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S01.E11: Very Superstitious


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Jessica’s superstitions get the best of her when she sells a house with the address 44 West 44th Street – the number 4 being bad luck in Chinese culture. At the urging of the new school counselor (guest star Judah Friedlander as Ray), Eddie decides to run for school president, but Jessica’s bad luck gets the best of him too when a white lie spirals out of control.
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I love when Louis and Jessica barged in on Grandma sitting on the toilet. Man, that was funny.

 

I don't care for that one blonde waitress who was making all the sex comments, but I do love Nancy. She's been saying some really unexpected things lately.

 

I also liked the last scene with Scotty Pippin. 

  • Love 4
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I don't care for that one blonde waitress who was making all the sex comments, but I do love Nancy. She's been saying some really unexpected things lately.

 

I agree. I don't think the show needs her. She's not funny and there's plenty of other characters.

  • Love 4
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I loved the blonde waitress. Favorite part of the episode. She was just so hacky. Like the comic you dread having to hear. Add that to the fact that no one ever responded to her. She is in her own world. Plus Paul scheer does great with his exasperation. All great stuff. Grandma doing Eddie's entrance music will never not be funny. I love that the family is over it. Grandma looks so happy to help her grandson as well.

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Constance Wu is the breakout star of this show. Her deadpan delivery just cracks me up. 

 

"A brutal murder happened there!"

"Which means another murder is highly unlikely!"

 

I know a lot of Jessica's in real life, and like how Constance acts, they always mean well, they just have a weird way of expressing it. Louis seem more like cartoonish to me, I hope they write him better in the future.

  • Love 2
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My brother's roommate has a remote control that he sets to play entrance music before he enters the apartment from outside.  Not kidding.  

 

There is a suburban city here in Ontario where the number 4 on houses has been banned since 2013.  LOL.

 

Because of my mother (who is not even Cantonese, but the city we live in is 40-50% Cantonese) we have lived in houses and apartments with the number 8 in the address 3 times.  (I think 8 means rich/money.)  

 

Regarding Scottie Pippen, he is so huge in pop culture.  A lot of Pippen fans write sitcoms.  The show Happy Endings is set in Chicago and they make Pippen references scattered throughout all 3 seasons.  It's like Seinfeld and Superman.

  • Love 1
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Constance Wu is the breakout star of this show. Her deadpan delivery just cracks me up

 

She, and to a lesser extent, Randall Park, are the only reasons to watch this show. Well, maybe the two younger boys too. I could not be less interested in Eddie (who's supposed to be the main character). Any scene he's in just drags, and I stop paying attention.

  • Love 5
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Before the episode aired, I was going to say that 4 is also bad luck in Japanese culture because the word for 4 is "shi," which is the same as the word for death, but then I didn't because I figured, eh, off topic. So I was delighted when the janitor explained it to Jessica's colleague. It made me feel like a garbage boss. Occasionally when I'm feeling superstitious, I try to avoid buying things in a quantities of 4, but one time I did that and my receipt totaled $6.66. So clearly I can never win.

 

Ms. Blue Jay, 8 is good luck in Japanese as well, but for us I think it means good health rather than money. 9 is also good luck, but not as good as 8. Possibly this isn't the most reliable of systems.

  • Love 5
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Love Eddie's entrance music. He listens to what I listened to in that era (and still do, sometimes). Puzzled how he gets straight As, given his seeming lack of interest. Though the comment about "no friend, no distractions" was good. The dad kind of annoys me.

 

"Open your third eye."

 

"My ... butthole?"

 

Note: Binged watched so not sure that line was the same episode.

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She, and to a lesser extent, Randall Park, are the only reasons to watch this show. Well, maybe the two younger boys too. I could not be less interested in Eddie (who's supposed to be the main character). Any scene he's in just drags, and I stop paying attention.

I've enjoyed Randall Park since he started doing Wong Fu shorts and one of their series a bit ago. Constance Wu is fantastic, I hope she gets an Emmy nomination at least. Grandma, Emery and Evan have all been great.

 

(I think 8 means rich/money.)

 

八 (ba1) sounds like 发(fa1) from 发财. So it's more "get rich".

 

She is in her own world. Plus Paul scheer does great with his exasperation.

 

She totally reminded me of my husband and his horrible puns. Paul Scheer was great with his reactions.

