Married with Children: Hilarious Voice Acting Evolution of Buck, the Bundy Family Dog (Seasons 1-9)

Buck the dog ran with the Bundys for nine seasons, but most fans don’t realize three different voices brought him to life. I let this one slip on a recent Bundy Club watch party with Amanda Bearse, and it’s the kind of detail I sometimes forget is even unusual until somebody asks.

When Buck “talked” in those Married with Children episodes, you know, the inner monologue gags, the dream sequences, the bits where the camera cut to him giving us his face, it was almost never the dog. It was a guy in a booth.

Kevin Curran was the regular voice of Buck. Kevin wasn’t an actor. He was a writer on the show, and he had this dead, flat, completely uninterested delivery that fit Buck perfectly. The kind of voice that sounds like the dog is judging you. He wasn’t trained, he didn’t have an acting bone in his body, and that’s exactly why it worked. A trained actor would have tried to make Buck sound cute. Kevin made him sound like he was waiting for the writers to feed him. I loved him as Buck. That deadpan was the baseline from day one, every inner monologue from Season 1 forward.

If you watched the show for any length of time, you got used to Kevin’s Buck. The dry takes on Peg’s cooking. The eye roll when Al complained about Polk High. That was Kevin in the writers room mic, doing the bare minimum, and the bare minimum was perfect.

Then there were the big Buck episodes. The ones where Buck got his own storyline, his own crisis, his own romance. The showcase episodes whose titles told you up front this was a dog episode. Buck Can Do It (Season 2, Episode 4). Buck Saves The Day (Season 4, Episode 3). Buck The Stud (Season 5, Episode 25). Buck Has A Belly Ache (Season 6, Episode 6). Change For A Buck (Season 8, Episode 11). When the writers built one of those, the show wanted something bigger, weirder, more theatrical. So they brought in Cheech Marin.

Cheech, of Cheech and Chong, of every great laid-back stoner voice in comedy history. Featured Buck got the Cheech treatment. I throw that out almost like it’s nothing now, but think about that for a second. The voice of a dog on a Fox sitcom was Cheech Marin. The same Cheech who could deliver a line like he was about to fall asleep on it and somehow make it the funniest thing in the room. I worked with Cheech years later on Nash Bridges when he was doing that show with Don Johnson. Great dude every time.

And for the love interest stuff, the dog romance plots like Buck The Stud, the show pulled in Catherine O’Hara. Catherine O’Hara is a genius. Best in Show, Schitt’s Creek, Beetlejuice, Home Alone, on and on. She voiced Buck’s girlfriend. A throwaway joke in a 90s sitcom dog romance subplot was performed by one of the best comedic actors of our generation. We got Catherine O’Hara as a dog. Imagine that casting meeting.

The dog himself, by the way, was Michael, a Briard. Briards are these big shaggy French herding dogs, and Michael was the one who actually showed up on set, hit his marks, and stared at the writers room camera while three different voices got dubbed in later. Michael passed in 1990 and other dogs took over the role through Buck’s final seasons. By Season 10, Buck “died” in the show and got reincarnated as Lucky in Al Goes To The Dogs (Season 10, Episode 21), but that’s a whole other story.

The thing I love about telling this is how it almost never came up officially. Cheech voicing Buck. Catherine O’Hara as Buck’s girlfriend. Stuff you don’t think to mention until somebody asks. There’s a hundred more like this that never made the DVD extras or the trade press. We’re trying to get to all of them here at Bundy Club.

Watch the clip above for me telling the story. And if you want more like this, the watch parties happen every couple of weeks. Members actually sit on the couch with me and the gang and ask the questions the trades never got around to asking.

Not a Bundy Club member yet? Get in here. The free tier gives you a peek at the community, and the paid tiers put you on the couch with us for the watch parties where stories like this one come out. Join up at bundyclub.com/join and stop watching from the outside.