Season 6 Episode 18: My Dinner with Anthrax

Bud and Kelly have won a radio contest, and the prize is that the thrash metal band Anthrax will come to their house. The only obstacle is their parents, so the kids arrange for Al and Peg to be sent out of town, which happens to coincide with the Bundys’ twentieth wedding anniversary. Peg has already told Al what she wants for it, and it is not an object. She wants to be made love to, properly, with holding and caressing and romance, and she is explicit that she is not interested in the thirty-second crash-and-burn, the twenty-second bump-and-snore, or the New Year’s Eve countdown that ends in better luck next year. Al takes this news extremely badly and seeks counsel from Jefferson, who talks him through the mechanics with the patience of a man explaining a difficult tax form, and whose estimate of how long the whole business takes sends Al into open grief. The trip itself turns out to be a timeshare presentation rather than a vacation, run by a salesman named Stan and featuring Edd Byrnes, living on the property for free and willing to say so. Back in Chicago the band arrives, finds the refrigerator, and locates Peg’s Mystery Pack, a sealed item of unidentified food that the show had established two seasons earlier and that nobody in the family has ever been willing to open. They eat it. They begin hallucinating. The living room does not survive.It is one of the busiest episodes of the season, with a guest band, two recognizable character actors and a genuine anniversary story all competing for the same twenty-two minutes, and it holds together better than it has any right to.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: February 23, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 18
• Overall episode number: 123
• Written by: Larry Jacobson
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: February 14, 1992
• Production note: Anthrax appear as themselves in the Joey Belladonna lineup, which broke up shortly after this aired and reunited in 2005.
• Production note: The premise came from a real 1989 MTV Headbangers Ball contest in which a winner had Anthrax turn up and wreck her house, along with the car she was being given.
• Title note: A play on the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre, and also the name of the in-story contest.

Guest Cast

• Anthrax as themselves
• Fred Willard as Stan
• Edd Byrnes as himself
• Roger Rose as the VJ
• Edd Hall as the radio DJ (credited as Ed Hall)

The Mystery Pack

Peg’s Mystery Pack is one of the great running jokes of the series’ middle seasons. It first got a mention in season 4’s “A Taxing Problem,” and the entire premise is that nobody in the Bundy family is brave enough to find out what is in it. Handing it to a touring metal band is the only reasonable way to resolve that, and the hallucination sequence that follows is scored to Anthrax’s own “In My World.”

Anthrax were already fans of the show before they appeared on it, which is why the casting works: they are clearly enjoying themselves rather than being sheepish about a sitcom gig. Watch the performance scene closely and the playback becomes obvious, since the band stops to smash things and kick over the drum kit while the track continues uninterrupted.

Fred Willard, playing the timeshare salesman Stan, is perfectly used. He went on to Modern Family with Ed O’Neill and to Anchorman with Christina Applegate, among about two hundred other things.

Edd Byrnes appears as himself, which pays off the “Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)” references twice, once on a record and once in an a cappella version he performs with Anthrax at the end. Byrnes had been a teen idol on 77 Sunset Strip thirty years earlier, and the gag is that he is now a man living rent-free in a Florida timeshare because somebody offered.

Famous Quotes

• Peg, specifying what she wants for the anniversary: “I want some romance in my life, Al. And I’m not talking about the old 30-second crash-and-burn. Or the old 20-second bump-and-snore.”
• Al, negotiating: “Peg, wait a second. I’ve been secretly hiding a hundred bucks. What say I just give it to you and we call it even.”
• Jefferson, coaching Al through it: “First you put on some music, and then you turn the lights down low.” Al: “Low?! But I can still see her!”
• Jefferson, continuing: “Then you lower her gently onto the bed and eight hours later, it’s over.” Al: “EIGHT HOURS! Oh God, the humanity! Hold me, Jefferson!”

Notes

• Peg establishes this as their twentieth anniversary, and mentions that Al once gave her motor oil, which she says was for their fifteenth. Season 1 had it as their sixteenth.
• Al’s anniversary gift this year is a postcard of China.
• Al’s “Bad to the Bone” theme plays as he prepares himself for the occasion in Florida with the aid of a magazine.
• This is the Bundys’ second trip to Florida. The first was season 2’s “Poppy’s by the Tree,” and the third would be season 10’s “Spring Break.”
• A goof for guitar people: the instrument left sticking through the Bundy living room wall is a Fender Stratocaster, which is not what either Scott Ian or Dan Spitz was playing in the scene.