Season 5 Episode 21: You Better Shop Around (1)

The first half of a two part story, and one of the more ambitious things the series attempted in its fifth season. Chicago is in the middle of a heat wave, the Bundys are melting, and Al’s solution is to buy an air conditioner. What he brings home is not a normal appliance. It is a surplus monster stenciled as the property of Erwin Rommel, it has a setting labeled Blitzkrieg, and when Al switches it on it does exactly what a machine built for the Afrika Korps would be expected to do, which is draw every available watt of electricity in the neighborhood. The Bundy house becomes the only cool building on the block. Everyone else loses power. By the end of the first act the neighbors have assembled outside with torches and pitchforks and a genuine intent to get at Al, and Peg is standing in the living room addressing her husband as Desert Fox. The family’s escape plan is to abandon the house entirely and relocate to the local supermarket, which is air conditioned, open, and full of food. They move in. They do not leave. And while they are camped out among the frozen goods, the store runs a promotion and the Bundys are declared the winners of a shopping spree, which is where part one leaves them and part two picks up. Along the way Al works the aisles, Bud is spotted by classmates and loudly disowns his own parents, and Marcy watches the whole thing from across the street and starts calling them the VanderBundys.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 14, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 21
• Overall episode number: 101
• Written by: J.D. Brangato and Michael Ferris
• Directed by: Linda Day
• Production note: Filmed nineteenth in the season but aired twenty-first, after the “Top of the Heap” pilot took the hundredth episode slot.
• Production note: Part one of a two part story. Both halves appear on volume one of the Married with Children: Most Outrageous Episodes DVD set.
• Title note: Taken from the lyric of the Miracles’ 1960 single “Shop Around.”

Guest Cast

• Bobbie Brown as Nibbles
• Bruce Jarchow as the store manager
• John Asher as Bob the stock boy (credited as John Mallory Asher)
• Jodie Mann as the cashier
• Regina Leeds as the cheese lady
• Louise Rapport as Mrs. Gillis (credited as Louise Pellegrino Rapport)
• Helena Apothaker as Butter Lefkowitz
• Kevin Ryder as the voice of the DJ

You Better Shop Around (1)

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