Season 8 Episode 3: Proud to Be Your Bud?

September 19, 1993

Published 09/19/93

Bud has one more plan. He comes down the stairs in full country and western outfit, having decided that country is in, and explains the preparation he has put into the persona, which includes chewing his weight in tobacco and learning a short list of country phrases. Kelly’s assessment of the look is immediate. The attempt fails, and it fails in a way that leaves him physically damaged and the outfit destroyed, and when he gets home he announces his retirement: he will neither seek nor accept a date from any woman for the rest of his life, and he will live out his days in the basement as the gnome his family has always said he is. He means it. He moves down there. And then he starts building something, a structure he describes as a portal, in the expectation that somebody will come through it, which is enough to convince the rest of the household that Bud has finally broken. What comes through is Cool Bud, a separate and more confident version of himself that only Bud can see, and the episode plays the relationship between them as a straight homage to a 1960 Twilight Zone episode about a man arguing with his own reflection. Meanwhile Al is trying to buy an alternator for the Dodge, which means a protracted battle with an automated telephone system. It is one of the more inventive Bud episodes the series made and the one that gave the character his second personality, which the show would come back to.

Episode Facts

Original air date: September 19, 1993
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 3
Overall episode number: 160
Written by: Stacie Lipp
Directed by: Tony Singletary
Production note: The last appearance of the Grandmaster B persona, visible hanging on Bud’s wall.
Production note: The two-Buds material is an homage to the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room.”
Title note: A play on the Budweiser slogan launched that year.