Season 9 Episode 18: Ship Happens (1)

Peg has entered a magazine contest and won a cruise, which Al refuses to believe is possible right up until Wolfman Jack knocks on the front door. The prize is one first-class ticket, so Peg pays Wolfman Jack fifty dollars to exchange it for two economy ones, and the Bundys and the Darcys go to sea on a ship the lifeboats identify as the Sea Dodge. The cruise has a format nobody explained in advance: it caters to one clientele during the day and a very different one at night, which means Al spends his days avoiding the passengers and his evenings being prevented by his wife from enjoying them. Peg also acquires a disastrous haircut on board. Back in Chicago, Wolfman Jack has stayed behind at the Bundy house with Bud and Kelly, and the three of them produce the episode’s best exchange, built around Bud getting his name deliberately wrong and Kelly spelling the family name incorrectly. This was Wolfman Jack’s last acting role. He died of a heart attack on July 1, 1995, about five months after the episode aired, which gives his scenes here a weight they were not written to carry.

The cruise itself is the gag. The ship caters to one clientele by day and another by night, which gives Al a glimpse of something he wants and Peg a reason to make sure he does not get near it, and her new shipboard hairstyle does the rest of the work. Wolfman Jack appears as himself delivering the prize, and it turned out to be his last acting role; he died of a heart attack that July, about five months after the episode aired.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: February 19, 1995
• Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 18
• Overall episode number: 202
• Written by: Michele L. Wolff
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: February 10, 1995
• Production note: Wolfman Jack’s final acting role. The legendary radio DJ died of a heart attack on July 1, 1995.
• Production note: The lifeboats name the ship as the Sea Dodge.
• Title note: A play on a considerably cruder idiom.

Guest Cast

• Wolfman Jack as himself
• Lisa Stahl as Gretchen
• Mary Garripoli as Julie
• Kim Anderson as the party girl (uncredited)

The Sea Dodge

Wolfman Jack’s entrance is the best thing in the episode. Al has just finished a speech about how nobody ever wins these contests when the howling starts at the door, and the man himself leans through the gap and announces his intention to blow Al’s mind. Al’s response, asking whether anybody in the house joined a record club thirty years ago, is exactly the right note.

The exchange between Wolfman Jack and the Bundy children is the funniest writing in the episode, mostly for Kelly’s contribution. Bud deliberately mangles the name, is corrected, concedes that the real version is cooler, and offers theirs in return. Kelly’s attempt to spell Bundy is the line.

Al’s endorsement of Wolfman Jack’s character, delivered in order to prevent him bending the rules, is a nice piece of construction: he builds the man up as unimpeachable and beyond reproach specifically so that Peg cannot bribe him, and Peg produces fifty dollars.

The cabin door scene with Jefferson is the broadest material in the episode and also the most efficient. Al refuses to open the door on the grounds that it is a trap, describes the specific mechanism of the trap, and Jefferson’s reason for opening it anyway is three words long.

Kim Anderson, uncredited here as one of the partygoers, had appeared back in season 2’s “The Great Escape” as a shoe store customer.

Famous Quotes

• Bud: “Mom, are you sure anybody ever wins these contests?” Peg: “Would Ed McMahon lie?” Al: “Gee, I don’t know, would he drink? Would he laugh at something that’s not funny? Would he tout the taste of dog food if he thought he could make a stinking buck?”
• Wolfman Jack, at the door: “Hi, I’m Wolfman Jack. Let me in, I’m gonna blow your mind out.” Al: “Anybody here join a record club? Well, you know, I’m talking about 30 years ago.”
• Bud: “Uh, listen, Lojack.” Wolfman Jack: “That’s ‘Wolfman… Jack’.” Bud: “Yeah. Much cooler. Listen, our name is ‘Bundy’.” Kelly: “Yeah, B-U-N-D and sometimes Y.”
• Al, pre-empting a bribe: “This man is unimpeachable, his character beyond reproach. He combines the best qualities of both wolf… and man.” Peg: “There’s 50 bucks for you.” Wolfman Jack: “Sold.”
• Al, on the cabin door: “Don’t answer that. That’s a trap… They say, ‘Yoo-hoo,’ you open the door they slap two pieces of bread around you and you’re never heard from again.” Jefferson: “I don’t know. She sounds thin. I’m gonna open it.”

Notes

• Al’s complaint about why he does not want to go on a cruise, which starts as seasickness and turns into something else, is one of his better two-part jokes.
• Peg’s shipboard haircut is one of the running gags of the two-parter.