The Brady Bunch - Classic or Dud?

Was that the one with Davy Jones?

We were watching it over the weekend, the girl introduces the big pop star, the kids go 'ner' and walk off, the mums all go "ooh, it's really him!!", Davy himself ownz the band and rocks out with some aplomb, meanwhile back on our sofa, Alice is all "HANG ON, I KNOW WHO HE IS!! MY FAVOURITE ONE FROM THE MONKEES!!!"

So, what goes around comes around eventually!

I watched this at the weekend too. Great.

The girl who plays Jan Brady was 26 when she made it wtf?

the movie is awesome funny, i need to watch the second one

the second one's even funnier in some ways.

i used to watch this show in reruns all the time.

I love the Brady Bunch movie.

That girl from it and Beakman's World...so classic.

"Hey there groovy chick, you're really happening in a far out way."

Marcia Brady: Doug! I think I just felt your tongue in my mouth.
Doug: It's called a French kiss.
Marcia Brady: But I thought you were from Nebraska!

"Cindy, you know by tattling on your friends, you're really just tattling on yourself. By tattling on your friends, you're just telling them that you're a tattletale. Now is that the tale you want to tell?"

"Gee, Dad, I never thought of it that way before."

greg brady's song in that movie is classic:

"clowns never laughed before, beanstalks never grew..."

I just found out that their family dog, Tiger, was the dog in A Boy And His Dog. !!!

HA!

No way! That's great.

Uber-klassik BTW, and such lovely parents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyooALwfxO8

"well, of course this is a car. but my name's not jack, it's greg."

Barry's back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Po8hj91dY

Schwartz originally had Gene Hackman in mind for the role of Mike Brady, but was told by Paramount that Hackman was too much of an unknown at the time and he had never done television.

http://www.bradyworld.com/cover/history.htm

"Greg, do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/08/florence-henderson-crabs_n_7246404.html

Classic response when Thomas Pynchon's sister was asked, "What is your brother doing right now?"..."Probably watching The Brady Bunch" (the three sisters in Mason & Dixon are definitely modeled on the girls)

I saw Christopher Knight (Peter) in a Bosley Hair Restoration ad recently.

RIP Florence Henderson :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg

Very sad. She seemed like a nice lady. Shows like this were important surrogates for a latchkey kid from a troubled home like I was back then. RIP, Florence.

The only thing I've found remotely interesting about this story (though I realize the issues raised are important):

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/business/oprah-patio-chairs-christopher-knight/index.html

it was pretty wild how this was just a normal family sitcom that was fairly grounded in reality but then every so often they'd randomly just appear on TV and do some choreographed song and dance routine. and none of the other characters would ever talk about it during the other episodes. now imagine if a modern sitcom did that. like Malcolm in the Middle.

Came across this rather bizarre item last week--eight miles high and falling fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7peFHjFoblk

lmaoo

@oklahomorose
3 years ago
Another mess for Alice to clean up!

it was pretty wild how this was just a normal family sitcom that was fairly grounded in reality but then every so often they'd randomly just appear on TV and do some choreographed song and dance routine. and none of the other characters would ever talk about it during the other episodes. now imagine if a modern sitcom did that.

Ahead of its time imo. Simpsons, Buffy, Angel, and Scrubs all had departures like that. For thirty or sixty minutes it was just... a different thing, and then everything went on as before.

Probably no one but me remembers the episode of Gilligan's Island where they produced a musical based on Hamlet. But I know it happened. Pretty sure the Skipper played Polonius.

Ahem.

It was done to impress guest castaway and theater impresario Harold Hecuba, referred to by his gofer Gilligan as HH, played by Phil Silvers.

A couple of the songs were from Carmen - Gilligan Hamlet singing his to be or not to be soliloquy to the tune of the Habanera, Skipper Polonius singing neither a borrower nor a lender be to the tune of the Toreador song- and then another song is sung to a tune from Tales of Hoffmann by Ginger Ophelia, I believe, if not Mary Ann Laertes.

But back to the subject at hand, Johnny Bravo and The Brady Six. Who remembers Greg’s “crumb list”?

I was reminded of a great touch when I just went to the island to check, the shots of the professor hand-cranking the old-timey victrola, playing what was presumably the Howells's opera records.

...which they brought on a three-hour tour, because you never know when you're going to need to blast some Bizet.

