Season 5 Episode 16: All Night Security Dude

Al Bundy’s four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High are the load-bearing wall of his entire personality, so an episode built around the trophy that commemorates them was always going to be one of the good ones. “All Night Security Dude” starts with Al taking a second job as an overnight security guard at the high school, a position he treats with far more ceremony than it deserves. He patrols the empty halls like a man on the beat, soundtracked by the Peter Gunn theme, and he sings to himself in the bathroom. It is in the bathroom that the disaster happens. While Al is in there, someone walks off with the school’s prized football trophy, and because Al was the only person on duty, Al is the one who gets fired for it. The firing itself is staged as a shot by shot parody of the opening credits of the 1960s western Branded, complete with the buttons being torn off his shirt and his night stick broken over the principal’s knee. Humiliated and unemployed again, Al sets out to recover the trophy himself, and the trail leads to Spare Tire Dixon, the rival lineman he beat on the goal line in the city championship almost twenty years earlier. Dixon has been nursing that loss ever since, and he has a theory about how it ruined his life that involves pie. What follows is two middle-aged men relitigating one high school football play in an empty gymnasium, and it is both very funny and unexpectedly sad. Ed O’Neill has named this one among his own favorite episodes of the series.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: February 24, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 16
• Overall episode number: 96
• Written by: Glen Eichler and Peter Gaffney
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: February 8, 1991
• Production note: Ed O’Neill named this one of his favorite episodes in the 1995 retrospective special My Favorite Married.
• Title note: The title borrows from a fictional Erik Estrada series that Peg lists among the new fall shows back in “We’ll Follow the Sun.”

Guest Cast

• Bubba Smith as “Spare Tire” Dixon
• Dorit Sauer as Trixie
• Carol Gustafson as the principal
• Kyle Cody as the pizza delivery boy

Al Bundy vs. Spare Tire Dixon

Casting Bubba Smith opposite Ed O’Neill is one of the better jokes the production ever made without saying anything out loud. Smith was a genuine All-Pro defensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts in the late sixties and early seventies. O’Neill played defensive line at Youngstown State and was briefly signed by the Pittsburgh Steelers before being cut in training camp in 1969. Two real football players, one real football career between them, acting out a grudge over a fictional high school game.

Dixon’s explanation of his downfall is the episode’s best piece of writing. He was supposed to play college ball, he says, but after the loss he fell into a depression and turned where too many players before him had turned to drown their sorrows, which was pie. By tryouts he could not get into a three point stance unless there was a pie on the floor. Al’s response, that Dixon at least had pie while Al has not eaten in nineteen years and sells women’s shoes and is married, is the show’s thesis statement in about fifteen words.

The music department does a lot of heavy lifting. Al sings Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” in the bathroom. His first patrol down the hallway is scored to the Peter Gunn theme. His firing gets “Branded.” And when Dixon draws a line on the floor and dares him to cross it, the show cues up the Chariots of Fire theme for a man in a security guard uniform.

Smith returned to the series in season 9’s “Dud Bowl,” that time playing a fictionalized version of himself rather than Spare Tire.

Famous Quotes

• Al, describing the hazards of working below an aerobics center: “Today they played Van Halen’s ‘Jump.’ And damned if the whole herd didn’t. It was awful, Peg. The ceiling broke open, and down they came, blocking out the sun. I experienced cellulite winter.”
• Spare Tire Dixon, explaining to Al how the championship loss destroyed his future: “I turned where too many players before me had turned to drown their sorrows: pie. Come tryouts, I could no longer get in a three-point stance unless there was a pie on the floor.”
• Al, declining to be moved by it: “I had a little bit of glory, yeah. But you had pie, and I haven’t eaten in nineteen years! So pardon me if I don’t cry for you, Argentina, but I sell women’s shoes, AND I’m married!”
• Al and Dixon, flat on the gym floor after finally settling the matter: “Sleepy-time now?” / “Oh, yes.”

Notes

• The episode establishes that Polk High won the city championship against Andrew Johnson High. Both schools are named for U.S. presidents, the eleventh and the seventeenth.
• A sign inside Andrew Johnson High gives the school mascot as the Impeachers, which at the time this aired was an accurate and very funny thing to name a team after Andrew Johnson.
• Bud’s date Trixie had already turned up earlier in the same season in “The Dance Show,” where she made him pay for dinner.
• Kelly’s line asking whether they will lose Tara is a Gone With the Wind reference.
• Peg works in another Mel Gibson reference, having mentioned him the week before in “A Man’s Castle.”
• A visible goof: when the principal snaps Al’s night stick over her knee and he holds up the broken half, the break is suspiciously clean, suggesting the prop was pre-cut.