Season 7 Episode 24: Old Insurance Dodge

May 9, 1993

Published 05/09/93

The Dodge is stolen, and Al’s grief lasts about as long as it takes the family to work out that the insurance company owes them twenty-five thousand dollars. From there the episode becomes a sustained piece of fraud. The claim is inflated with increasingly implausible contents said to have been in the trunk, and while it is processing, Al discovers that car dealerships will let a man take a vehicle out for an extended test drive without much scrutiny. So he borrows cars. Good ones. The show gives him a Lincoln Town Car and a drive through downtown Chicago scored to Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go,” and an earlier sequence in a rental car arrives to the Hallelujah chorus. Kelly’s contribution to the scheme is the funniest thing in the episode: having read that a Mercedes costs fifty K, she volunteers that she has been collecting the letter K from the notes the school sends home about her, and proposes that Bud harvest more from the newspaper. Then the police call. The Dodge has been found. The trunk is unopened, which means every item on the claim is demonstrably still inside it, and the twenty-five thousand dollars evaporates. Al’s speech about why he is glad to have the car back is one of the warmest things the character ever says, and he immediately takes it back. It is one of the best Dodge episodes the show made, and the Dodge had carried a lot of episodes by this point.

Episode Facts

Original air date: May 9, 1993
Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 24
Overall episode number: 155
Written by: Larry Jacobson
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: April 16, 1993
Production note: On the original broadcast the credits carried a scene of Kelly on the phone to a car salesman learning what a Mercedes costs. Later prints freeze it as a still with the dialogue played over the top.
Title note: A pun on Al’s car and on what the family is attempting to pull.