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I thought this episode was kind of a mess.  Between the very-special-lesson about lying, to weird uses of the book to launch into something completely different, to cutsey scenes with that youngest brother (I've found him funny before, but this was just forced), to toilet humor, to just random lines like they give to Nancy... it's just all over the place.  The superstition thing was taken too far.  I thought the episode would be about how Jessica sold that lemon of a house.  I still don't understand how she did so easily.  I think the grandma would be funnier if she just spoke English.  She was pretty funny in "Desperate Housewives".

Edited by Camera One
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Aww, Scottie Pippen.  Man. To be Scottie Pippen on that Dynasty team.  Mozart and Salieri type of stuff.  Anyhow, he did a good job and delivered those lines well. 

 

Eddie's pimp walk bit with Grandma rolling out the music continues to be funny. 

 

I love the music.  I adore (still do) De La Soul and hearing Me, Myself and I on primetime tv in 2015 makes me happy.

 

The superstition thing is funny and I like that they showed the white workers at the restaurant judging, yet doing their own rituals.  We all have them, right?  In mine, cute babies in my family will catch a (painful!) pinch from an auntie to make sure no one can give them the "bad eye".

  • Love 3
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(edited)

Ha, he totally reminded me of Mr. Rosso too! I was waiting for him to ask Eddie to come rap in his office only to have Eddie start busting out actual raps. I loved that everyone ignored his attempts at the share clam.

 

Eddie selling Tupac dubbed off the radio cracked me up. Kids these days don't know what it as like to try to record songs off the radio! This week's episode of Black-ish had the kids talking about back when The Real World started airing (which was only a few years before Fresh Off the Boat takes place) when you had to be at home to watch a show AND you had to watch the commercials. How things have changed in 20 years!

 

One of the things that makes Evan so awesome is how happily he follows directions. When Louis told him to see how long he could cover his ears, he just cheerfully said, "Okay!" and did it for the rest of the scene.

 

I never considered dipping onion rings into clam chowder, but I wouldn't say no to trying if they were both in front of me.

Edited by ElectricBoogaloo
  • Love 3
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I feel like Eddie wouldn't have been selling burned CDs, though. I worked in a government office for IT in like, 1996 and my boss made me write up a "report" "justifying" getting the office a CD burner. They were too expensive for regular homes back then.

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I think the whole burned CDs thing was the show's attempt to tell a sanitized version of some of the things Eddie was doing at the time. In the book, he said when he was 13 (which was 1995, the same year that the show takes places), he was running NCAA pools, taking bets on NFL games, and selling porn on 3.5" disks. He specifically mentions that this was in the time before CD burners or USB drives. Considering that Louis had a fake fax line a few episodes ago, I agree that it's very unlikely they would have a CD burner.

  • Love 1
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, he was running NCAA pools, taking bets on NFL games, and selling porn on 3.5" disks.

 

13 year olds bet on that kind of stuff? What kind of porn can you put on a 3.5" disk? Where did the porn even come from? The only thing I really remember from early 90's computers were pixel art and Oregon Trail...

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Finally just saw the episode. I noticed how few VOs there were, hardly any like in previous episodes. Given the real Eddie's dislike of the episode, I'm wondering if he refused to do the VOs and they had to cut them out.

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I think the whole burned CDs thing was the show's attempt to tell a sanitized version of some of the things Eddie was doing at the time. In the book, he said when he was 13 (which was 1995, the same year that the show takes places), he was running NCAA pools, taking bets on NFL games, and selling porn on 3.5" disks. He specifically mentions that this was in the time before CD burners or USB drives. Considering that Louis had a fake fax line a few episodes ago, I agree that it's very unlikely they would have a CD burner.

From what I remembered, the counselor asked if they were "dubbed" which confused me because I remember dubbing was when you recorded on a cassette tape. I wonder if the producers kept the term but decided against using the medium because today's generation would have no idea what a cassette tape is anymore.

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Porn availability for boys first changed with the VHS as seen in The Persistent Romeo episode. Instead of one magazine copy from an adults stash passing hand to hand with the chance of loss the dubbing and mix tapes editing out the movie set up for the money scenes began and now many copies went around making suppression of porn impossible. With the dail up modem and limited storage space on home computers it was no longer necessary to find one VHS to copy but you downloaded a scene and put it on a floppy to escape detection

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