Season 6 Episode 23: The Gas Station Show

Al watches Shenandoah, is moved by the sight of Jimmy Stewart holding a family together, and institutes Bundy Sunday Funday, a program of compulsory family togetherness that the rest of the household receives without enthusiasm. The outing does not get far. The Dodge runs out of gas and has to be pushed into a filling station, where Al asks the attendant for two dollars’ worth of fuel and the family wanders into the convenience store and helps itself to twelve dollars of snacks that nobody pays for. With no money in the car and none at home, the station’s solution is that Al works the debt off. He is handed a set of coveralls with somebody else’s name stitched on them, and for the rest of the episode Al Bundy is Habib, pumping gas in the full service lane while his family goes off to find twelve dollars and conspicuously fails. What makes the episode is who comes through that station. The Swedish Bikini Team pull in, collect Bud and drive away with him. A busload of women from a Chicago bowling team arrives next. Peg sends Al a red gas can to fill without paying for it. Jim and Betty, a wholesome family in a nice car, serve as a running comparison the Bundys cannot survive. By the end Al has decided that next week’s Bundy Sunday Funday will involve rifles, and Kelly is delighted. It is the kind of episode the series could run on almost nothing, a single set and a parade of visitors, and the sixth season was particularly good at those. It also gave the show Habib, a name it would keep returning to for years.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 26, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 23
• Overall episode number: 128
• Written by: Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: March 20, 1992
• Production note: The name Habib on Al’s borrowed coveralls became a running gag for the rest of the series, most prominently in season 7’s “‘Tis Time to Smell the Roses.”
• Title note: Named for the gas station Al spends the episode working at.

Guest Cast

• Phil Buckman as Joe
• Colby Chester as Jim
• Leah Ayres as Betty
• Jeffrey Roth as Jim, Jr.
• Marisa Theodore as Betty, Jr.
• Peggy Trentini as Ulla
• Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst as Hilgar
• Anna Keller as Karin
• Jane Frances as Eva
• Andrea Leithe as Stacey
• Sherlock Ganz as Olga

Bundy Sunday Funday

The structure is one long escalating humiliation set in a single location, and it works because the station is a stage that anyone can walk onto. The Swedish Bikini Team were a beer advertising creation at the height of their notoriety in 1992, and the show simply drives them into the shot, lets them collect Bud, and drives them out again. Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst, who plays Hilgar, had already been in two other episodes, as Flopsie in “Weenie Tot Lovers & Other Strangers” and as Almond in “Route 666.”

Full service was already a dying thing by 1992, which gives the setting a certain period weight. Checking wipers, tire pressure and under the hood for a customer survives in only a couple of states, and watching Al do it in a stranger’s coveralls is funnier for being slightly archaic even then.

The arithmetic does not support the premise, and the episode does not care. Illinois minimum wage in 1992 was $4.25 an hour, which means twelve dollars of debt is under three hours of work. Al appears to be there all day.

Peg’s report on her own unproductive seven hours includes a phone call from her mother, who has weighed herself and found that she has gained six pounds since high school. Al’s responses to this news are two of his better lines, and Peg’s observation that it is fortunate the woman cannot hear him sets up the punchline perfectly.

Famous Quotes

• Al, on his wife’s efforts: “Peg, you’ve been gone seven hours. Don’t tell me you couldn’t raise $12 in seven hours!” Peg: “Al, you have a job and you can’t raise $12 in seven hours!”
• Al, on his mother-in-law’s weight concerns: “Don’t worry, Peg. She probably had six pounds of food stuck between her teeth.”
• Peg: “When I think of how that woman loves you. Thank God she can’t hear you.” Al: “Thank God she can’t EAT me!”
• Al, announcing next week’s program: “We’re gonna take a nice drive up to the woods and we’re going huntin’. See, I’ll be the only one carrying the rifle and you kids can run out there and flush out the game. We’ll call it ‘Bundy Sunday Gunday’.” Kelly: “Oh boy!”

Notes

• Al reveals the family is banned from the zoo after Bud gave Pop Rocks to a panda.
• The sign above the station’s store reads “1438 – R.M. Habib – Dealer / Owner,” which is where the coveralls come from.
• The Illinois plate on Al’s Dodge reads 2 RPH 72.
• Kelly’s malapropism of the week turns “financial faux pas” into “financial fox paws.”
• Al sings “99 Bottles of Beer” while the family pushes the car into the station.
• Phil Buckman, the attendant, later played bass in Filter and has spent years as the voice of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s advertising. Leah Ayres, as Betty, is best known from Bloodsport.
• Goofs: the station’s own sign prices regular at $1.13, so two dollars should buy nearly two gallons rather than a flick of the nozzle, and the Dodge’s hood is removed and then left behind entirely when the family drives off.