What's Harold to Hecuba or Hecuba to Harold?

More on topic, whenever I am called upon to fulfill multiple responsibilities I think of the episode where Greg has two dates for Halloween - one is in the family room and the other is in the living room, and he has to run back and forth through the kitchen, switching from a magician costume to a vampire costume, and as the episode continues the system breaks down and he like leaves his fangs in.

I was speaking to some other Xers recently and they all remembered it.

Classic.

Last night I couldn't sleep and my brain wanted to replay the ep where they collect green stamps (that was a thing) and they build a pyramid of cards; there is a sequence of dire threats to the card pyramid. It's a metaphor - even a comfortable upper-middle-class life is precarious and always in danger of collapse.

Then the one where Mike's den becomes a hippie bachelor pad, complete with bead curtain and a lava lamp, which of course foretells the epic thread In every 70s US home ever

Also, the tiki thing is cool and all but please don't forget the one where they are in Arizona in an old west ghost-town and get comically locked in jail, and they loop all their belts together to retrieve the keys.

The theme, as usual, is teamwork - this disparate, often fractious tribe can only be redeemed when they pool their resources. My own weird blended family - full of step- and half-siblings - was more than a little influenced by the Bunch.

But back to the subject at hand, Johnny Bravo and The Brady Six. Who remembers Greg’s “crumb list”?

― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, January 27, 2023 9:41 AM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Greg said that someone he hated was "at the bottom of my crumb list." But shouldn't a real jerk be at the top of a crumb list?

Skipper Polonius singing neither a borrower nor a lender be to the tune of the Toreador song

This is kind of messing with my head because i've never noticed this thread before and clicked on it because last week I had the brady bunch's 'time to change' stuck randomly in my head - which isn't that strange as I saw every episode of this show at least twice during my pre-cable childhood.

But last week I had the 'neither a borrower' song as sung by alan hale jr. stuck in my head out of nowhere after not thinking about it for like 35 years. I've only ever seen maybe 10 episodes of gilligan's island and this was one of them.

There are just some weirdly sticky moments in the teevee of that time. I saw thousands of hours of mostly forgettable (and duly forgotten) entertainment during the 70s/80s, but the things I remember I remember in excruciating detail.

I've only ever seen maybe 10 episodes of gilligan's island

I probably saw every one 10 times, as a kid and then with my kids. The musical cues are indelibly etched in my brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErE6K2pVklw

Lots of stuff etched in my memory because at the time there was both much less to watch on television and much less in my brane.

_But back to the subject at hand, Johnny Bravo and The Brady Six. Who remembers Greg’s “crumb list”?

― Cry for a Shadowgraph (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, January 27, 2023 9:41 AM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink_

Greg said that someone he hated was "at the bottom of my crumb list." But shouldn't a real jerk be at the _top_ of a crumb list?

-Butch Firbanks

It was literally last year i discovered there were two alans hale and that he was not some ageless wonder who didnt age between 1932 and 1970-something

That discovery was like that one cat at the famous photo shoot documented in A Great Day in Harlem who supposedly said that he hadn't known until that great day that "there were two ten o'clocks in the day."

More relevant to the thread is that the actor who played Alice's boyfriend Sam the Butcher also played Archie Bunker's friend Barney Hefner.

I see that his name was Allan Melvin. He also did a lot of cartoons and ads (presumably cartoons as well). WIkipedia tells me

His voice acting career continued until 1994, with Scooby-Doo! in Arabian Nights being his final voice work (again as Magilla Gorilla) before retiring.

He was also on The Phil Silvers Show but not on Top Cat, I don't think.

He was really good on The Phil Silvers Show or Sgt. Bilko in the UK

xp

Gotta say he was pretty much the closest thing I ever saw on television - or in film for that matter - to certain people I knew, relatives and family friends, from my parents’s generation.

Mr. Redd (mon semblable, mon frere), I think the Hawaii and Grand Canyon episodes are early examples of what would subsequently be called "very special episodes."

These are distinct from specials (like the Star Wars Christmas special, or the various feature-length Brady and Gilligan reunion shows).

This typology of special episodes has given us a very specific meme form of, e.g., "A Very Brady Christmas."

That memescape could lead us into other territory like "A Very Kardashian Pesach" or whatever.

