Season 7 Episode 21: Movie Show

Kelly’s birthday has been forgotten again, and Al’s plan for discharging the family’s obligation involves arranging things so that nobody has to do anything at all. It backfires: Kelly cancels a date with her boyfriend in order to spend the evening at the movies with her family, which is the one outcome Al had not budgeted for. So all five of them go. The bulk of the episode takes place in a multiplex and a single auditorium, and it is one of the show’s best uses of a confined setting. The concession stand sequence is a small riot, with Peg and the children forcing their way to the front and then ordering comprehensively. Once the lights go down, the episode’s best device kicks in: each Bundy gets an interior monologue over the same shot of a screen, and the four of them are having four completely unrelated experiences. Bud is calculating how to be seen as a cool guy. Al is counting the minutes and considering violence. Peg has mistaken Al’s boredom for emotion and is making plans. Kelly is thinking about her hair. Al and the other men eventually sneak out to a different screening, and Al’s review of what he found there is one of his better speeches. This is also the first credited screen role of David Boreanaz, six years before Angel. It is one of the most purely enjoyable episodes of the back half of season 7, partly because almost nothing is at stake and partly because the whole family is in the same room for twenty minutes with nowhere to go.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 11, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 21
• Overall episode number: 152
• Written by: Ellen L. Fogle
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: March 19, 1993
• Production note: David Boreanaz’s first credited screen role, six years before Angel. He and David Faustino finally shared a scene in 2017, on an episode of Bones in which Faustino played a version of himself.
• Title note: Named for the family’s trip to the cinema.

Guest Cast

• David Boreanaz as Frank
• Kimberly Brooks as the salesgirl
• Craig Benton as the usher
• Nicholas R. Oleson as Lon (credited as Nick Oleson)
• Elena Statheros as Liz
• Anahit Minasyan as Lil
• Phil Dominguez as Lex
• Frank Lloyd as the man in the blue shirt (uncredited)

Four Bundys, One Film

The interior monologue sequence is the best idea in the episode and the show plays it exactly right, cutting between four faces watching the same screen with four unrelated trains of thought running underneath. Peg’s is the one that does the heavy lifting, because she has correctly identified a tear in her husband’s eye and drawn entirely the wrong conclusion from it, and her silent thanks to a women’s magazine is the punchline. Kelly’s contribution is five words about her hair.

The closing credits on the original broadcast carried a scene that has since been replaced. The Bundys sat in the empty theatre reading the crew names aloud as they rolled, offering a comment on each, and finished by booing the Columbia Pictures Television logo. The DVD and all later prints substitute a still frame with “Love and Marriage” over it, and the logo is now Sony’s.

Every film poster visible in the lobby is a Columbia release of that year, including Groundhog Day, El Mariachi and Last Action Hero, which is unsurprising given who produced this series.

Frank Lloyd, the show’s resident stuntman, appears uncredited two rows behind Al and later steps on Bud’s hand. Watch the auditorium during the scene where Bud is sat on by a large man: the stunt double is visible crawling along behind the row.

Famous Quotes

• Al, reviewing the film he snuck out to see: “That was a beautiful, lovely movie. I saw 22 hooters, bunch of guys were killed, had no story at all. It had everything.”
• Kelly: “Daddy, what makes men cheat on women?” Al: “Women!”
• Al, continuing: “We’re loners, rogues, great white hunters, roaming wild and free, like our ancestors, the mighty monkey… Women don’t respect men unless they cheat. That’s why your mother doesn’t respect me.”
• Bud, in voiceover: “Babes can’t resist a guy who sits alone at the movies. Maybe I’ll wear a raincoat…”
• Peg, in voiceover: “I see a tear in his eye. I think I actually may get some tonight. Thank you, Cosmo, you really do know men.” Kelly, in voiceover: “I like the way my hair tastes tonight.”

Notes

• Peg notes that they have forgotten Kelly’s birthday again, which the series had already established in season 3’s “Life’s a Beach” and earlier this season in “Every Bundy Has a Birthday.”
• Peg and the children clear the concession queue with the same line they used at Heathrow in “England Show (Part 3).”
• Two episodes earlier Bud had complained that his parents were too cheap to buy the children cinema tickets, which makes this outing a continuity oddity.
• Goofs: the concession worker assembles items nobody has ordered, and Al announces that every screening is sold out except one, then wanders into a different and largely empty auditorium.