Marcy Vosburgh
Al finds out Peg has spent years buying other people’s yard sale junk, so the family holds a sale of their own to get rid of it. Nobody comes. It is the season 4 finale, the last episode in which Peggy smokes, and the source of Al’s Bigger Idiot Theory of commerce.
Al decides the world needs a shoe advice hotline and asks Steve for fifty thousand dollars to build one. Steve approves the loan to win a sales contest, and the decision ends up costing him his job at the bank and getting Marcy demoted. It is the most expensive thing Al does to the Rhoades in the entire series.
Bud rents his father out to the neighborhood as a professional woodsman to raise concert money, and sends him into the woods with a party of local children. Al knows nothing about camping. Back home, Peggy hosts the women’s answer to season one’s poker game.
A modest windfall sends the Bundys out to a proper restaurant, and then they realize the money is still at home. Nobody will admit it to the staff, so the meal goes ahead while the arithmetic gets steadily worse.
Peggy’s favorite bra is discontinued on her birthday, so Al and Steve set out across Wisconsin to find one. This is the episode that triggered the Terry Rakolta advertiser boycott, which ended up handing the show the biggest audience it had ever had.
A men-only fishing trip collapses when everybody’s wife invites herself, and then all three women turn out to be menstruating at once. FOX’s censors delayed the episode, which had been written as the season premiere. TV Guide covered the hold-up.
Peggy’s relatives arrive — two feuding uncles and three singing aunts, played by the Del Rubio Triplets — while Al tries to watch Hondo. King Kong Bundy plays Uncle Irwin, and the family surname came from him in the first place.
Marcy dents Steve’s new Mercedes while he is away, and rather than get angry he announces that the stress has made him impotent — and then commits to it entirely. Marcy spirals. It is also the first episode to show the real Tang bottle.
Al and Steve sell Marcy’s twenty-year-old boxed Barbie to fund a baseball card collection, and then have to get it back after the shop is robbed. The search takes them through downtown Chicago — and across the exterior set of another show filming on the same lot.
Peggy’s high school rival challenges the family to a bowling match, and Steve agrees to bowl as a Bundy, which should settle it. Then it emerges that Bud spent his lesson money. It is the first outing for the “Whoa, Bundy!” cheer.