Season 10 Episode 20: Turning Japanese

March 17, 1996

Published 03/17/96

Marcy is up for a promotion, and securing it requires one dinner at the D’Arcy house with her boss, Mr. Shimokawa. Her preparation is thorough to the point of absurdity: she asks Al to leave the neighbourhood entirely so that her boss will not be repulsed by him or his children, and when Al declines to do it for free she pays him in a night at a Howard Bowman’s Motor Lodge. She also hires an actor to play Al, a more presentable Al, who sells Acuras, which works until Mr. Shimokawa hears the real Dodge start up outside and decides he wants it.

The car is the one thing Al will not trade. Marcy has money, a career on the line and a guest to impress, and none of it moves him, which produces the episode’s firmest line: the Dodge was born a Bundy and it will die a Bundy. The negotiation therefore relocates to the Jiggly Room, where Marcy turns out to be entirely comfortable, explaining to Bud that feminism concerns a woman’s rights in the workplace and that where that workplace happens to be is none of her business. Her tolerance has limits, and a stripper approaching Jefferson finds them immediately.

Pat Morita plays Shimokawa, and the half-hour’s best running gag is Jefferson’s karaoke. He works through “Fame,” “I’m So Excited” and then Culture Club, and the Culture Club number provokes a response from Shimokawa that the episode stages as an attempted stabbing, the single biggest laugh in the half-hour, built entirely on Ted McGinley’s commitment to a performance nobody asked for. Morita and McGinley had both been on Happy Days, in different eras.