Season 5 Episode 21: You Better Shop Around (1)

The first half of a two part story, and one of the more ambitious things the series attempted in its fifth season. Chicago is in the middle of a heat wave, the Bundys are melting, and Al’s solution is to buy an air conditioner. What he brings home is not a normal appliance. It is a surplus monster stenciled as the property of Erwin Rommel, it has a setting labeled Blitzkrieg, and when Al switches it on it does exactly what a machine built for the Afrika Korps would be expected to do, which is draw every available watt of electricity in the neighborhood. The Bundy house becomes the only cool building on the block. Everyone else loses power. By the end of the first act the neighbors have assembled outside with torches and pitchforks and a genuine intent to get at Al, and Peg is standing in the living room addressing her husband as Desert Fox. The family’s escape plan is to abandon the house entirely and relocate to the local supermarket, which is air conditioned, open, and full of food. They move in. They do not leave. And while they are camped out among the frozen goods, the store runs a promotion and the Bundys are declared the winners of a shopping spree, which is where part one leaves them and part two picks up. Along the way Al works the aisles, Bud is spotted by classmates and loudly disowns his own parents, and Marcy watches the whole thing from across the street and starts calling them the VanderBundys.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 14, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 21
• Overall episode number: 101
• Written by: J.D. Brangato and Michael Ferris
• Directed by: Linda Day
• Production note: Filmed nineteenth in the season but aired twenty-first, after the “Top of the Heap” pilot took the hundredth episode slot.
• Production note: Part one of a two part story. Both halves appear on volume one of the Married with Children: Most Outrageous Episodes DVD set.
• Title note: Taken from the lyric of the Miracles’ 1960 single “Shop Around.”

Guest Cast

• Bobbie Brown as Nibbles
• Bruce Jarchow as the store manager
• John Asher as Bob the stock boy (credited as John Mallory Asher)
• Jodie Mann as the cashier
• Regina Leeds as the cheese lady
• Louise Rapport as Mrs. Gillis (credited as Louise Pellegrino Rapport)
• Helena Apothaker as Butter Lefkowitz
• Kevin Ryder as the voice of the DJ

The Desert Fox Air Conditioner

The air conditioner gag is built on a single sustained joke about German military engineering, and the props department committed to it. The unit is marked as the property of Erwin Rommel, the field marshal known as the Desert Fox, and its control panel offers Blitzkrieg among the settings. The lettering is a sort of invented German-English hybrid, which is historically nonsense but reads perfectly on camera. Peg’s eventual “Well, Desert Fox…” to her husband is the payoff, and the studio audience reaction to it was reportedly loud enough that Katey Sagal had to restart the line twice.

The mob scene is one of the show’s better set pieces. Torches and pitchforks outside a suburban Chicago home over an electricity bill is exactly the right level of escalation for this series, and Marcy’s contribution is a rewritten line from “If I Had a Hammer” about what she would do with it to Al Bundy’s skull. The season 6 episode “If Al Had a Hammer” takes its title from the same song.

Moving the family into a working supermarket gave the production an unusually large standing set, and the episode makes full use of it. The brand names on the shelves are all visible and all real, which is worth noting given that several of those companies had pulled their advertising from the show during the Terry Rakolta boycott two years earlier and had since come back.

Bobbie Brown plays Nibbles, a supermarket shopper on whom Al tries the dropped item routine, the same move Charlie Verducci had used in the episode before this one. Bud, meanwhile, strolls past his own parents with his arms around two girls, including Butter Lefkowitz, and yells at them to get a job. He also reveals that he is the only Bundy the Chicago Police Department has not fingerprinted.

Famous Quotes

• Peg, surveying the consequences of her husband’s appliance purchase as the neighbors try to get inside: “Well, Desert Fox…”
• Marcy, on finding the Bundys living in a grocery store: she calls them the “VanderBundys” and asks how they are enjoying the summer home.
• Marcy, rewriting a folk standard for the occasion: “If I had a hammer, I’d drive it through Al Bundy’s skull.”
• Bud, walking past his own parents in the supermarket with two girls on his arm: “Get a job, buddy!”

Notes

• The Bundy shopping cart is painted in the colors of Crater Face’s car from Grease, complete with the cheating spike on the wheel.
• The radio DJ is played by Kevin Ryder, half of KROQ’s Kevin and Bean morning show. His partner Gene “Bean” Baxter had played DJ Rick Cool four episodes earlier in “Oldies But Young ‘Uns.”
• Bruce Jarchow and John Asher would both later appear on the USA Network’s Weird Science series, Asher as Gary Wallace and Jarchow as Principal Scampi.
• Al reads a tabloid headline claiming that Steve Rhoades has married Cher.
• Al sings Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” in his plastic pool at the top of the episode.
• A goof that is hard to unsee: a thermometer visible on the house during the hundred degree heat wave scene reads about seventy, which was probably the actual temperature on the stage that day. Peg also shoots a hole in Al’s inflatable pool and it sprays water rather than air, in the wrong direction.