Thank you so much for your kind words,Y M. Puffin, but I just looked up Very Special Episode and found it had a slightly different meaning, I think, unless I am missing something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_special_episode
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VerySpecialEpisode

TIL the tvtrope O.O.C. Is Serious Business.

Sometimes a Very Special Episode was characterized by Hugging and Learning.

Cf. MASH, which was a mostly fun show regularly punctuated by Very Special Episodes, including the great granddaddy of Very Special Episodes, which famously strained the nation's plumbing infrastructure during its commercial breaks.

Kids today (including and especially my own kids) just cannot grasp how television worked in my youth. Which is, of course, fine. They also don't need to know about horse-drawn buggies like or flint knapping.

I just found out that their family dog, Tiger, was the dog in A Boy And His Dog. !!!

Extended info about Tiger: https://www.cbr.com/tv-legends-revealed-why-did-the-brady-bunch-have-a-doghouse-but-no-dog/

Here is an insanely long blog post that no doubt takes as long to read as watching the episode itself: https://bradybunchreviewed.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/episode-18-tiger-tiger/

Quant suff!

Did anyone ever read the Robert Reed book a roommate of mine once told me about that seems to mostly him sending memos to Sheldon Leonard’s office about the genre incoherence of the scripts and threatening to walk if this was not fixed? Seem to recall quotes like “I can’t play this scene! It’s like Batman in the operating room! It’s all wrong, it just won’t work!”

Sherwood Schwartz, not Sheldon Leonard.

In fact, has it been noted yet that Sherwood Schwartz created both The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island? One thread indeed.

This is all over the intranetz, this link looks okay: https://www.ericdsnider.com/misc/batman-in-the-operating-room-why-some-comedy-isnt-funny/

As expected, the Boy and His Dog thing does not seem to be true.

when my nieces were younger my brother had checked out brady bunch dvds from the library so i got to see multiple episodes in succession and one thing i hadn't noticed before was that an outfit one kid wore would appear on a different kid in a later episode. i assumed it was more likely a production thing, like, hey, this is already in our wardrobe department, we can still use this, but it sticks in the back of my mind that it could be a deliberate acknowledgement of hand-me-down culture in middle-class america. that's a level of attention to detail i'd never heretofore ascribed to the brady bunch mythos that makes me wonder what the hell else they were up to.

i wasn't paying attention, but i never noticed ashley wearing hilary's stuff, but then again they weren't a hand-me-down type of family.

I have a vague recollection that there was some criticism at the time that Mike and Carol were a bit too understanding and therefore not realistic, there was no generation gap, they were too much like Mr. Rogers (which maybe I thought of because Ginger Grant is sort a name like Fred Rogers DO U SEE? although the parallelism is not all there) but I have no way to verify that.

Some things I don’t believe we have discussed yet

• When Chris Knight met and later married a model on one of those Reality Roommate shows, spawning yet another reality show about their relationship, My Fair Brady, in which Chris’s buddy and old(er) Brady brother Barry Williams apparently appeared several times.
• That the theme music was done by none other than Happy Kyne himself, Frank De Vol, who also wrote the themes for Family Affair and My Three Sons. This last tune still persists as a toe-tapping ear worm in my head.

Two more Frank De Vol or sometimes just De Vol facts of interest

• He arranged the famous Nat King Cole version of “Nature Boy,” recently heard in the Andy Warhol doc on Netflix. ( The version in Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair was sung by unknowns
• He was born in Moundsville, WV, a town strongly associated with Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter.

Probably should post somewhere else but instead will double down on the derail: https://moundsville.org/2021/01/19/night-of-the-hunter-rise-and-fall-of-an-american-con-man/

There are many treasures during his career as musician and actor listed on his Wikipedia page but somehow this one sticks out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_De_Vol#Television_work

Beginning in 1969, "The Fuzz" became the theme song of Brazilian television newscast Jornal Nacional.

The music credit on The Brady Bunch read, "Music by De Vol" (and I think there was a trademark symbol next to that). I thought that was hilarious, as it sounded like a corporation. I mentioned this jokingly to my dad who said, "Oh yeah, Frank De Vol! Did arrangements for Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald!"

Apparently he preferred to be billed as Frank De Vol when acting but simply De Vol when doing music.

