Season 6 Episode 19: Psychic Avengers

The heating bill has gone up, which means the Bundys can no longer afford a weekly TV Guide, which for Al Bundy is not an inconvenience but a crisis of faith. The family packs suitcases and prepares to leave the house before he gets home, because they remember what happened during the Great Toilet Paper Scare of ’86. When Al does find out, his reaction is as advertised. Relief arrives in the form of Jefferson, who turns out to have a side business selling lucky numbers through newspaper advertisements under the name Madame Zelda, and who is entirely unapologetic about it. Al’s response is to demand a cut, and from there the operation scales up fast: a room full of phone operators, Al in a white suit with a cane and a southern drawl, and a revenue stream consisting largely of elderly people’s pension money. The trouble is that Chicago already has an established psychic industry, organized into five families, and the west side belongs to Madame Inga. Al, having decided he wants the west side and every other side, crosses her. Madame Inga turns out to be the real thing. The curse she puts on the Bundys turns the entire family into monkeys, and in a neat inversion, turns Buck into a human being, who promptly gets himself into legal trouble that requires bail money. It is the most purely surreal episode of season 6, and the closing credits run over Al and Peg as monkeys, sharing a kiss.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: March 1, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 19
• Overall episode number: 124
• Written by: Calvin Brown, Jr.
• Directed by: Amanda Bearse
• Taped: February 7, 1992
• Production note: Marcy does not appear, even though Amanda Bearse directed it.
• Production note: Kevin Curran, the show’s producer and the regular voice of Buck, plays the human version of Buck on screen late in the episode.
• Title note: Most likely a nod to Marvel’s Avengers.

Guest Cast

• Candice Azzara as Madame Inga
• Travis Venable as Big Bob
• Steven Trevor as Zelmo
• Andy Flaster as Thursday Markowitz
• Z.Z. Clark as Hakbar
• Larry Udy as Psychic #1
• Barbara Perry as the old lady
• Kevin Curran as human Buck and the voice of Buck

The Five Psychic Families

The five psychic families are a direct lift from The Godfather, right down to the sit-down and the line about being bigger than U.S. Steel, which comes from Part II. Bud is thrilled by the scale of the operation and Jefferson is the cautious one, which maps onto the Havana sequence in the same film rather neatly for a sitcom about a shoe salesman.

Al’s white-suit phase is one of the show’s recurring pleasures. Every so often the series would put him in expensive clothes and let him talk like a man with holdings, and the gap between the costume and the man is the whole joke. His arrival at the phone bank, demanding lit lines and fleeced people, ends with a full Whoa Bundy from the family on the subject of stealing old ladies’ pensions.

The monkey ending is the sort of thing the series could do because nobody was going to stop it. There is no attempt to explain the curse and no attempt to undo it on screen. The implication, given that the Bundys are human again the following week, is that Buck showed up for his court date and the bail money came back.

An earlier draft of the script went somewhere even stranger. In that version Buck loses half the money meant for Madame Inga, which breaks half the curse, and the family comes back human but transformed into the Monkees: Al as Micky Dolenz, Peg as Mike Nesmith, Kelly as Peter Tork and Bud as Davy Jones.

Famous Quotes

• Al, arriving at his own phone bank in a white suit: “Wanna see lines lit! Wanna see people fleeced! C’mon my little fortune cookies! Daddy needs a new pair of ev’ythang!”
• Al, on territory: “Damn Madam Inga and her army of psychic Swedes. I want the west side, I’ll have the west side. I’ll have all sides: inside, outside, east side, west side.”
• Jefferson, when Al asks how he can do this to unsuspecting people: “I’m a thief. Love me for what I am.” Al: “I’m a squealer. Love me for what I am… or cut me in.”
• Peg, taking the threat seriously: “Al, I’m scared! You are meddling with powers, which, much like a woman’s body, you don’t understand!”
• Bud, to Kelly, on curses: “Let’s see how you feel when you’ve been turned into a thick thighed waitress… And that’s just the curse of time!”

Notes

• Peg’s account of the Great Toilet Paper Scare of ’86 involves the market running out of Aurora White, her attempt to disguise the house brand in the old wrapping, and the last bridge party she ever hosted.
• The office wall carries a sign reading “Madame Zelda’s Motto: It Pays To Know the Future.”
• Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose” plays when Kelly introduces Al to the five family heads, better known to most people as the Blues Brothers entrance music.
• On the original broadcast the end credits ran over live footage of the monkey Al and Peg moving around the couch and eventually kissing. The DVD and syndication prints replace it with a still.
• A goof: Al is excited to see Starsky & Hutch on the cover of a TV Guide he says is from 1972, three years before that show premiered.