“…Til the one day when the lady met this fellow, and they knew that it was much more than a hunch that this group must somehow form a family. That’s the way we all became the Brady Bunch.”
Has it really been nearly 60 years? Nothing make me feel as old as when a film or television show I watched as a kid celebrates some grand anniversary milestone. It’s like birthdays without the ice cream cake. On September 26th, The Brady Bunch celebrated its 57th anniversary. The 20-disc collection features the entire series. You get all five seasons of the original television itself with some commentaries by creator Sherwood Schwartz himself as well as members of the Brady clan. That’s 117 episodes of Brady. For me, going back to those very first episodes was a bit of a culture shock. The show was planted firmly in its time. From 1969 to 1974, the series was very much anchored into its place in time. More than that, the show began to influence and insert itself just as firmly in becoming a part of that very same culture. The theme song is pretty much known by anyone who has ever lived from that era to today. You don’t have to have ever watched an episode to know it. I was a young kid when I last watched any of these episodes, but it’s amazing how much of it came back. It was also a bit of a shock seeing the kids so young in those first season episodes. In these five seasons the clan grows up, and there’s a rather dramatic difference in how they look and act over those years.
The story itself is simple. The theme song pretty much sums it all up. Mike Brady was played by Robert Reed. Mike was an architect and had three sons named Bobby (Lookinland), Peter (Knight), and Greg (Williams), going from youngest to oldest. He also had a housekeeper named Alice, played by Ann B. Davis. In the pilot, he marries Carol Brady, played by Florence Henderson. In the kind of coincidence you might only find in Hollywood, she had three daughters named Cindy (Olsen), Jan (Plumb), and Marcia (McCormick). In that first season the stories were more or less about the large family learning to be together. Many of the stories would pit the boys against the girls. After that first season there was less of the “new” family dynamic, and the group very much settled into a routine that has gone on for 50 years. The show still plays in syndication all over the world and has enjoyed spin-off shows, movies, and specials that are still going on. Most of those shows are found in this collection.
This collection is only the original series, but the show spawned a ton of Brady down through the years. The first series came in 1981 and was called The Brady Brides. There were seven episodes, including a 90-minute pilot. When Jan (Plumb) wants to marry her long-time boyfriend Philip (Kuhlman), her parents (Reed/Henderson) aren’t as excited as she hoped. They still believe in a kind of tradition where the oldest girl should be married first. That’s going to become a problem until it isn’t. Marcia (McCormick) runs into a rather wacky guy named Wally (Houser), who boldly sits at her lunch table, and in minutes he’s joking about them getting married. She ends up finding him charming, and before you know it, she’s also telling her parents about being engaged. Before you can say Brady Bunch sequel, it’s a double wedding. The two couples decide to buy a house together, where we get something more akin to The Odd Couple than The Brady Bunch. Wally works as a sales rep and designer at a toy company and pretty much lives in the moment. Philip is a science professor and has a somewhat aristocratic demeanor, and the two mix about as well as oil and water. While the rest of the Brady clan all made cameos in the pilot, only Florence Henderson and Ann B. Davis would appear in episodes of the show.
It took 10 years for another show to arrive. In 1990 we got The Bradys. The show starts with the family all at their own places cheering Bobby (Lookinland), who is racing in a big championship race. He has a horrible accident that puts him in a wheelchair and understandably depressed. The show ran for five feature-length episodes and did star the entire clan with the exception of Leah Ayres, who filled in for McCormick as Marcia. With all of the characters back, the show really focused on Carol and Mike dealing with their grandkids. Mike ends up going into politics when he can’t get results from his city councilman. There was more potential to this show, but with so many characters, including grandkids, it never really formed into a cohesive kind of show and just couldn’t compete.
While the original show was on the air, the studio attempted to capitalize on the notice the kids were getting for a couple of musical episodes on the show. Folks started seeing some money in presenting the kids as a kind of singing group. Remember, this was the era of bubblegum pop, with The Partridge Family, The Monkees, and The Archies. The Saturday morning cartoon landscape was also starting to move in the bubblegum pop movement, and with shows like Josie & The Pussycats dominating both television and radio, it was decided to give the kids their own cartoon show. The Brady Kids was complete fantasy and did not connect with the live-action show at all. The kids form a rock band and go on tour with a talking parrot who was actually a wizard and a couple of panda cubs. The adventures were silly, and the show featured them playing songs. It all lasted for a little more than a season and delivered 22 half-hour episodes. Finally, there were five films.
So ends the story of that man named Brady and the whole Brady Bunch. But not really. There is now talk of yet another reboot, and the family’s house has been front and center on one of those renovation shows. A Very Brady Renovation features many of the kids, and is running now, so not included in this set. The Bradys certainly had their flaws, and the films were often pure schlock. The kids might not have been your typical 1970’s American kids, and they certainly weren’t the symbols of virtue many television kids before them were represented to be. “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a perfect kid. And SIX of ’em, yecch!”
