Season 5 Episode 18: Weenie Tot Lovers & Other Strangers

This is the episode that gave the series Weenie Tots, and for that alone it earns a place in the canon. Kelly lands a job as the spokesmodel for the product, a deep fried pig-in-a-blanket substitute that Al regards as nature’s perfect food, and the gig comes with a year’s supply delivered to the house. Al is so overcome that he hand trucks the cartons into the kitchen himself. Then Peg notices there is a scratch and sniff sweepstakes printed on the packaging, and that one of the cards is worth fifty thousand dollars, and the Bundys discover they are holding the winner. The problem is the fine print, which Bud is the one to spot: contests of this kind bar employees of the company and their immediate families, and Kelly now works for Weenie Tots. Rather than accept that, Al and Peg recruit Marcy and Jefferson to claim the prize on their behalf, which requires the Darcys to pose as the winners and then be trusted to hand the money over afterward. Anyone who has watched this show knows how well that is likely to go, and the plan expands to involve Kelly as well before it starts coming apart. Along the way Al spends a long stretch of the episode at the Weenie Tot factory inventing a new life story for the benefit of a secretary named Flopsie, who is filing her nails and reading a magazine and not listening to a word of it. Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye wrote this one, their second in a row.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: March 24, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 18
• Overall episode number: 98
• Written by: Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: February 22, 1991
• Production note: Filmed seventeenth in the season but aired eighteenth.
• Production note: The first appearance of Weenie Tots, which became Al’s signature food for the rest of the series.
• Title note: A play on the 1970 film Lovers and Other Strangers.

Guest Cast

• Ray Girardin as Mr. Shnick
• Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst as Flopsie
• Rick Ford as Johnson (credited as F. Richards Ford)
• Milt Tarver as the IRS agent
• Helena Apothaker as Butter Lefkowitz
• Jennifer Braff as Rhonda Rose
• Dan Tullis Jr. as the policeman

Nature’s Perfect Food

Al’s definition of a Weenie Tot, delivered to a wife who has somehow never heard of them, is the line the episode is remembered for, and the packaging copy that follows it is almost better. The label warns that the product has no nutritional value, states outright that it is not food, and then instructs the owner not to expose it to air because doing so accelerates the disintegration process. The show would keep mining that joke for another six seasons.

The money plot is a textbook Bundy scheme in that it fails for exactly the reason anyone could have predicted. Handing fifty thousand dollars to Marcy and Jefferson and expecting it back is not a plan, it is an invitation, and Marcy’s own assessment of her husband, that she does not intend to end up as Bonnie to this man’s Clod, tells you how much faith she has in her end of it either.

Dan Tullis Jr. turns up as a Chicago police officer. He would keep playing the part across the run of the series, though the character does not actually get named Officer Dan until season 8. Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst, the put-upon Flopsie, came back twice more, once as one of Al’s fantasy women in “Route 666” and once as a member of the Swedish Bikini Team. Helena Apothaker is in the very next episode as well, playing Bud’s date Crystal, before returning to the Butter Lefkowitz role later on.

Al’s funniest material here is the running sequence of fabricated biographies he tries out on Flopsie. He is a twenty-five year old millionaire whose wife died in a flaming car wreck. He is Joe Namath, winner of Super Bowl III. He killed a beast with a long knife and now lives alone in a mansion with the world’s largest diamond. None of it works. Flopsie’s only contribution to any of it is to ask him to stop spraying her.

Famous Quotes

• Al, to a wife who has just asked what a Weenie Tot is: “A Weenie Tot is a delicious little hot dog-type meat, wrapped in a breaded shell, and deep-fried in pure lard. It’s nature’s perfect food!”
• Peg, reading the fine print on the carton at Al’s insistence: “Do not expose Weenie Tots to air. Will accelerate disintegration process. Enjoy.”
• Al, on whether the family has won anything: “Well, I can tell you that. We’re Bundys; we didn’t!”
• Al, opening a flirtation with the factory secretary: “You might be wondering what a 25-year-old millionaire is doing with an 18-year-old daughter.” Flopsie: “Not really…”

Notes

• Al’s paycheck is revealed to be denominated in pesos rather than dollars, eighty of them, which works out to a few dollars. Season 6’s “Rites of Passage” has him handing Bud his entire paycheck of six dollars.
• Al tells Flopsie he is Joe Namath and recounts leading the Jets to the Super Bowl III title. Namath’s opponent that day was the Baltimore Colts, whose roster included Bubba Smith, the guest star from two episodes earlier. Namath later appeared on the show as himself in season 10’s “Dances with Weezie.”
• Al owns a Charlie’s Angels lunch box.
• Peg tells Al to stop acting like Opie and get a real job, and Al responds that at least Opie came home to Aunt Bee’s pies.
• Al’s retirement property, Lake Chicamocomico, gets a mention.
• An early draft of the final scene had Bud leaving with Flopsie for a weekend in Washington on her uncle’s private jet, with the exit line “Who says you can’t have your Tot and eat it too?”
• The episode was parodied in 2003 on NBC’s The Rerun Show, with Ozzy Osbourne and his family playing the Bundys and Erik Estrada as Officer Dan.