Season 6 Episode 16: Rites of Passage

Bud turns eighteen, and nobody in the house appears to have noticed that this means anything. The party being arranged for him involves a pony and a clown. The clown, named Sticky, is a former children’s television personality who is now available for private bookings and who carries a knife and has an unsettling relationship with a stuffed animal, and the episode gets a surprising amount of mileage out of leaving exactly what Sticky has done in his past unstated. Bud, reasonably, would like to be treated as an adult, and Al agrees, because there is a Bundy tradition for this and Al intends to honor it. Every male Bundy, on his eighteenth birthday, is taken to a strip club. So the two of them go, and the house rules posted on the wall of the establishment tell you most of what you need to know about the clientele: shoes required, no head bands, no phones, no belt knives, no cameras, no fighting, and no dwarf tossing. The no fighting rule does not survive the evening. What Bud actually gets for his eighteenth birthday is his first bar fight, and he gets it comprehensively, against a man named Gorgo who generously allows Bud a free shot at his face. Father and son come home after dark, visibly wrecked and extremely pleased with themselves, and Al’s advice on how to handle Peg in the morning is the best line in the episode.It is one of the warmest episodes of the season in its own battered way. The series rarely let Al and Bud simply enjoy each other’s company, and the closing scene, two beaten-up men congratulating each other in a dark living room, counts as genuine affection by the standards of this household.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: February 9, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 16
• Overall episode number: 121
• Written by: Ilunga Adell
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: January 17, 1992
• Production note: David Faustino turned eighteen himself three weeks after this episode first aired.
• Production note: The bar fight required eleven credited stunt performers, including Kevin Curran taking his usual turn as the voice of Buck.
• Title note: A rite of passage being the ceremony that marks the move from adolescence into adulthood, which in this family means the Nudie Bar.

Guest Cast

• Roger Hewlett as Sticky the Clown
• Gina Puzo as Roxanne
• Frank Lloyd as Gorgo
• Carl Ciarfalio as the man
• Kevin Curran as the voice of Buck
• Dick Warlock, “Judo” Gene LeBell, Greg Elam, David Graves, Denny Pierce, Dane Farwell, Dan Barringer, George Fisher, Randy Fife and Tracy Murray as stunt performers

The Bundy Rite of Passage

The posted house rules are the single best prop in the episode, and the show is smart enough to let the camera sit on them long enough to read. The one that gets the laugh is the last one, because it implies that at some point there was an incident.

The fight scene is unusually well populated for a sitcom. Frank Lloyd, the show’s resident stuntman and a recurring presence as Al’s friend Norris in earlier seasons, plays Gorgo, the long-haired patron who invites Bud to hit him and then takes a chair across the back instead. The man Bud headlocks afterward is Dick Warlock, who played Michael Myers in Halloween II and spent years as Kurt Russell’s stunt double. “Judo” Gene LeBell, a genuine martial arts legend who turned up on this show repeatedly, is the drunk redhead wandering through with a beer bottle.

Sticky the Clown is the episode’s strangest invention and the show never explains him, which is the correct choice. On the original broadcast the end credits ran over footage of Sticky holding a teddy bear and gesturing with the knife. Every print since, on DVD and in syndication, replaces that with a still frame.

Al’s shoe store story this week is a genuine program: the Department of Juvenile Corrections has started busing delinquents in to watch him work for three hours as a deterrent, and it is called Scared Rich. It is a parody of the Scared Straight programs of the late seventies, and the show liked the construction enough to use “Scared Single” as an episode title in season 8.

Famous Quotes

• Al, on the new rehabilitation initiative at Gary’s Shoes: “The guards made them watch me work for over 3 hours until even the most hardened punk was crying like a baby. It’s a new program called ‘Scared Rich’. If only they had a ‘Scared Single’ when I was a punk.”
• Al, to his son in the dark after the fight: “18 years old and your first bar fight like every other male Bundy before ‘ya! I’m proud of you son! How do you feel?” Bud, after spitting out a tooth: “I feel great, Dad!”
• Al, on the cover story: “You’re a man now. You stare her straight in the eye and tell her we were stuck in traffic.”

Notes

• Bud reveals that Al’s entire paycheck comes to six dollars, following up on the pesos joke from season 5’s “Weenie Tot Lovers & Other Strangers.”
• Bud’s birthday is established as January 22nd, which makes the complete absence of snow or winter clothing in a Chicago-set episode a notable oversight.
• Among the gifts Kelly has given Bud in the past was a Village People poster with his own face pasted onto it.
• A goof: the front door is clearly still swinging open while Al tells the Scared Rich story, yet the Darcys have to open it to come in a moment later.