Season 6 Episode 18: My Dinner with Anthrax
February 23, 1992
Bud and Kelly have won a radio contest, and the prize is that the thrash metal band Anthrax will come to their house. The only obstacle is their parents, so the kids arrange for Al and Peg to be sent out of town, which happens to coincide with the Bundys’ twentieth wedding anniversary. Peg has already told Al what she wants for it, and it is not an object. She wants to be made love to, properly, with holding and caressing and romance, and she is explicit that she is not interested in the thirty-second crash-and-burn, the twenty-second bump-and-snore, or the New Year’s Eve countdown that ends in better luck next year. Al takes this news extremely badly and seeks counsel from Jefferson, who talks him through the mechanics with the patience of a man explaining a difficult tax form, and whose estimate of how long the whole business takes sends Al into open grief. The trip itself turns out to be a timeshare presentation rather than a vacation, run by a salesman named Stan and featuring Edd Byrnes, living on the property for free and willing to say so. Back in Chicago the band arrives, finds the refrigerator, and locates Peg’s Mystery Pack, a sealed item of unidentified food that the show had established two seasons earlier and that nobody in the family has ever been willing to open. They eat it. They begin hallucinating. The living room does not survive.It is one of the busiest episodes of the season, with a guest band, two recognizable character actors and a genuine anniversary story all competing for the same twenty-two minutes, and it holds together better than it has any right to.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: February 23, 1992
- Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 18
- Overall episode number: 123
- Written by: Larry Jacobson
- Directed by: Gerry Cohen
- Taped: February 14, 1992
- Production note: Anthrax appear as themselves in the Joey Belladonna lineup, which broke up shortly after this aired and reunited in 2005.
- Production note: The premise came from a real 1989 MTV Headbangers Ball contest in which a winner had Anthrax turn up and wreck her house, along with the car she was being given.
- Title note: A play on the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre, and also the name of the in-story contest.
Guest Cast
- Anthrax as themselves
- Fred Willard as Stan
- Edd Byrnes as himself
- Roger Rose as the VJ
- Edd Hall as the radio DJ (credited as Ed Hall)
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