Noiseless Chatter Archive

  ALF Reviews: “Going Out of My Head Over You” (Season 1, Episode 19) Ever since “For Your Eyes Only,” also known as the Jodie episode, I’ve had a solid reference point for what  ALF  can achieve when it gives a shit. It would be one thing if the show was consistently bad, or if it had some sort of lame, go-nowhere premise, but neither of those things is true; the writing periodically achieves cleverness, and the premise — I’ll argue this to my grave — is excellent. The problem is that the show is so frequently content with lazy scripts and storylines that have nothing to do with the main selling point: a space alien living in an unfamiliar world. “For Your Eyes Only” was an exception. It was more or less front-to-back good, it had a surprising depth of emotion, gave us the show’s first (and so far only) rounded character,  and  it built upon a key aspect of the show: as an alien, ALF can’t leave the house, and therefore he feels lonely. Most episodes of this sh...

About a month ago I wrote about a project called The Interactive Canvas . At the time it was a Kickstarter hopeful, with author Matt Sainsbury (of Digitally Downloaded ) hoping that people would pledge enough money for him to assemble the games industry interview collection of his dreams. Typically Kickstarter success is measured in terms of funds: if you don’t meet your goal, you’ve failed. If you have met your goal, you’ve succeeded. If you’ve exceeded your goal, you turn cartwheels for several weeks straight. In the case of The Interactive Canvas , however, success took quite a different form: Matt got the news that a traditional publisher was interested in his book, and he wouldn’t have to crowdfund it after all. The Kickstarter came down, and The Interactive Canvas was fast-tracked to becoming a reality. Hot on the heels of this good news, Matt Sainsbury sat down to graciously respond to my stream of nonsense. 1) In exactly 21 words, what is your intention wi...

  ALF Reviews: “Wild Thing” (Season 1, Episode 18) Now this is interesting. The syndication edit of “Wild Thing” is only 18 minutes long. Typically they’ve been about 22 or 23 minutes, which reflect maybe two or three minutes’ worth of trimmed material. As I’ve mentioned before in these reviews, I’m disappointed by that, but not largely concerned. While it’s fair enough to assume that we’re losing some decent lines and maybe a moment or two of plot clarification, I truly doubt it would make the show  better . Even if we operate under the assumption that all of the stuff that got cut was good, that still leaves us with the fact that any given episode of  ALF  only had two or three minutes’ worth of good stuff, and that’s a pretty lousy ratio. Here, though, it’s a bit trickier, as we’re losing six or seven minutes’ worth of material. That’s basically a full act. In fact, Hulu divides its programs up by “act” so that it can show its own commercials. “Wild Thing” has an ...