Al often spends time attempting to recapture his glory days, but is usually undermined in spectacular fashion by frequent bad luck and poor judgment.
He frequently goes to "nudie bars" and strip clubs with his friends, the most prominent of which is called "The Jiggly Room", featured during the series' final four seasons.
Al is said to have extreme foot odor, prefers the escapism of television and bowling over his dysfunctional family, and life of drudgery and starvation (as Peg refuses to cook, she claims that she is allergic to fire, despite the fact that she smokes cigarettes in the early seasons) and is often seen in his trademark couch potato pose — seated on the sofa with one hand stuck under the waistband of his pants.
He also has terrible teeth, as noted in the episode "Tooth or Consequences," where his extremely poor dental hygiene leads to a trip to the dentist with typical bad luck results.
His other joys were Westerns, often John Wayne films, most notably Hondo, until Peg's family ruined his recording of the movie by taping over it with a song dedicated to her.
[2] The producers stated in interviews that they were also attempting to determine what a good "mission statement" would be for the show, and ultimately went with the first sound heard on the first episode — that of Al flushing a toilet.
During the day, she likes to watch daytime talk-shows, sit on the living room couch, and eat copious amounts of ice-cream BonBons (without ever gaining weight).
Peg is a redhead (brunette in the first two seasons) with a bouffant hairdo, and she usually wears combinations of modern-day 1980/1990s and dated 1960s-styled fashions with skin tight Spandex pants and shirts, and stiletto heels, which make her walk in a unique way.
Peg continually squanders what little money Al makes on extravagant spending sprees, including everything from expensive clothes to useless trinkets, and even steals from her children to get extra cash.
Despite being generally portrayed as a dullard, the show occasionally hints at Kelly's ironic intrinsic intellectual ability, which only exhibits itself on those rare occasions when she is not preoccupied with her social status or men.
Christina Applegate has said that she didn't consider Kelly to be necessarily unintelligent, but rather as someone with an unconventional thought process (i.e. she was capable of learning and intellectually solving problems, but she did so in a manner that deviated from the more common linear logic).
[11] Applegate wrote on Twitter that she based her character on a girl in the 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.
In subsequent seasons, he morphed into an unpopular, socially inept outcast, prone to self-serving schemes — many of which tended to involve attempts to impress girls.
Later in the series, having lost his virginity, he still remains generally unlucky in his pursuit of the opposite sex, despite the occasional one-night stand; one of which was with his cousin's fiancée, Janie, played by Joey Lauren Adams.
During his teenage years, Bud develops a fleeting crush on the Bundys' next door neighbor Marcy Rhoades, towards whom he makes several unsuccessful come-on attempts.
He tries to attract girls with the help of various alter egos, including street rapper "Grandmaster B" — a persona often ridiculed by his family, who call him everything from "Bell-Ringer B" to "Bed-Wetter B".
Like his parents and sister, Bud is a surprisingly adept fighter, exhibiting a talent for generally besting an adversary, no matter their size, and has no qualms about using chairs or tables to even the odds.
She wins back her old job after "frugging" on her boss's desk for 20 minutes, clad only in a slip, while the other drive-up window tellers toss quarters at her.
At one point late in the series, Al runs into a poorly disguised Marcy in the adult section of the local video rental store; she claims she's renting movies only to erase them.
As a banker, Steve takes sadistic pleasure in humiliating people who bullied him in high school by making his former tormentors (many of whom were stuck in poor, dead end jobs similar to Al's) grovel for bank loans, which he flatly refuses.
Garrison had decided he no longer wanted to be tied down to a weekly television series, preferring to avoid being typecast in one role and devote more time to his first love: stage acting.
Prior to disappearing, he loses his job at the bank after, in an effort to win a free trip to Hawaii, he approves a loan for Al's "shoe hotline" project which fails.
In the sixth-season episode "The Egg and I", Steve returns to Chicago in an attempt to reclaim his old life and settle back into the yuppie lifestyle with Marcy.
), he usually ends up working with beautiful women, which prompts a jealous Marcy to make him quit and return to his de facto job as her gigolo.
After discovering that they were in possession of private pictures of Shannon Tweed in sexually provocative manners, Jefferson convinced Al to sell it to the media.
During the course of the series, it is revealed that Jefferson spent time in prison for selling contaminated land as a vacation spot to several people, including Al.
Occasionally, people claim to have seen him on The Love Boat and Happy Days (a reference to McGinley having starred in both shows towards the end of their original broadcast runs), but Jefferson always denies this.
Voice-over by writer/producer Kevin Curran, who appeared briefly onscreen during the end sequence of the sixth-season episode "Psychic Avengers" where Buck is turned into a human.
Like the human Bundys, he is just as lazy, insulting and sarcastic to the rest of the family, making snide remarks about Kelly's intelligence and Bud's inability to find a date.
Unlike his last incarnation Buck who was heterosexual, Lucky himself is gay having on two occasions been attracted to males: once to an English Bulldog that wore a leather jacket and spikes that he met at a park, and also to Jefferson when he was in a wool sheep costume.