Jaleel White‘s Family Matters character Steve Urkel hadn’t quite broken out to be the star that he would become when he was left out of a scene in the first season that featured the cast throwing pies at one another. This did not sit well with the teen actor.

“And I went, and I begged,” White said over the weekend at 90s Con 2025 in Hartford, Conn. “You know, I was, like, ‘I’m 13, I was like, please, give me anything, I’ll do anything.’ He’s like, ‘You’ll do anything?”

White was persuasive, but he didn’t immediately know that he had convinced anyone on the crew of Family Matters, which originally aired from 1989 to 1998.

“They used to send a driver to your house with the script at night of the rewrite,” White continued. “Driver brought the script, and I opened the script, and my jaw dropped to the floor at Steve Urkel shows up at the end of the food fight, and the entire Winslow family just pelt him with pies. And I’m like, ‘That’s not how I wanted it to be exactly.”

He remembers the incident as not just a gag, but a real throwdown.

“And I have a feeling those pies, at that time, came extra hard,” White said. “I just got pummeled, and I took it, and I remember that was the first week that I ended up as the promo that they ran throughout ABC all week. It was just me walking into the door and getting hit by a pie.”

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Urkel took part in another pie-throwing scene well into the TGIF series. The nerdy neighbor of the loving Winslow family, on whom the series focused, ended up being the breakout star despite White being initially cast for a guest appearance.

White recalled in his 2024 memoir, Growing up Urkel, that he could tell Urkel was becoming more and more popular because of the direct feedback from fans, even in a time before social media.

“Back in 1990, it all started by getting a few fan letters delivered to me at a table reading by a production assistant,” he wrote. “Next, it was a manila envelope full of letters right before another table reading. Then maybe a small box would show up. It was a collection of letters that had been sent to ABC and Warner Bros., and they just compiled them. Before I knew it, I was doing a table reading and someone pointed to a stack of boxes in the corner and said, ‘Those are all yours, Jaleel.'”

The feedback also was not the same as it is now, he wrote: “It was different because TV actors didn’t get any negativity back then in the form of fan mail. You might hear from somebody who liked you too much, but you didn’t get anybody who took the time to write a letter, put a stamp on it, and walk it to their mailbox only to tell you how much your existence and popularity annoys them.”