Halloween on Married... with Children

When you sit down with a sitcom from the '80s or '90s around the end of October, you usually get the same kind of holiday episode.  You'll find the kind where everyone turns up in an elaborate costume and the living room is taken over by cobwebs, pumpkins, skeletons, black cats, and whatever else the set dressers could hang before the cameras roll.

Halloween was treated like a special event on those shows, and I have always felt that the television version was how I liked to pretend my real Halloweens went. I like to think of Halloween as a safe night, a little spooky, and packed with more spirit than a regular Tuesday night ever had.

Honestly, though, our Halloweens were a lot quieter than that.

My brother and I would often put on a costume, hit the fifteen or so houses on the block, and race home to count the candy in front of the television.  If I was lucky, the television would already be tuned into whatever Halloween special we had been waiting all month to see.

We had jack-o'-lanterns on the front step and a few decorations in the window, but when we got back, there was no wall-to-wall haunted house waiting for us like you saw on TV.

Don't get me wrong, I still look back fondly on plenty of Halloweens, especially the year my parents got the itch and threw a party for the kids from school.  Mom came up with the games, Dad built an elaborate haunted house in the garage, and for a few days I was the star of the third or fourth grade.

They never did that again, and in a way, that makes the one time even more special.

Sitcoms in the '80s and '90s got the holidays right, and that is why, for the past several years, I have been covering classic sitcoms and the special holiday episodes they used to build a whole night around.

You can find the "Holidays On..." series on Home Improvement, Roseanne, Frasier, Full House, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Family Matters anytime in the Collections section on this site.

This year I kept circling a show that never quite belonged in the same living room as those others, but I think that's exactly why it fits here on YesterYear.

Married... with Children.

If Full House and Family Matters were the wholesome Friday-night version of the American family, the Bundys were Fox's answer to all of that.

Al Bundy, played by Ed O'Neill, sold women's shoes at Gary's Shoes & Accessories for Today's Woman, lived off the fading glory of four touchdowns in a single game at Polk High, and spent most episodes wishing the universe would just leave him alone.

His wife, Peg, played by Katey Sagal, shopped, ate bonbons, smoked cigarettes, and treated housework like a rumor she had heard once and decided not to investigate.

Al's kids, Kelly and Bud, Christina Applegate and David Faustino, were the kids you didn't want to raise.

Next door, Marcy, played by Amanda Bearse, and first Steve Rhoades and then Jefferson D'Arcy, existed mainly so Al would have somebody to insult.

The series premiered on Fox on April 5, 1987, and ran eleven seasons through June 9, 1997, for 259 episodes, including one Fox originally shelved.  Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt created it as a deliberate anti-Cosby Show, blue-collar, cheap, crude, and proud of it.  Early on it barely registered in the ratings, and then it became one of the shows that proved Fox could exist at all.  By the early '90s it was a Sunday-night institution, the kind of series your parents either banned outright or watched with one eye closed and the other laughing.

I didn't grow up with the Bundys the way I did with the Tanners or the Taylors.  Married... with Children was a little too sharp for our family's television rules, so I caught it in pieces on Sunday nights at a friend's or later, in syndication, on lazy afternoons when I had the house to myself.

Looking back as an adult, you can see what the writers were doing.  They were not celebrating the holiday the way Roseanne or Home Improvement did.  They were using Halloween the way they used everything else, as another excuse for Al to be miserable, Peg to be useless, and the universe to kick the Bundys while they were already down.

That is why this year's series is a little different.  Roseanne treated Halloween like a sacred moment, Home Improvement built a haunted house in the basement, and Family Matters gave us Stevil.  Married... with Children did not go all-out every October. 

Over eleven seasons, Married... with Children has only one true Halloween episode in the classic sitcom sense, plus a handful of others that are close enough, weird enough, or scary enough to earn a spot in a Bundy Halloween marathon.

As with our previous look-backs, not every episode that aired in late October even mentioned the holiday.  The show did, however, tease us as early as Season One.

