Season 8 Episode 24: Assault and Batteries

May 8, 1994

Published 05/08/94

Al has a broken basement step to fix and a deadline, because Hondo is on television later and he intends to watch it. The flashlight he needs is dead, which starts a chain of events that occupies the whole episode: Peg is sent for D batteries and returns with A batteries, her reasoning about the difference being one of her better moments, and Al is forced to go out himself. The store he ends up in is a supermarket called Sav-Som, and he gets locked inside it after closing. The remainder of the episode is Al trapped in a shut supermarket with his film starting, which the show stages as a sort of odyssey, including a Western fantasy sequence in which the Bundys appear as frontier settlers and Peg contemplates a box with a rabbit on top that she believes will eventually contain small people. Meanwhile Bud and Kelly have decided to throw Buck a birthday party, having found his birth certificate under the couch cushions, and Buck’s view of the celebration is not positive. This went out as part of FOX’s May 1994 sweeps event in anaglyph 3-D, with the viewing glasses handed out free at 7-Eleven. It is a slight episode carried by a gimmick, and the gimmick is the reason to watch it: this is the one Married with Children episode shot to be seen through cardboard glasses. Strip the 3-D away and what is left is a small, well-observed story about a man who wants one thing from his evening and is methodically prevented from having it, which is the engine the series ran on for eleven years.

Episode Facts

Original air date: May 8, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 24
Overall episode number: 181
Written by: Sam W. Orender
Directed by: David Castro
Production note: Part of FOX’s May 1994 sweeps event “Fox-O-Rama,” presented in anaglyph 3-D. The glasses were given away at participating 7-Eleven stores.
Production note: The final appearance of Cheech Marin as the voice of Buck, his third.
Title note: A play on assault and battery, and on the batteries Al spends the episode hunting.