Modern Family Fans Crowned This Movie Parody Scene The Best In The Series

With a broadcast TV run on ABC that spans 11 seasons, the critically acclaimed sitcom "Modern Family" kept audiences loyally tuning in with dryly hilarious, brilliantly insightful writing and spot-on acting from its ensemble cast. The series is ostensibly presented, especially in earlier episodes, from the POV of an unseen documentary filmmaker following the Pritchett, Dunphy, and Pritchett-Tucker families in their day-to-day, suburban Southern California lives.

And like other sitcoms both contemporary and reaching back to TV's infancy as a medium, "Modern Family" is known to occasionally tip its hat to other well-known shows or films with a reference, brief scene, or line of dialogue. Comedic allusions to popular films in sitcoms is, of course, a well-known narrative technique, from the "Carol Burnett Show" parody of "Gone with the Wind" to "Community" and its deft send-ups of "Pulp Fiction," "Dead Poet's Society," and other classics to "The Simpsons" and its spoofing of everything from "The Graduate" to "Citizen Kane." But when it comes to "Modern Family" and the show's singular parody of iconic scenes from one of the most iconic motion pictures in Hollywood history, fans seem to agree that this particular spoof is, well, a horse of an uproariously different color.

As the "Modern Family" Season 4 episode "Fulgencio" progresses, we see Phil and Claire Dunphy (Ty Burrell and Julie Bowen) acting as godparents at the christening of Jay and Gloria Pritchett's (Ed O'Neill and Sofia Vergara) newborn baby. But as Phil takes his baptismal vows, the scene is intercut with a montage featuring young son Luke Dunphy (Nolan Gould) comically reenacting classic mafia-vengeance moments from "The Godfather," including, naturally, a climactic shot of a horrified kid waking up to find a severed stuffed toy zebra head in his bed.

Redditor u/Minute-Egg started a discussion thread featuring the above sequence titled "Best scene in a Sitcom. EVER," prompting other users to applaud the cinematic spoof, including u/Divyansh-the-gr8, who declared, "The 'Godfather' reference absolutely killed me!!" Redditor u/eaglesk didn't even have to watch the film in question to get it. "I haven't even seen '[T]he [G]odfather,'" they admitted, "but I knew instantly this is what it was referencing."

As it turns out, the scene's star also approves. Gould told MEA WorldWide in a 2019 interview, "My favorite moment for Luke was in that 'Godfather'-like sequence where Luke is wreaking havoc. I just had a lot of fun shooting [it]."