Hmm.
https://www.decades.com/lists/inside-the-theme-song-the-brady-bunch

Mike and Carol were a bit too understanding and therefore not realistic

Hard disagree. I have some IRL experience that is salient.

As has been noted, my own personal family was a funhouse-mirror Bradyesque mess, with six kids rotating among different combinations of five utterly hapless and lost parents circa 1975-1985. Step- and half- siblings, bizarre partner switches, complete chaos.

The sitcom format would not allow Mike and Cindy to be abusive fuckheads. Nor would divorce have worked, thematically. That's why widow- and widowerhood were 70s/80s TV defaults.

Given the number of children, my parents kinda fell back on a Mike/Cindy approach.

Mike and Cindy also had a lot of money, a nice house, and a domestic servant. Which would have reduced their stress level enough so that they could be lenient parents.

There is one poignant line that resonates with me to this day: "the only steps in this house are the ones leading up to your room."

Pretty sure every 70s kid in a messy broken home felt a pang of longing in that moment.

Great post, although I have to point out that you wrote Cindy instead of Carol.

Ah, “The Fuzz” is kind of an upbeat take on crime/cop theme music and is from the film The Happening. You probably remember the title song as sung by The Supremes and credited to HDH and De Vol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePfyOnrSPug

Yeah, widowers. The aforementioned Family Affair and then The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, to name two off the top of my head.

Sorry JR! Brain lag. Obviously Mike and Cindy would be a totally different thing, and not something I would recommend televising

There was supposed to be a French remake with Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg but that was not to be.

For widow the first thing that comes to mind is of course Hope Lange in The Ghost & Mrs. Muir.

Who I see from another thread was married to Alan J. Pakula according to clemenza.

Mary Tyler Moore was to have been a divorcee but changed to someone with a broken engagement.

Alice was a widow.

Mr. Drummond on Diff'rent Strokes? Widower.

The mother on Silver Spoons existed but only hazily.

One Day at a Time? Divorce but veiled.

I paid a lot of attention to televised depictions of single, divorced, and remarried parents during this era. For obvious reasons.

Divorced parenting was a trend (for obvious reasons) and how different shows handled it remains interesting.

Hmm, remember the film With Six You Get Eggroll but not Yours, Mine and Ours.

This is all over the intranetz, this link looks okay: https://www.ericdsnider.com/misc/batman-in-the-operating-room-why-some-comedy-isnt-funny/

― The Big Candy-O (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, January 27, 2023 9:01 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

its funny that he's complaining about this but he's right. And Eric is correct that The Simpsons is one of the few shows that managed to actually get it right. which in turn unfortunately inspired a bunch of comedy writers into thinking they could do it too. maybe That 70's Show pulled it off, though obviously its nowhere near as good

I’ve always been amused that even the laugh track on Brady Bunch barely laughs at many of the jokes. And astounded to see how many people it took to write an episode, considering the quality of said jokes.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/brady-bunch-house-for-sale-1.6858486

Joe Namath and Bobby Sherman will pop over for a visit.

I'm having a hard time believing there is enough nostalgia left for this show to warrant that price. The number of people who even remember this show is dropping by the year.

please shut up and leave me to my elderly nostalgia

Those who remember the show are also, though, the only demographic that can possibly afford that price

"Any time you're at the house… there's people showing up day and night taking pictures of the house," he said.

Sounds great!

That's a hefty price tag to engage in constant Brady bunch larping.

like Sam the Butcher bringing Alice the Meat

they were four men

living all together

and they were all alone

Random thoughts on finishing this show for the first time since Nick at Nite repeats in the '90s:

In my mind, the Bradys live in an alternate timeline where "the Sixties" never happened and it just went on being American Graffiti/Happy Days forever--despite the '70s style, the spirit of the show is a lot closer to Leave It to Beaver in its squareness. It's difficult to imagine the Bradys occupying the same space as Watergate, Black Sabbath or marijuana.

It's a strange how none of the children ever mention or express any feelings about their other birth parent.

Cousin Oliver was irritating, but his notoriety seems out of proportion to his screen time.

My girlfriend and I spent much time speculating on the terms of Alice's employment, considering she seems to be "on duty" pretty much her entire life--even being roped into working on the kids' school projects and being pranked. I wonder what her salary was. I don't recall if we ever see her bedroom. I imagine just a pile of bedding by the laundry machine.