Season 5 Episode 19: Kids! Wadaya Gonna Do?

“Kids! Wadaya Gonna Do?” splits the household in three and gets a full episode out of each piece. Al and Peg have been invited across the street to watch a rented movie at the Darcys’ place, an arrangement that lasts about as long as it takes them to walk through the door. Within minutes they have colonized the living room, criticized the selection of films, started drinking the beer, and begun singing over the soundtrack. Marcy spends the evening watching her own house be taken from her by two people who were not even supposed to be comfortable. Meanwhile both Bundy children have decided to earn money, with very different results. Bud needs cash to impress a girl named Crystal and get her to a concert, and the deal he strikes with her turns out to be the best night of his young life. Kelly takes a babysitting job and walks into a house containing seven children named after the months of the year, who proceed to dismantle her over the course of an evening. She reads to them. She negotiates with them. She tries telling a fairy tale and cannot remember the ending, so she improvises one out of Stooges and dwarves. None of it helps. The episode originally went out as a one hour special paired with the backdoor pilot for “Top of the Heap,” which made it something of an event, and it is also the installment fans still argue about, because depending on how you read Bud’s evening with Crystal, this may be where he finally stopped being a virgin.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 7, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 19
• Overall episode number: 99
• Written by: Ellen L. Fogle
• Directed by: Linda Day
• Taped: March 22, 1991
• Production note: Originally broadcast as a one hour special alongside the backdoor pilot episode “Top of the Heap.”
• Title note: The title mashes the old sigh of “kids, what are you going to do?” together with Hulk Hogan’s wrestling catchphrase.

Guest Cast

• Helena Apothaker as Crystal
• Edith Varon as Agatha
• Irina Cashen as June Hubbard
• Joey Simmrin as March Hubbard
• Matt Leavitt as January Hubbard
• Kristen Semon as December Hubbard
• Cheri Semon as July Hubbard
• Samantha Leavitt as April Hubbard
• Heather Lynne Cranny as May Hubbard

The Hubbard Children

The Hubbard family is a good joke on its own, seven kids named January through December, and the casting is a nice piece of production history. January and April are played by Matt and Samantha Leavitt, the son and daughter of series co-creator and executive producer Ron Leavitt. July and December are played by Cheri and Kristen Semon, the children of the show’s property master Michael Semon. All four turned up again in different roles in the season 7 episode “Christmas.”

Kelly’s shift as a babysitter is written as a slow siege. She starts with a book called Goody Goose and some confidence, and ends overwhelmed. The episode also quietly fills in her history: she reveals she was already earning money at five by charging boys for kisses until Peg put a stop to it, and Bud discloses that he has a lifelong problem with running water because of the time Kelly babysat him and threatened to flush his head down the toilet.

Across the street, the movie night is the purest demonstration of the Bundy and Darcy dynamic the season produced. Al cannot be left alone in a room with someone else’s television. The group ends up singing “The Way We Were” over the film, which is precisely the sort of thing Marcy rents movies to avoid.

Bud’s half of the episode is the one with consequences. His arrangement with Crystal is a straight trade, summarized by her in a line about how the closer she gets to Ice, the closer he gets to the heat, and the morning after leaves him unmistakably pleased with himself. Whether that counts as the moment, or whether the honor belongs to Janie in season 7’s “Wedding Show,” is a debate that has never been settled.

Famous Quotes

• Bud, looking for common ground with the dog: “You know, you and I are a lot alike, boy.” Buck: “No. I’ve had sex. And at least I have the decency to die at thirteen.”
• Marcy, letting herself into the Bundy house through a door Al and Peg left wide open: “You know, in this day and age, I don’t know why you leave your door open! A maniac could just walk in and kill you!”
• Peg, assessing her husband’s romantic range: “You haven’t even learned to capture breasts on this planet yet.”

Notes

• Helena Apothaker, who plays Crystal here, had appeared in the previous episode as Butter Lefkowitz, and would return to the Butter role later in “You Better Shop Around.”
• Bud claims to have personally taught both Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer how to dance. It is the second Hammer reference of the season, after “All Night Security Dude.”
• Kelly mentions she is already failing Smiling 101 and has a headache, which pays off later in “Kelly Bounces Back” when her rival Piper Bauman brings up her tension headaches in smiling class.
• Kelly works as a waitress at Bill’s Hill Top Drive-In here. She would take another waitressing job in season 7’s “Kelly Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and last longer at it.
• Al reaches for King Solomon when trying to settle a dispute, which is not a comparison that flatters anyone involved.
• All of the films Marcy rented are from the 1980s, including Beaches.
• A continuity oddity: Al struggles to carry a VCR that is visibly not plugged into anything, and the beer bottles on the Darcys’ coffee table fall over and right themselves between shots.