Season 11 Episode 2: Children of the Corns

October 5, 1996

Published 10/05/96

Gary announces a sales contest between her only two employees, with a raise for the winner, which is the sort of management decision that has driven the shoe store’s plot for a decade. Al and Griff talk their respective games: Al claims to be a natural-born salesman and then screams at a customer who interrupts the boast, and then Al finds a shortcut. An immigrant child turns up at the store, the child works in a sweatshop Gary is running illegally, and Al realises he does not need to sell a single pair of shoes to win the raise. Blackmail is faster.

The sweatshop material was topical to the week it aired. In 1996 a whistleblower revealed that clothing sold under Kathie Lee Gifford’s name at Wal-Mart was being produced by children in Honduras, and the story dominated American television for months. Dropping that into Gary’s Shoes gives the episode an unusually specific target, and the show plays Al’s reaction exactly right: he is not outraged by the sweatshop, he is delighted to have found leverage.

Peggy’s half of the episode is smaller and funnier. She wins a microwave as home shopper of the month, has never operated one, and sets about learning what it does, a process the show scores with “Also sprach Zarathustra” and which ends with Bud microwaving the family’s frozen pet turtle under the impression it is a meatball. The turtle, Kelly’s, had been in the freezer since it lost its head, and the episode is essentially a remake of a joke from season three involving Bud’s goldfish and an oncoming car.

Episode Facts

Original air date: Saturday, October 5, 1996 on FOX
Season 11, Episode 2
Overall episode 240 of the series
Taped August 23, 1996; production code 11.02
Written by Matthew Berry and Eric Abrams
Directed by Amanda Bearse
The title combines Stephen King’s Children of the Corn with the foot condition