Season 10 Episode 20: Turning Japanese

Marcy is up for a promotion, and securing it requires one dinner at the D’Arcy house with her boss, Mr. Shimokawa. Her preparation is thorough to the point of absurdity: she asks Al to leave the neighbourhood entirely so that her boss will not be repulsed by him or his children, and when Al declines to do it for free she pays him in a night at a Howard Bowman’s Motor Lodge. She also hires an actor to play Al, a more presentable Al, who sells Acuras, which works until Mr. Shimokawa hears the real Dodge start up outside and decides he wants it.

The car is the one thing Al will not trade. Marcy has money, a career on the line and a guest to impress, and none of it moves him, which produces the episode’s firmest line: the Dodge was born a Bundy and it will die a Bundy. The negotiation therefore relocates to the Jiggly Room, where Marcy turns out to be entirely comfortable, explaining to Bud that feminism concerns a woman’s rights in the workplace and that where that workplace happens to be is none of her business. Her tolerance has limits, and a stripper approaching Jefferson finds them immediately.

Pat Morita plays Shimokawa, and the half-hour’s best running gag is Jefferson’s karaoke. He works through “Fame,” “I’m So Excited” and then Culture Club, and the Culture Club number provokes a response from Shimokawa that the episode stages as an attempted stabbing, the single biggest laugh in the half-hour, built entirely on Ted McGinley’s commitment to a performance nobody asked for. Morita and McGinley had both been on Happy Days, in different eras.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, March 17, 1996 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 20
• Overall episode 232 of the series
• Production code 10.21
• Written by Fran E. Kaufer
• Directed by Sam W. Orender
• The title refers to the 1980 single by The Vapors

Guest Cast

• Pat Morita as Mr. Shimokawa
• Darrell Kunitomi as Japanese Al
• Angela Spangler as Bambi
• Todd Parker as Officer Stan

The Dodge Is Not for Sale

The Dodge had been a running joke for a decade, unreliable, hideous, a constant source of humiliation, and this is the episode that establishes it is also non-negotiable. Al will accept a bribe to vacate his own neighbourhood and will happily let a stranger impersonate him at a dinner party, but the car is where the line sits. The show does not explain why, and it is better for not explaining; the Dodge is simply the last thing he owns outright.

Marcy’s conduct at the Jiggly Room is one of the sharper character notes in the late run. The series had spent nine seasons positioning her as the household’s feminist antagonist, and here it lets her be entirely at ease in a strip club, with a rationale she delivers without a flicker of self-consciousness. Then a dancer touches her husband and the rationale evaporates. It is a joke at her expense that also happens to make her more human.

Pat Morita was eleven years past The Karate Kid and well into a long run of television guest work, and he plays Shimokawa as a man of precise tastes being slowly destroyed by an evening of amateur karaoke. The casting has a footnote: Morita had played Arnold on Happy Days across two separate stints, and Ted McGinley joined that show in its eighth season as Roger Phillips, which makes this a reunion of sorts between two actors who never overlapped.

Famous Quotes

• Marcy: “I need you to leave the neighborhood. You see, I don’t want my boss to be repulsed by you or your children, no offence.” / Al: “None taken.” / Marcy: “So you’ll do it?!” / Al: “I meant none taken… yet.”
• Al: “One night, all expenses paid, in a Howard Bowman’s Motor Lodge.” / Bud: “Oh, HoBo’s!” / Kelly: “Where every bed is shaped like a boxcar. Or, uh… so I hear from my slutty friends who may go there all the time. Not me.”
• Jefferson (singing): “Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?” / Mr. Shimokawa: “More than life itself!” Reaching across the table for the knife.
• Bud: “Mrs. D’Arcy, I thought that as a feminist you wouldn’t like places like this.” / Marcy: “Feminism is about protecting a woman’s right in the workplace. Now, where that workplace happens to be is none of my concern.”
• Bambi: “A lap dance?” / Marcy: “Split, bitch!” The limits of that position, located in about four seconds.
• Al: “It was born a Bundy, by God, it will die a Bundy!” Showing Marcy the door.

Notes

• Bud mentions he is close to graduating; he does so three episodes later, in “Bud Hits the Books.”
• Jefferson’s karaoke set runs through “Fame” by Irene Cara, “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters, Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.”
• The cold open has the family watching Family Matters and discussing Urkel’s wardrobe.
• Pat Morita and Ted McGinley were both Happy Days cast members, Morita as Arnold, McGinley as Roger Phillips from season eight, though in non-overlapping stretches.
• Goof: Shimokawa later refers to Al as a shoe salesman, which nobody on screen ever tells him; Marcy’s hired stand-in claimed to sell Acuras.
• Goof: as Al delivers the “born a Bundy” line at the front door, a red light, apparently an exit or recording sign, reflects off the glass.