"Nightmare on Al's Street" (S1 E11)
Originally aired June 14, 1987

The title makes it sound like the series is putting on a striped sweater, some phony claws, and calling it a night, but this isn't even a Halloween episode. It's not even from October.

It's Marcy's nightmares about Al.

Steve is out of town on business when a pair of contractors offer to redo Marcy's driveway on the cheap ($500 for two driveways).  Al tells Marcy she should ask Steve, who is out of town. Marcy says she knows what she's doing, but Al warns they are going to scam her. However, Marcy, economics degree practically in hand, takes the deal anyway. 

I enjoyed the purely first season line "I'm not sexist. I'm just saying women don't know nothing. Asphalt and economics are purely male-oriented fields... and since Steve is as close to a male as you have, he should be in on the decision." That would likely have been toned down in later years, where instead of snarky he just became "dumb."

The cops catch the guys, and Marcy cannot stand that Al was right.  That night she starts dreaming of her husband Steve, who turns out to be Al. Her romantic dreams become nightmares, so much so that when Steve really comes home, his week is ruined.

Peg thinks it's hilarious, until it isn't.  She finally gets insulted at how disgusted Marcy is while she's "dreaming around with her husband." Al keeps gloating, but Peg insists he "stop causing those dreams."

Steve stomps next door for advice from Al, the last man on Earth who should be giving marital counsel.  Marcy finally admits Al was right about the driveway, the dreams stop, and the episode ends the way early Married... with Children often did: nobody learned a lesson, but the title got its laugh. 

Elm Street becomes a Chicago suburb, Freddy Krueger becomes a shoe salesman, and there are no costumes or cobwebs, just the writers using the episode title to wink at a horror franchise because they could.

Hold that thought.  Ten seasons later, the wink pays off.

Get ready, because here is a look at the Bundys' version of Halloween, plus a couple of bonus scares.

Fair warning: even though it has been nearly thirty years, there are spoilers below.

"Poppy's by the Tree" Parts 1 and 2 (S2 E1 and E2)
Originally aired September 27, 1987

I know September isn't Halloween, but I'm including this two-parter anyway. I think you'll forgive me the minute the cold open goes to black and white.

Season Two kicks off with the Bundys' first real vacation.  Peg wants someplace that does not involve looking out the window at a chain gang, and borrows the Rhoades' expensive luggage so they can look like people who travel often. Al immediately books a trip to Dumpwater, Florida, for an $8-a-night motel called, ridiculously, Poppy's by the Tree.  The name is a joke on all those "by the Sea" beach places, and at Poppy's, there is only one sad palm tree. The room looks like it came out of the wrong side of the 1970s.

The cold open explains the backstory.  Every five years since 1967, an axe murderer has turned up at Poppy's and gone after the tourists, and 1987 is one of those years.  The town knows the history, but they refuse to tell the guests. When Al asks a local to take a family picture, the guy says the paper wants one and has them say "Gator Bait" as they pose.  The family is mad at Al for taking them to Dumpwater instead of Hawaii, but Al is proud of his cheap vacation. Peg worries that people around the hotel look at them like they are "dinner."

Part 1 is all wacky locals, red herrings, and cheap-motel jokes.  The cook waves a meat cleaver, a local kid Kelly has been flirting with walks around with an axe, and Al's idea of a weapon is a plastic fork, which he uses to stab wildly into closets while covering his eyes.  The first half hour ends on a shot that still works.  The killer slides under Al and Peg's bed, then punches a blade up between them with a great "To Be Continued" still frame.

For a 1987 network sitcom, that is a genuine slasher moment.

Part 2 is where it becomes a "Halloween episode." A brief recap reminds everyone that a killer shows up at Poppy's every 5 years. The Bundys run screaming in a Home Alone-style moment, and then race back into the hotel as a storm rages outside. They find the phones dead, and Al sums up the situation with blunt Bundy clarity.  Kelly pushes Bud to the forefront with her wisdom: "last born, first torn."

The sheriff doesn't seem too concerned about the murder, given that he's a local and all. The family decides to sit back to back and promise to stay awake all night to fight off the murderer. The next morning, the locals wake the Bundys, and the family starts arguing. After Peg dresses him down, Al suggests he should run to the axe, not away from it.

They return to the room to get their things and find a man in the closet. Al chases him down to the lobby where he fights him off, while nobody else seems to care. It's just Dilbert, the deputy, who is a kleptomaniac and a creep, and the sheriff lets him off the hook.

Al returns to the room to get the family, but Kelly points out that Mom is missing. Al's response is perfectly Al... he noticed something was wrong because he was wondering why he was the one carrying the bags.

Meanwhile, Peggy is tied up in Room 25.  The killer is not a mystery so much as a town tradition, and he is also the local celebrity, the man who met Andy Griffith.  He explains that tourists drove his father to a heart attack and his mother to take her own life in that same room, and his family lost the hotel, and that tourists were always complaining about towels, food, or a trip to Hawaii. 

Peg tries to talk the killer into letting her go by saying she'd take care of him. She lies through her teeth, saying she loves to cook, clean, and take care of her man. Eventually, she caves and says she can't do any of it. She finishes by telling him he needs to spend time with Bonbons and Donahue.  He hates Donahue. 

Al finds the room, and the killer tells Peg he's going to hide behind the door and she should call him in. She refuses, and he threatens to kill her first, and she can't wait to yell out Al's name. An axe swing nearly takes off Al's head, and the two scuffle in a very funny chase scene. Al and Peg's shouts catch the attention of everyone in the lobby, and the sheriff rushes in just as Al headbutts the killer in the stomach and then knocks him out with a swinging punch to the jaw.

The townspeople rush into the room, but they are disappointed that the Bundys aren't dead.  Dumpwater, they explain, only has two attractions: a serial killer and the man who met Andy Griffith.  They can stand to lose one... but they really can't lose both. 

One local would like to keep the little white-haired girl (Kelly).  Another suggests hanging the whole family, but Al and his family escape and go home to Chicago. As he puts it, at home he only dies a little bit each day.

It is a vacation-from-hell episode wearing a slasher costume, and it is the closest the early series comes to a haunted house.  If you are building a Bundy Halloween night, start here.  The black-and-white murders, the blade through the mattress, Peg in Room 25, and Al actually saving her for once all feel like the writers decided to do Psycho on a Fox budget with laughs instead of screams.

"Married... with Aliens" (S5 E7)
Originally aired November 4, 1990

This one missed Halloween by a few days, but it still belongs here as a bonus episode. 

Bud, Kelly, and Peg (with noticeably larger hair) are arguing on the couch about who will go get Al. Eventually, Peg reveals they've been arguing for hours about who will go get her husband after he fell and hit his head. Al comes home, and it turns out that he was fishing coins out of the mall's wishing fountain and cracked his skull. He has a bruise and a long monologue about how he was treated.

That night, Peg calls Al a baby. Every time he gets hurt, he gets "whiny," like last summer when he was changing the tire and the car fell on him. "Boy, I sure got a lot of sleep that night!" she exclaims, then mocks him for saying, "I can't feel my legs!" She calls him demanding, then asks him to rub her "tushie" so she can go to sleep. Al pulls out an old baseball mitt and scratches her butt.

Just then, little green men climb through the bedroom window and steal his sock.

"Peg!  Peg!  Peg!  Three little green aliens came in here, and they stole my sock."

Peg's response is the whole Bundy marriage in one line: "Were they green before or after they touched your socks?"

Then she tells him he probably needs a doctor and demands he go back to sleep.

Nobody believes him.  The kids think he is an idiot.  Marcy gets one of the episode's best lines when she reminds us that it seems UFOs only visit the town idiots.

Al tries to bait them with brand-new socks laid out on the floor, but nothing happens.  When the aliens come back, they pick up the new pairs, shake their heads, and pull a worn-out, dirty pair out of the dresser.  Al understands immediately.  They want used Bundy socks, and fresh cotton is useless.

That is when Al stops being terrified and starts being Al.  A tabloid will pay a million dollars for pictures, so he waits with a camera.  The aliens are delighted to pose.  They gather around him, take the socks, and sing "Kumbaya" while Peg sleeps in the next room.  Al asks if they will come on Geraldo.  They point at the sky.  Before they leave, he offers them the redhead (Peg) for their intergalactic zoo, but they decline.  He wishes them to "live long and prosper" and starts planning for his new mansion.

Then he takes the film to the photo lab, but of course, the clerk ruins the negatives.

The aliens come back one more time.  Al has smashed the camera.  He asks the only question left, which is why the socks, and they answer in their own language.  "Mizoozoo.  Fuel."

The closing crawl is the punchline the entire episode set up.  Long ago, in the galaxy Euryops, a comet threatened hundreds of worlds, including a small green one called Earth.  On the planet Philydion, they still sing about the man who provided the fuel that let the ships divert the comet, and that man is Al Bundy.

The whole thing is silly in the best Married... with Children way, a man nobody listens to who is briefly the most important person in the universe, paid for his trouble with ruined pictures and missing laundry.  It is not cobwebs and caramel apples and Beistle cats and pumpkins.  It is a close encounter in a Chicago split-ranch, which, if you think about it, is exactly how a Bundy Halloween would go.

"Take My Wife, Please" (S8 E7)
Originally Aired October 24, 1993

Here it is! The actual Halloween episode! 

If you only watch one Bundy Halloween, watch this one.

The cold open is Peg running the annual Halloween strategy meeting in the kitchen.  The Millers give away good, healthy fruit, so they plan to egg the Miller house.  Mr. Grover doesn't believe in Halloween, so they plan to ring his doorbell anyway because, as a Jehovah's Witness, he should know what it feels like to have the doorbell ring over and over again.  Kelly stumbles in late from an exterminator-company party and reports the night's valuable lesson: never spray poison into each other's mouths and play Twister, because people were dropping like flies. 

Kelly's contribution is that you are never too blonde to learn (a good line from Bud).

They put on the costumes they made the night before... a bag over their head. Bud's reads Tom Cruise, Kelly's says only "Bag," and Peg's is labeled Princess.

Marcy runs through the door and says she's in trouble. She's hosting a charity holiday function for women who killed their husbands just to watch them die... and in trying to find the perfect "theme" for the party, had hired The Village People. But they just called her collect and said they couldn't make it. See, cause they're broke now... She then asks them to come over and perform as The Village People for her "house full of menopausal angry murderers," expecting a concert... as Jefferson walks in a leather biker outfit, looking like he'd fit in at the club with Vito on The Sopranos. The Bundys decline, but when Marcy offers $500, they begin singing "Macho Man" and walk out the door.

Al comes home dressed as a giant green dinosaur and says he hates Halloween. He complains that the shoe store makes them dress up in costumes and he hates it. He reads a note from Peg that says they are performing as The Village People and that she left a plate warming in the oven for him. Al burns his hands as he pulls a plate (no food... just the plate) from the oven. "How does she find the time..." Al mutters.

Trick-or-treaters arrive and start giving Al guff.  He has no candy and tells them to go away, but when a kid in a dinosaur mask asks if Al is one of the dinosaurs that spit, Al says no.  The kid gleefully says he is and squirts ink in Al's face.

Al's verdict is simple and perfect.  Next to Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Sunday through Monday, Halloween has got to be the worst day of the year.  Then he says the line he has been saying for eight seasons.

He wishes he were dead.

The doorbell rings.  Al slams the door on another kid in a hood.  When he turns around, the hooded figure is suddenly inside the living room.  Al asks how he did that, but Death says that is the first thing they teach you in Death School, because everyone needs a gimmick.  Death complains that the hood is hot and asks to take it off, because she just had her hair done.  The face underneath is Peg, dark hair, darker makeup, Peg's voice with the volume turned toward menace.  Al is crestfallen to see Peg: "Perfect..."

Death can look like anything, his greatest fantasy or worst nightmare, even her own worst nightmare, but who would want to go around looking like Sally Struthers?  She is here because Al has been asking to die.  Panicked, he tries to send her after Michael Bolton, or whoever wrote the theme song for The Facts of Life, instead. 

Death is in a good mood, so she makes a deal.  If any family member says they need Al, in any way, before midnight, she will let him live.

Al thinks for one second, then says he will go get his suitcase.

That is the A-plot, and it is one of the meanest, funniest constructions the show ever built.  Al has spent years telling the world that nobody needs him, and on Halloween night he has to get one of them to say it out loud.  Death kills the time while he waits for his family to come back from Marcy's by showing him a photo album of famous departures. When Al asks where he's headed, she warns him to pack sunblock, preferably SPF One Million.

Meanwhile, at Marcy's, the B-plot is doing what Bundy B-plots do.  Marcy owns only one Village People record, "Y.M.C.A.," and she plays it on repeat.  The guests, who paid a hundred dollars a head, start to turn after hearing the same song for the 40th time... Just then, the real Village People show up late with a bag of candy, because everyone on the block assumed they were costumed trick-or-treaters. 

They get up on stage, ready to kick off the concert, and start with... "Y.M.C.A." The ladies attack! Two of the Village People escape through Marcy's kitchen covered in toilet paper and run out the back door. Kelly notices the paper is "the good stuff" and loves the softness of 2-ply. Bud says that it's just thick 1-ply. The two disagree, but decide to ask Al because if anyone would know, it's him.

Kelly says, "Where is he when we need him?"

Not exactly the noblest reason to be needed, but Al will take anything at this point. He runs over to Death and informs her, "My pumpkin says she needs me!"

Death lets him live... but promises to see him again on the day after he wins The Lottery. 

He wakes up on the couch, surrounded by his kids. Al asks if he's been sleeping, but Kelly says, "No, you were dying." She tells him her exterminator tank sprung a leak, and he'd been inhaling toxic fumes.

With Al awake, Kelly tells her Mom she doesn't need to call the ambulance... but Peg says she's on the phone ordering a pizza and shrugs. Kelly invites The Village People over so Al doesn't feel left out, and the episode ends on a "Y.M.C.A." dance party.

I love a piece of trivia attached to this episode.  Death tells Al she will take him the day after he wins the lottery.  So, when the show was abruptly canceled after the 11th season and ended without a proper finale, Ed O'Neill pitched a one-time episode in which the entire family dies in a tornado the day after winning the lottery to bring this episode full circle. FOX didn't go for it.

This is the Bundy version of the classic sitcom Halloween, which includes costumes, a party, a supernatural visitor, and a last-minute save.  It just happens that the costumes are the Village People, the party is for menopausal husband-killers, and the save is 2-ply toilet paper.  I laughed as hard rewatching this for the article as I did at Niles' pre-dial 9-1-1 bit on Frasier.  Different shows, same "I cannot believe they put that on network television" joy.

"Flight of the Bumblebee" (S10 E7)
Originally aired October 29, 1995

Two years later, Fox still parks a Bundy episode in the Halloween neighborhood, even if the holiday is only mentioned in passing.

Al and the NO MA'AM brothers come up the walk singing James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," grocery bags in hand, ready for a night of televised wrestling while the wives are supposed to be at bingo.  They don't get wrestling, though.  The wives are home, and they have claimed the television for a romantic movie.  Al's greeting to Peg is the one he wakes up with every morning, which is "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?"

The men get banished to Bud's room and interrupt his "private time" with his new girlfriend. The men set up shop on his bed and chase the girl away. The men marvel at how tough King Kong Bundy is (no relation to Al). After King Kong Bundy's interview, they make King Kong an honorary member of No MA'AM, but Bud complains he's been trying to join for 6 months. They decide he must do something brave, heroic (or stupid), to join. Al decides that he must go down to Wrestle-Palooza and get a photo with King Kong Bundy; otherwise, he can't join.

Kelly goes along, dressed in a sparkly gold dress and serving as his valet. Bud wears a full bumblebee costume and talks his way backstage as the "backup wrestler." She briefly mentions that it's Halloween and the only costumes left in the store were the Bumble Bee or Pocahontas, and Bud doesn't have the cleavage for the latter.

Michael Clarke Duncan, of Green Mile and Ricky Bobby fame, appears as a security guard here.

King Kong Bundy comes out of his locker room, angry that his opponent backed out. Bud approaches him and asks for a photo to make his "brain dead Dad" happy. Bundy agrees, saying he does a lot of work for the stupid. While posing for the photo, Kelly gets a bright idea and signs up Bud "The Bumble Bee" as Bundy's new opponent.

What follows is physical comedy of the "they are actually throwing a dummy around the ring" variety, and it is funnier than it has any right to be. 

King Kong tries to go easy, and Bud almost pins him by accident.  Kong is furious, and his response is great. "This is what I get for taking it easy on you? I expect this kind of chicanery from the Fighting Florist, but I assumed from your valet, you were the kind of guy who liked girls." Bud says, "I do..." and Kong roars, "THEN PREPARE TO BECOME ONE!"

At home, the NO MA'AMs club and the wives have gotten together and turned on WrestlePalooza. Despite his loud screaming, nobody realizes that the bee is Bud. Even Peg is delighted watching King Kong twist off the Bumblebee's stinger.  Al informs her it's not his stinger.

One of the wives says it's time to turn on the romance movie, but Marcy (dressed in a great embroidered Halloween denim shirt) and the rest of the women are suddenly very interested in all the grunting and sweating and turn hungrily toward their husbands.

As Bud screams in the ring, Al and the men of the club scream at home for a different (but oddly similar) reason.

Bud and Al are lying on hospital beds in the living room. Bud is proud that he got his photo with Bundy, and asks if he's in the NO MA'AM. Al says no; they don't watch wrestling anymore because it made the wives crazy, and they renamed the club Numb Old Men Anxiously Awaiting Morticians.

Is it a Halloween episode?  Only in the sense that Al and his friends steal candy from trick-or-treaters and the wives wear Halloween shirts. That, and a man in a bumblebee costume is thrown around a wrestling ring with a man named King Kong. But it's here because the series didn't give us many October nights, and because Bud in that costume is the closest Season Ten gets to the timeless sitcom tradition of everybody dressing up and something going wrong.

Bonus scare: "Damn Bundys" (S11 E20)
Originally aired April 28, 1997

This one has nothing to do with Halloween, but includes the real-life Freddy Krueger, Robert Eglund (not as Freddy), so I'll allow it.

Al and Jefferson are watching the NFL draft.  Jefferson tosses a canister of chips like a football.  Al goes through the dining-room table trying to catch it.

Getting up, unfazed, he says he would sell his soul to play for the Chicago Bears and take them to the Super Bowl.  The doorbell rings.  A man in a red shirt walks in and says he's there to fix the television. Al says there's nothing wrong with the television, and the man in red snaps his fingers, freezing time and causing the television to explode. Peg and Jefferson sit there like lawn ornaments.  Al is not impressed and says his wife needs a little fixing, too.

Robert Englund says he is the Devil, not a genie.

Yes, it's THE actor behind Freddy Krueger, and it's why Season One named an episode "Nightmare on Al's Street" in the first place.

Al takes the deal (soul for the Super Bowl) without blinking.  He becomes a phenom and carries the Bears through the season. The younger guys on the team blame him for giving them all jock itch. 

Then, at the height of Al's season, Lucifer, dressed as a referee, tells Al he could take the Bears to the Super Bowl, but he wouldn't get to play.  Al refuses to quit, and the Devil strips him of his football superpowers. Al can barely breathe, see, or hear now as he rejoins the team. On the next play, he is knocked out flat and has an out-of-body experience. Lucifer takes him down to hell.

Hell, for Al Bundy, is a problem for Lucifer. The itinerary of eternal torments starts with a covered tray of Al's only meal for eternity.  Weenie Tots.  Al loves Weenie Tots.  Fine, Lucifer says; a steady diet means an eternity in the bathroom.  Al asks why Lucifer thinks he loves them.  All right then, Lucifer says he will never see his family again.

Al drops to his knees and announces that this is heaven.

