Dammit Janet!

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“Dammit Janet!”
Family Guy episode

Episode no.	Season 2 Episode 22
Guest stars	Haley Joel Osment
Written by	Matt Weitzman and Mike Barker
Directed by	Bert Ring
Production no.	2ACX09
Original airdate	June 13, 2000
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"Let's Go to the Hop"	"There's Something About Paulie"
List of Family Guy episodes

"Dammit Janet!" is an episode from the second season of the FOX animated television series Family Guy. The title of the episode comes from the second song in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Concerned that Stewie isn't playing well with other children, Lois puts him in day care to be around other children his age. With Stewie out of the house, Lois is bored so Brian suggests she get a job.

Peter seizes the opportunity to steer her to get a job as a flight attendant so he can get free travel. With Glenn Quagmire's connection, Lois gets the job. The work is hard and she has to take abuse from the passengers.

Overhearing Peter boast about his free travel, she drags him into a lavatory to discuss him using her. While they're occupied, the plane is hijacked to Cuba. Unable to get documents to return to the US, they ride a refugee raft to Florida.

Meanwhile, at the day care center Stewie falls in love with a toddler named Janet despite his best efforts. Giving in, he decides to woo her but is heartbroken when he discovers she only wanted his cookies.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Notes

The Evil Monkey in Chris' closet makes his debut appearance in this episode.

[edit] Cultural references

In opening montage Stewie has a fantasy of an old-fashioned train thriller movie. This may be an homage to the 1960's show The Wild Wild West, as Stewie later says that one of his many names was "Artemus", which was the name of one of the central characters in the show.
Stewie drops a kid into a pit, walks away, and sings, "Steve walks warily down the street, with his brim pulled way down low," the first line from Queen's song "Another One Bites the Dust".
Peter talks about how he got in trouble as a kid, and we cut to a scene of the classic Dr. Seuss character, The Cat in the Hat, offering to clean up the house. Peter says "No, no, just go. It'll be funny!". In the original book, the cat wrecked the house, then cleaned it up in a matter of seconds before the children's parents got home.
When Lois asks Peter and Chris "What will the neighbors think?" we see a woman yell "Abner! Abner! The Griffin boy just killed a plastic reindeer!". The neighbors are Mr. and Mrs. Kravitz from the old TV show Bewitched where Mrs. Kravitz would always see witchcraft being used and try to convince her husband, Abner, that she really did see what she says she saw.
Lois' exciting life involved meeting Kim Richards who played Tia Malone in Escape to Witch Mountain and Return from Witch Mountain. (Lois conflates the titles to Escape from Witch Mountain.)
After getting free air travel, Peter dumps Tinkerbell from Peter Pan.
When Brian says "Well, well, well, looks like someone's in love." and bites into the apple, this is a subtle reference to the episode Brian in Love. When Stewie realizes that Brian has an attraction to Lois he says the same thing and bites into an apple as well.
The scene in which the pilots pretend to be dead, to Lois's horror, is another reference to Airport 1975 (previously referenced in the episode "Death is a Bitch").
When Peter asks Lois, "What if Kurt Cobain had quit?", the scene cuts to a Nirvana concert where Kurt tells the audience "Say no to drugs!". It's revealed that if he quit, he would have made seven albums rather than just three. It is also implied that nobody would know or care about his wife singer/actress Courtney Love if Kurt Cobain had quit drugs and lived. The angry look on her face may be a nod to theories that Love murdered Cobain and made it look like a suicide.
Stewie serenades Janet with Frank Sinatra's "You Make Me Feel So Young".
On the flight Lois is working, an Egyptian passenger says to her: "Momken Tekooni Merati", which she does not understand. In the Egyptian dialect, it indeed translates to "Will you be my wife?".
The artist's rendering of an attractive redhead married to a fat man is Wilma and Fred Flintstone.
A cutaway to a fictional sitcom called The Communists shows a Soviet family that lives in the only red house in the neighborhood. At the dinner table, when the father asks his son about his grades, he stalls, so the mother says: "Quit stalling (pronouncing it Stalin)". She then adds: "Tell us your marks (a reference of Karl Marx)". The boy says: "Do I Khrushchev?", at which point Nikita Khrushchev enters saying: "Did somebody say Khrushchev?" and dances on the dinner table to Techno music, with the family joining along.

[edit] References

S. Callaghan, "Dammit Janet!" Family Guy: The Official Episode Guide Seasons 1-3. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. 100 - 102.
A. Delarte, "Nitpicking Family Guy: Season 2" in Bob's Poetry Magazine, 2.May 2005: 21 - 22 http://bobspoetry.com/Bobs02My.pdf