It's time for the Weird Accordion to Al column to become a real book you can hold in your hands and read on the toilet and everything!
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With this article, I finish writing up The Weird Al Show! Yay! Goodness, it was a lot of fun to revisit, and I certainly got more out of it this time around. Glad to complete this. Next up Comedy! Bang! Bang! Should also be fun and funny. Then UHF and The Compleat Al and then I edit it all and Felipe adds illustrations and we design the additional material and then we publish that baby, hopefully still by the end of June. Good to have goals and deadlines in times like this.
Episode 13: “Al Gets Robbed”
Original airdate: December 6, 1997
Today’s Lesson: “When faced with a problem, use your creativity and imagination to help you solve it”
In one of many recent blog posts about “Weird Al” Yankovic, I wrote about how bizarrely timely and perpetually relevant Al’s catalog remains. The titles of “Germs”, “Virus Alert” and “My Bologna” all take on new meaning in light of the current p-p-p-pandemic while the poster reveal for the Disney blockbuster Jungle Cruise couldn’t help but remind fans of “Skipper Dan”, whose tragicomic narrator prostitutes his gifts as a thespian working, if you can even call it that, at the Jungle Cruise ride at a theme park.
The 13th episode of The Weird Al Show, “Al Gets Robbed”, similarly captures our current fraught, terrifying, lonely age in a manner that borders on uncanny. The episode finds Al in a state of profound crisis. He returns home to discover that his cave has been robbed and consequently must find a way to carry on and maintain some semblance of everyday life without the things that give his life, and his eponymous television show structure, continuity and order.
How do you carry on when everything you’re used to living with and having at your disposal is suddenly gone? That’s a question a lot of us are wrestling with right now, just as Al does in what would turn out to be the very last episode. If that sounds awfully dark for an episode of a children’s television program, that’s because it is.
The darkness kicks off with Al triumphantly returning from a convention for cave-dwellers and making a most unfortunate discovery: someone has burglarized his beloved cave.
Everything is gone: his lava lamp and Hawaiian shirt collections, his eyeball chair, Harvey’s Habitrail, even his perfectly preserved wad of Dustin Hoffman’s earwax. They didn’t stop there: they stole the wheels from Harvey’s stunt car, his stereo AND all of his Sheryl Crow tapes.
It’s a Duketastrophe, is what it is! The burglary inspires an existential crisis: “Without my stuff that I am?”, he frets, before answering, “Just another another cave-dwelling, accordion-playing, hamster-loving TV host. What a cliche!”
“How can I do a realty great show when I don’t have any of my stuff?” Al asks rhetorically, only to have wrestler Randy “Macho Man” burst through a wall, Kool-Aid-Man-style, with some tough love and questionable advice. He proposes a wrestling match to pass the time and entertain viewers. Al talks a big game and then has Harvey wrestle the WWF superstar in an inter-species mismatch of historic proportions, in that it does not take long for the adorable rodent to pin the Slim Jim pitch-man.
Then Bobby the Inquisitive Boy stops by seeking, as always, seeking knowledge Al can’t provide and an answer to life’s big questions, more specifically, “Where do I come from?” Normally Al would show him a deeply unhelpful, uninformative, defiantly non-educational educational film but his film projector is gone, along with everything else.
When an embarrassed Al tells Bobby that’s the kind of information he should get from his dad, Bobby insists that his dad said Al probably had movies on the subject he could show him, which makes me wonder what kind of a show Bobby’s dad thinks Al is running.
Then in the mailbag segment Al answers a question about imaginary friends by discussing his own imaginary friend Gilbert, a fond reverie interrupted by Al’s decidedly non-imaginary friend Gilbert Gottfried, who is dressed like Tony Montana crossed with Ricky Ricardo for some reason and yells and hollers indignantly that he’s most assuredly real and even offers proof of identification via a driver’s license.
It’s funny (not to mention weird) because it’s true! Unlikely as it may seem, Gilbert Gottfried IS a real person.
Even The Weird Al Show’s weakest and least Al musical guests, like R&B also-rans All-4-One, overlap with Al and his musical career in fascinating ways. Since all of the instruments are gone, along with everything else, All-4-One ends up performing a Stevie Wonder cover a cappella.
The performance is ten times better solely by virtue of being a Stevie Wonder song and not an All-4-One composition but what I found interesting is that the song they chose is the golden oldie "Love's In Need of Love Today”, the first song from the Motown genius’ Songs in the Key of Life, which Al fans of course know primarily as the record that gave the world “Pastime Paradise”, which was sampled for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”, which in turn begat Al’s own “Amish Paradise.”
Then the episode, and the crazy saga of The Weird Al Show ends the only way it can, and the way that it must: with the revelation that the burglar was beloved sitcom star Dick Van Patten, from Eight is Enough and “Bedrock Anthem.”
Actually, that’s not quite how thing conclude. The show ends on a bleakly ironic note, with Al reading a letter from his cave-dwelling convention friends saying, apropos of the episode’s lesson, they were impressed by his creativity and imagination and would be watching his show every week from now on.
Of course there was no more The Weird Al Show, so they had to wait nearly a decade for the show’s DVD release.
With “Al Gets Robbed”, its thirteenth and final episode, The Weird Al Show ended with a bracingly dark, boldly conceptual and bitterly funny finale. With its premiere, “Bad Influence” it kicked off with a bracingly dark, boldly conceptual and bitter funny debut. In between Al and his gifted collaborators squeezed in eleven more bracingly dark, boldly conceptual and bitterly funny episodes that went tragically under-appreciated at the time of its release and in the ensuing decades as well.
UHF made a glorious if not entirely unexpected journey from critical and commercial flop to cult classic but The Weird Al Show remains under-appreciated. Al has been very pubic and frank about his frustrations making the show but it’s precisely the conflict between what Al wanted to do and what the network, censors and that infernal mandate to be educational and informative as well as funny and entertaining that gives the show a bracing tension.
Let’s be blunt: when it came to accolades, attention and viewership, Al and The Weird Al Show got robbed. Thankfully, as with the case of UHF, history can, and will, be kinder than a present that is all too often unkind when it is not downright sadistic.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.