So Lucifer does the only thing that actually works.  He takes Al to his permanent accommodations... the family living room. Then, he sends the rest of the family down too, because they died when the brakes went out on the car while taking Al's body to the dump, er... the cemetery.

Three hundred years later, the family is still there.  Bud's crab claws keep puncturing his blow-up doll.  Kelly is a gargoyle who scares off dates.  Peg has hooves and cannot work the remote or call the Home Shopping Network.  The D'Arcys are stuck listening to Al's insults every single day.  Al, who thought eternity without his family would be paradise, may finally understand what hell actually looks like, maybe for the first time in eleven seasons.

He challenges Lucifer to a football game.  First to score wins, and the winner returns to Earth.  The Devil's team is Eric the Red, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Brutus, and Goliath.  The Bundys and D'Arcys get four downs and waste three.  On the last play, Lucifer freezes the Hail Mary and offers Al a side deal: drop the ball, go back alone, and take three beautiful companions and sacks of cash with him from down below.  Al catches it anyway.

He wakes up on the broken table.  The draft is still on.  The family is still there.  It must have been a dream.

Then he reaches into his pocket and finds the box of Red Hots Lucifer gave him. He looks at the camera and says, "There's no Hell like home."

We did it! Take a breath...

Fox tried to make the Bundys feel like part of a real Halloween week, even when the scripts wouldn't cooperate.

If you were a kid in the mid-'90s with the television stuck on Fox in late October, you remember the Fox Halloween Bash.  It ran as a week-long primetime block from 1991 through 1996, with special bumpers, celebrity wraparounds, pumpkin-carving bits, Universal Studios haunted-house segments, and a stack of spooky episodes that were sometimes actually spooky and sometimes just whatever the network already had in the can.  I wrote about the 1994 Bash years ago, featuring Elvira, the Crypt Keeper, and George Carlin hosting, with Coors Light and Universal tie-ins, Scott Wolf reminding you that Party of Five was preempted, and David Faustino appearing at times.

It is still one of my favorite memories of how television used to feel in October.

Married... with Children regularly got pulled into that block.  The 1994 Bash parked a Married rerun of "Field of Screams" (Season 8 Episode 20, originally from February 27, 1994), on Sunday night after the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror stack.  It is not a Halloween episode, but one in which Marcy's bank wants to turn the Polk High football field into a car plant, so Al chains himself to the goalpost. Kelly accidentally releases a rare African bug, and Bud has a very unfortunate pesticide reaction that the Bash programmers must have decided counted as body horror. 

Fox ran it because the title sounded right and the network needed something at 9 PM.

David Faustino also turned up in the Bash wraparounds themselves, including a Universal Studios bit with Brian Austin Green and the rest of the Fox kids of the moment.  The 1995 Bash later clipped "Flight of the Bumblebee" into the same Halloween packaging.

That was the Bundy deal with Fox for October.  Other shows got cobwebs and cold opens while the Bundys got a scary-sounding rerun, Bud at Halloween Horror Nights, and a bumblebee costume. 

Now that we know which episodes belong in the stack, the next question is where to watch these episodes.

As of this writing, Amazon Prime Video streams all eleven seasons of Married... with Children.  You can also watch the series for free with ads on Tubi and The Roku Channel, and buy seasons or episodes digitally through Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. 

Married... with Children was never going to give us the Taylor basement haunted house or Roseanne's Tunnel of Terror.  The Bundys didn't decorate or host parties, and Al didn't want trick-or-treaters at his door. When he got them, they spit in his face. Other '90s sitcoms used Halloween to show that, underneath the arguments, the family still liked each other.  The Bundys used Halloween to confirm that Al was right, and that the holiday was another thing the world did to him on purpose.

Which Bundy scare is your favorite?  The axe at Poppy's, the sock-stealing aliens, Death in a Peg wig, Bud the Bumblebee, or Robert Englund's Hell? 

Leave a comment and let me know.

Happy Halloween from 9764 Jeopardy Lane. 

Don't expect candy.  Expect a plate in the oven, and try to look grateful.