Aliens in the Family (1996, TGIF)

About

Aliens in the Family is the story of a big-hearted human dad, Doug Brody (John Bedford Lloyd), who was abducted by a spacecraft, fell in love with an alien single mom, Cookie (Margaret Trigg), and returned to Earth to marry her and raise their unusual brood of human and alien children. (And that's the way they became The Brody Bunch!) Doug's two human kids, the much-bullied 9-year-old Adam (Christopher Marquette) and the status-conscious 14-year-old Heather (Paige Tiffany), are alternately delighted and exasperated by their three extraterrestrial siblings — their wisecracking brother Spit, 14; brainy sister Snizzy, 10; and precocious but demanding baby brother Bobut, who acts as if he's Emperor of the Universe, and with good reason — he is. Rounding out the family is Bobut's nanny, Sally Hagan (Julie Dretzin), who is often the target of his imperious wrath, but who knows how to charm him with chocolate pudding. Regularly featured is Tiffany Kendall (Kristanna Loken), a popular girl who's hot for Spit. Includes guest appearances by a pre-famous James Van Der Beek, Hayden Panettiere, Allison Janney, and Aaron Eckhart, with a live-action cameo by Sally Jessy Raphael, and an amusing vocal cameo by Joanna Kerns.

This deliriously goofy spoof of family sitcoms (a combination of "Dinosaurs" and "The Brady Bunch" that poked fun at shows of the era like "Full House") was created by then-husband-and-wife team Andy and Susan Borowitz ("The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"), was produced by the Jim Henson Company, and aired as a companion to "Muppets Tonight." Unfortunately, that series didn't last long on ABC, and this had an even shorter lifespan -- after a measly two airings, it was pulled off the air and canceled, with the remaining 6 episodes later broadcast on Saturday mornings with little fanfare. Several years later, reruns blipped on The Odyssey Network (later rebranded The Hallmark Channel). Although it developed a small cult following, it hasn't officially been made available anywhere since, with the exception of a couple clips that the Henson company has posted on their site and YouTube.

Half these rips are mine, a couple came from other collectors, and a pair (You Don't Have a Pet... and Respect Your Elders) are hybrids (high quality rips with a little low-quality footage to compensate for audio/video dropouts). My rip of the pilot is a tad better than the others out there (which isn't saying much since a tracking line shows up at the bottom and it's bouncy in spots), but I'm still on the lookout for a good copy, as well as the rest of the TGIF segments that the cast appeared in.

Note: This is completely unrelated to the 1985 book by Margaret Mahy, which was adapted as a BBC series in 1987. But because I've been curious about that show since 1996, I found it and put it on the archive.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

Jim Henson Company

Language

English

Subtitles

English

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Kids profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed