I spent a few years living in Germany during my teenage years -- a few years which just happened to fall during the mid-1980s, so I missed quite a few cultural milestones. MTV? We'd occasionally get a videotape someone would bring back from the states, which would make the rounds of my friends until we had the 2 hours of music memorized*. Cabbage Patch Kids? Luckily, I missed that one until recently, when one of my daughters was given a vintage one by a great-grandmother. Smurfs? Well... actually, they came from Germany, though they were called something like "Schlumphs," which is precariously close to an unflattering German term for a young woman of questionable virtue.
But I digress. When I returned to the states, I had a lot of catching up to do, culturally. And one of the things I never quite got was the TV show Alf, which came and went while I was overseas. Allegedly. I summarily refused to believe that a sitcom starring a stuffed furry alien could possibly have become a prime-time hit, even in the 1980s. And yes, I had seen Knight Rider. It was huge in Germany. In fact, I accused many stateside friends of being part of a conspiracy to convince me that Alf was real, then chuckling at my gullible self behind my back. Even years later, I was never quite convinced.
Flash forward two decades. While visiting the in-laws last weekend, we stumbled upon this.
I'm through the looking glass, sadder and a bit wiser. Sadder, mainly, as had my kids not gleefully colored all over the sucker, I could have made a fortune on eBay.
(*) Back in the day, MTV aired short-form movies that were intentionally synchronized with popular songs of the time, called (I believe) "music videos."