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 ice using shellfish as a ball).
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.
The production of ALF was technically difficult and demanding. All four lead actors - Max Wright (Willie Tanner), Anne Schedeen (Kate Tanner), Andrea Elson (Lynn Tanner) and Ben Hertzberg, also known as Benji Gregory (Brian Tanner) - have conceded a high level of tension on the set.
Max Wright stated that he despised supporting a technically demanding inanimate object that received most of the good lines of dialog. He admits to being "hugely eager to have ALF over with". Anne Schedeen said that on the last night of taping ALF "there was one take and Max walked off the set, went to his dressing room, got his bags, went to his car and disappeared. There were no goodbyes." Schedeen herself said "there was no joy on the set, it was a technical nightmare - extremely slow, hot and tedious. A 30-minute show took 20, 25 hours to shoot." While fond of her on screen children, Schedeen said some adults had "difficult personalities. The whole thing was a big dysfunctional family".
Fusco is notoriously secretive about his character. During the show's production, Fusco refused to acknowledge that the puppet ALF was anything other than an alien. All involved with the production were cautioned not to give away any of ALF's secrets.
Paul Fusco was the primary puppeteer. He used one hand to control ALF's mouth leaving the other free to control one of the puppet's arms. A second puppeteer, Lisa Buckley, accompanied Paul under the stage and wore ALF's other hand (the hands were basically furry gloves) to control it. Together, with a third person (Bob Fappiano), who controlled ALF's facial and ear movements via an RC controller offstage, they worked in concert to make ALF's movements fluid and believable. All of this made for a painstaking process and there were countless mistakes and retakes.
While roaming around this cemetery, I stumbled across Alf's marker and then found a different sort of Alien Life Form nearby. I quicky attached a small bison tube to it while shielding my eyes. The energy field surrounding this alien device is really strong, so be very careful not to disturb it.