Review: American Dad “Demolition Daddy”

10-4, Headband Dynamite

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Everybody at Pearl Bailey High School is having their father teach them to drive. Except for Snot, he’s apparently the only kid in the school whose father isn’t in the picture. Steve relies on old, dependable Stan, who quickly disappears for the rest of the episode. Haley agrees to teach him in Sub Hub’s tractor-trailer, as long as he accompanies her on a Smokey and the Bandit-style caper delivering a truckload of explosive salami to Florida.

While that sounds fun, Snot is forced to practice driving with Tuttle until the Rubenesque neighbor has a heart attack. This forces Snot to rush him to the hospital in reverse—the only gear he knows. This catches the eye of Roger, or should I say Dick Keebler a long-forgotten, hillbilly character the alien created about sixteen years earlier. Turns out, Keebler was a demolition derby spotter for Lonnie Lonstein (Snot’s absentee father).

Keebler sees real promise in Snot’s driving abilities and wants to train him to compete in the derby. The boy agrees, but it’s more of an invitation for Roger to mess around his old digs. And mess around he does: with redneck women, redneck men, and on WebMD the next morning after having sex with all those rednecks. Anyway, Roger’s demolition derby car is as fake as most WebMD diagnoses and it crumbles after a miner fender-bender with a scooter.

Snot needs to find his dad’s old car—the Red Rammer—in order to compete and learns his mom hid the car piece by piece around their house. It would’ve been super easy to find if Snot wasn’t so oblivious. After a rebuilding montage with Toshi and Barry, Snot is ready for the derby. However, that’s the moment Dick Keebler decides to pull one of his classic double-crosses and steals the Rammer.

Snot’s mom arrives just in time to offer her son a ride. And because driving is in his blood, he catches up to Keebler before getting smashed into by a couple of Roger’s good-old-boy pals. Luckily, Steve and Haley were close by with their plot-convenient exploding salami to help their friend in need. Jeff—who was in the back of the semi the whole time—almost lost his life by purposely igniting the cargo, but it was a golden plan all the same.

While Keebler succeeded in stealing the Rammer, Snot came away with something more valuable, a new respect for his mother. Not to mention a bunch of slick-ass driving moves and the ability to run just about anybody off the road.

Our Take

A Snot episode is never going to be a top-tier episode of American Dad. It’s simply not in the boy’s DNA, through no fault of his own. But compared to “Mom Sauce” from a few weeks ago, this was a far better outing. Snot didn’t come across as annoying or vapid and his journey was compelling and thought-provoking even though this retcon of his father wasn’t exactly canon.

It’s always helpful when the B-plot connects to the A-plot by episode’s end. Steve and Haley are two great characters and they often do good work together. At certain points during this episode, I kind of wanted to see more of the ins-and-outs of their quest, especially with Jeff in the back abstaining from weed until the perfect moment. How did he even manage? Plus, as I mentioned earlier, it was a spoof of Smokey and the Bandit and parody is something the American Dad writers have always done well.

I would’ve liked to see more of Roger in his redneck/demolition derby element as opposed to him hanging around the outskirts of that world. While it was funny to see Roger looking up various STDs at the library as he completely shirked his mentoring duties, we don’t get to see him in such an exaggerated Southern setting very often. I wanted to see the alien get crazy with those beer-swilling, gator-baiting, love-hating country folk. But we got tepid, careful Roger instead.

With Steve out of town, Snot’s mom played a great antithesis to the shady Dick Keebler. Throughout the episode, we saw her come face-to-face with the demons her husband left behind as she wrestled over whether or not to tell her darling Schmuely the ugly truth. While she eventually came around and accepted that her son was nothing like his father, the road there was rocky, and the former demolition derby spotter had to dodge many proverbial car crashes before coming to terms with her son.