Noiseless Chatter Archive

As you all know, I never do favors for anyone unless they give me even more in return. Since I’m away this week, the guy I wrote a Power Ranger sex thing for got roped into filling in for me. Eventually I might — MIGHT — take a proper look at ALF’s Hit Talk Show. But in the very likely event of my death, here’s Samurai Karasu of Ranger Retrospective to give it the coverage it doesn’t by any means deserve. I apologize for the break in your regularly scheduled ALF reviews my fellow ALFanatics. Mr. Reed has informed me he was on trial for murder this week so he needed someone to fill in his shoes. Unfortunately, ALF wasn’t a show I watched much of in its heyday. I had a good excuse though, I was -6 months old during the season finale’s first airing. However I was familiarized with the show through reruns on various channels, as well as Paul Fusco’s desperate attempts to shove his brainchild into any pop cultural limelight that granted him the opportunity to do so. For wha...

Reader BJ Siard alerted me to this fact: Anne Meara passed away on Friday , at the age of 85. Fans of the ALF reviews will know her as Kate Sr., a condescending nickname I coined because the show never bothered to make me care about who she actually was. She was introduced in the Kate Sr. Trilogy , and has made intermittent appearances since then. And while I couldn’t pretend that she was actually a fantastic and welcome presence on the show, I would hasten to point out that she did what she could with what she was given. Sadly, what she was given involved ALF in gypsy garb channeling the dead, being moved by a soap opera written by a space alien, being forced by her daughter into bed with a creepy guy she just met, dueting with Max Wright at the end of an episode about ALF shitting in the tub, and so on. In other words, she was given nothing. So don’t let her work in ALF dictate what you’ll remember about her. Meara’s IMDB page reads like an off-center history of ...

  ALF Reviews: “Hide Away” (season 3, episode 13) With “Hide Away,” we find ourselves at the halfway point of season three. We’re so close to Jim J. Bullock joining the cast, I could spit on him. From here I’m not sure if I’ve seen any more episodes. I did watch  Project: ALF  (or at least some of it) when it aired, but after “Do You Believe in Magic?” I don’t know if I ever bothered tuning in again. I might have, but “Hide Away” isn’t at all familiar to me. No memories came rushing back with this one…and that’s kind of a shame. It’s not a great episode, or even a good one, but it’s miles beyond “Do You Believe in Magic?” If I had held out for another week as a kid, I could have at least ended my association with this show on a higher note. That’s “higher” in a very relative sense, I assure you. “Hide Away” opens with ALF burping. It literally opens with that. It’s the very first thing that happens in the very first frame. Incredibly, it gets better! Willie comes home and...