Original Airdate: October 29, 1990
You can watch these episodes on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube (all for $), and DVD.
Pete is fond of calling the first season of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air the best first season of any TV show of all time. OK. Disqualifying all Lostish and Twin Peaksy answers, I think this is fair. Among sitcom-core shows, I think it's absolutely true. As the very first holiday episode of the first season of Fresh Prince, I think "Someday Your Prince Will Be in Effect" is a decent enough way to kick this blog off. It is a wild one.
It starts out with Will and Carlton making a bet on which one of them will pick up a date to Hillary's Halloween party, as the (whole) family prepares to descend on the local mall to find Halloween costumes. As far as I can tell, the party was that very night. It only occurs to me now that none of them really seemed concerned to not have a costume for a party the same night.
The family splits up and we're given a glimpse of each of their on-location journeys. Phil gets distracted by the siren call of a gadgets-store, which I think is the first and last time Phillip Banks even shows a passing interest in gadgets.
Hillary and Ashley go to what looks like a very typical mall clothing store of its time. To find a costume. It looks exactly to me like a store that was in Windward Mall for a short time when I was a teen that sold really cheap knit crap. I can't find much about it online, so I'll let that go. Hillary somehow comes out of it with a Yves Saint Laurent dress. Will later was probably the first person in American to call a sexy adult costume what it is, something I appreciated at the time. It actually is a very nice dress.
Vivian gets pulled into a mall recording booth, which was a thing at the time before karaoke was popular. She sings "Proud Mary" (in the style of Tina Turner, obviously), which inspires her Halloween costume. Of course Vivian the First makes a to-die-for Tina Turner, despite not wearing a wig. She just looks like Vivian in a tiny, sparkly dress, which is just fine. ♥
Will and Carlton are focused primarily on finding dates. Most of that is pretty boilerplate, rejection-montage stuff, but I would be remiss not to mention "We're Back," an apparent hip hop dance troupe doing their thing in front of a small crowd outside of Sam Goody. We don't know who they were before, or where they went, we just know that they're back now. Pete and I are somehow able to weave We're Back into conversation several times a year. In attempting to pick up a woman in the audience who think that dancers are sexy or something, Will joins them on stage and does his patented bendy Will Smith dance. It's good.
We later find out that Will found a Superfly costume and Carlton went to the party as a vampire, which I guess they got on this mall trip. This must have been the longest day in history. I would need to reserve an entire weekend for this mall trip alone.
Weaved into all of this is a fucking clip show. Keep in mind the show only premiered less than two months earlier on September 10 of the same year. They had like four episodes to work with. It's boring and bananas until they start making shit up in attempting to pick up the woman who agrees to go to the party with Carlton (zoinks!). We see a
dramatization of Carlton's story of what a typical date with him is like, in which he beats up two would-be muggers and then turns into Michael Jackson briefly.
Then Will describes what a typical night with him is like, which ushers in a parade of guest stars, all playing themselves, all asking Will for personal advice. Most notable, Heavy D just seems to appear when Bo Jackson needs help with planning a dinner party He drops a line from a song (diddly diddly dee), Will and Kadeem Hardison have a football fantasy reminiscent of a combination of Bart and Krusty winning the Super Bowl together and/or a play on Mean Joe Greene. I may be missing a really obvious reference to something else. Al B Sure is there. Quincy Jones too. Malcolm Jamal Warner appears via telephone. I feel like I'm making half of this up.
I also didn't intend to give this much detail, but really I just wanted to tell you about We're Back and this one part where Will leap-frogs some guy in the mall. This is relevant because Pete and I both remember the next day at school kids were mimicking the leap frogging.
The episode slows down significantly after we leave the mall and much less happens. They reveal of all of their Halloween costumes, for example. I didn't mention that due to his procrastination in the gadget store, Phillip did not find a costume, and instead came as Comfortable Man. This is also Pete's favorite Halloween costume.
This girl from the mall that I didn't even mention above comes as Cinderella in a dress I would have liked to get married in. It's strongly implied that she and Will will begin dating as a result of her looking so cute even though he was kind of a dick to her earlier. Carlton's date, the one he told he was Michael Jackson ended up robbing the Bankses, also looking beautiful dressed up as Mrs. Claus (so that she could justify carrying a bag to stash the good silver, etc. in). Poor Carlton.
Just out of control.