.
Game of Thrones, if only for the shock value ;-)
And at last, the Tv series I've probably enjoyed most in the last few years: the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. But make sure you can stomach it, the season finales are sickeningly evil (especially season 2).
I don't know, but I would guess it is, if only because "Gordon Shumway" is the alias of ALF from the 80s tv show.