Season 8 Episode 17: Valentine’s Day Massacre

February 13, 1994

Published 02/13/94

Kelly has been sitting on a Valentine’s card for six years. It was addressed to Bud, it came from a classmate named Crystal Brooks, and Kelly simply never passed it along. Crystal is now a famous pop singer, which transforms the card from an old embarrassment into the single greatest missed opportunity of Bud’s life, and he sets out to find her and explain. She is staying at a hotel with a bodyguard, and Bud’s attempts to get past him make up the funniest stretch of the episode. He steals a bellhop uniform. He is thrown into an elevator full of people. He is dragged around the building by a dog named Winkie, a sequence the show scores to the William Tell Overture. And on his first approach he is intercepted by a hotel guest named Rita, who mistakes him for a service she has ordered and pulls him into her room, which is the loudest thing that happens to Bud all season. Meanwhile Al is attempting to buy Peg a Valentine’s gift, and the Valentine’s store is the episode’s best invention: a service counter now calling number 2009, a bouquet referred to in-house as the Wallet-Breakers, armed guards to carry it, and a blood donation station on site for customers who cannot pay. It is a strong holiday episode and one of the better showcases for Bud in the eighth season, since almost everything that happens to him is physical and almost all of it is somebody else’s doing. The Valentine’s store, meanwhile, is the sort of satirical set piece the series could build in a single scene and then never use again.

Episode Facts

Original air date: February 13, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 17
Overall episode number: 174
Written by: Cindy Begel
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: February 4, 1994
Production note: The card dates to 1988, which places it in season 2. That season’s Valentine episode, “Peggy Loves Al, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” had Bud out with his first valentine, April May June.
Title note: After the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which happened in Chicago, and the 1967 film about it.