Season 8 Episode 18: Get Outta Dodge

Peg has finally worn Al down on the subject of the Dodge, and he agrees to sell it, which produces the best sequence in the episode: a parade of prospective buyers at the Bundy front door, each one worse than the last. A pair of winos arrive first with forty dollars, having decided they should not drink and drive. The advertisement, it turns out, was supposed to read four thousand. After them comes a succession of visitors whose interest in the vehicle says more about the car than any description could, and somewhere in the middle of them Kelly turns up at her own front door, looking for a man named Waldo in a book, and fails to recognize the house. Then the Dodge Corporation gets involved. A representative named Bill Ellis has noticed that the car is about to roll over one million miles, and offers Al a brand new Viper in exchange for the right to film the moment. So Al has to drive the remaining distance on camera, which takes him out into the desert and through a town the script calls Burnt Scrotum, New Mexico. Whether the odometer cooperates is the question the episode turns on, and the answer involves the length of the Bundy driveway. It is one of the better Dodge episodes and the one that finally forces Al to put a price on the car, which turns out to be the hardest thing anyone asks him to do all season. The parade of buyers at the door is the funniest sustained sequence in it, and the Dodge Corporation subplot gives the episode somewhere to go once that runs out.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: February 20, 1994
• Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 18
• Overall episode number: 175
• Written by: Mark Driscoll
• Directed by: Sam W. Orender
• Production note: On the original broadcast the credits continued Al’s drive through the desert. Later prints replace it with a still.
• Title note: From “get the hell out of Dodge,” doing double duty for a man getting out of his Dodge.

Guest Cast

• Todd Susman as Bill Ellis
• Stefanie Ridel as Lisa Pruner
• Michael Hagiwara as the businessman
• Bert L. Cook as the criminal
• William Bookston and Maray Ayres as the winos
• David Graubard as the mobster
• Richard Assad as the first visitor
• Cindy Margolis as the bikini model (uncredited)

One Million Miles

The door sequence is a well-built escalation and the winos get the best of it, because their logic is actually sound. They do not want to drink and drive, so they have come to buy a car, and they are offended rather than embarrassed when the price turns out to be a hundred times what they brought.

Kelly’s appearance in the queue of buyers is the episode’s sharpest joke. She arrives at her own front door holding a Where’s Waldo book, announces who she is looking for, looks up, recognizes her father, and remarks that the house had looked familiar.

Bud reveals that the car is technically a “Dodge-enstein,” assembled from parts of several different Dodges over the years, which is as close as the series ever came to acknowledging that the prop was not a consistent vehicle. Al also mentions that he missed Bud’s birth because he had taken the Dodge to the pool hall, which fits a pattern the show had been building for several seasons.

Stefanie Ridel, playing Bud’s date, was a member of the group Wild Orchid at the time and was dating David Faustino. One of her bandmates turns up on the show a few episodes later under her own stage name.

The driveway gag at the end is the sort of arithmetic the series never worried about: the odometer reads all zeroes, qualifying Al for the new car, and then adds nine tenths of a mile in the length of one driveway.

Famous Quotes

• Peg, making her case: “What is wrong with getting a slightly newer car? I hear they’re coming with all these fancy options these days. You know, like dashboards and paint…”
• Al: “Just more things to go wrong. Listen to me, Peg: you can nag, you can cry, you can whinny, bleat and moo, but I will never sell the Dodge.”
• The first buyer at the door: “Hi. Uh, we’re a couple of winos, but we don’t want to drink and drive… So we wanna buy a Dodge. Here’s your 40 bucks.” Al: “It was supposed to say 4,000.” The wino, offended: “Hey! We’re not THAT drunk!”
• Kelly, at her own front door: “Hi, I’m looking for a guy named… Daddy! Oh boy, I thought this house looked familiar.”
• Al, after the last of them: “You know what the problem is, don’t you?” Peg: “Sure, the blind don’t drive.” Al: “Too bad the mute don’t marry.”

Notes

• Cindy Margolis, posing beside the Viper, had appeared in season 7’s “The Chicago Wine Party” as one of the Beer Girls.
• Bert L. Cook, from the show’s own production staff, plays the criminal Officer Dan drags in and then releases.
• A scene in the original FOX promo, in which Al admires the model beside the Viper and then claims to like the car too, was cut from the broadcast version.
• Goofs: a microphone is visible above Al’s head during the Viper presentation, and the garage alarm clock jumps from 6:00 to 6:01 within a second or two of being switched off.