Season 4 Episode 2: Dead Men Don’t Do Aerobics

September 10, 1989

Published 09/10/89

Peggy wins two weeks of training with Jim Jupiter, a local aerobics instructor with his own television programme, and proceeds to kill him. Not deliberately: she simply introduces him to smoking, to eating the way she eats, and to the Bundy way of spending an afternoon, and his constitution is not equal to it. The episode is a straightforward demonstration of the series’ position that the Bundy lifestyle is lethal to anyone not raised in it.

What makes it funnier than it sounds is that Peggy is not corrupting him on purpose. She is being hospitable. Jupiter arrives in peak condition, is offered a cigarette and a sandwich, and the decline is gradual enough that nobody in the house notices anything is wrong until it is too late. The episode’s dedication card at the end, a tribute to “our brother the mighty cockroach” and an invitation to let him show the way, is the closing thesis.

Al supplies the episode’s best-known line, and the most notorious piece of editing in the series’ home-video history. Told that Peggy has won, he observes that she never asked his permission to marry him or to conceive his children, and declines to grant it now. The line was cut from the Sony DVD release, which used the syndicated prints from season four onward because of music licensing problems with “Love and Marriage,” and is one of a number of casualties of that decision.

Jim Jupiter’s logo uses an image of Saturn rather than Jupiter. His two on-screen companions are named Lola and Bunny, seven years before Space Jam combined them. Steve mentions playing the sousaphone in high school, and Marcy has won a Woman in Banking award.