History YMMV / TheOddCouple

* WTHCastingAgency: Upon the female version's debut with Sally Struthers as Florence (female Felix) and Rita Moreno as Olive (female Oscar), at least a few reviewers referred to their casting as bizarre and "quixotic". To a lesser extent, Jenny Seagrove's casting as Olive in the 2001 West End production of the female version.

* AdaptationDisplacement: Most people tend to think of the original TV version first.

* AcceptableTargets: Murray's large nose was a frequent target of contempt.

* {{Adorkable}}:
** Especially on the TV series, Felix takes practically everything, from his habits to his pastimes to his relationships, to extremes, which is why he often finds himself being called a lunatic. In the end, though, his childlike enthusiasm and good heart win out over any annoyance he causes. Felix is especially {{adorkable}} when he's happy or excited. In "I'm Dying of Unger", he rolls on the bed like a little kid after tricking Oscar's agent into giving him three more days.
** Oscar's secretary Myrna has her moments too, especially when she just wants to be loyal and helpful to him.
* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic:
** Just try to get [[https://youtu.be/Af1h4ibpKJA that Neal Hefti tune]] out of your head. Fittingly, Jack Klugman loved the theme, but Tony Randall hated it.
** When Roy Clark guest-starred, the episode's tag featured him performing his signature piece "Malaguena". The audience, Tony Randall and Jack Klugman were all blown away by the performance.
** Some top-tier American opera singers - [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Horne Marilyn Horne]], [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martina_Arroyo Martina Arroyo]], [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fredricks Richard Fredricks]] - appeared on the show and got a chance to strut their vocal stuff.
* CrossesTheLineTwice: One of the few racial jokes the show from "[[Recap/TheOddCouple1970S3E14SometimesAGreatOcean Sometimes a Great Ocean]]", in which Felix asks Monroe (the Hispanic landlord's son) who was installing a reading lamp in Oscar's room, why he didn't tell Murray and his friends to get out when Oscar was sick in bed.
--> '''Monroe''': "When was the last time you saw a Puerto Rican chase out three cops?"
* FunnyAneurysmMoment:
** In one episode from the series, Oscar is hospitalized for an impending throat surgery, and of course, Felix pesters him to no end -- even the surgeon and Oscar's fellow patient get fed up with him and all want nothing more than for him to leave Oscar alone (even after Oscar returns home, the doctor wants Felix to just leave him the hell alone). [[SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments Years later when Jack Klugman was hospitalized for throat surgery, the first person to come to his side was his dear friend Tony Randall.]]
** In the episode when Felix and Oscar go to (and eventually get kicked out of) a health camp, Oscar tells Felix that he's fine not being as healthy as he could be and comforts him by saying that even if he only lives 20 more years and Felix lives 25, they'll still be happy. Jack Klugman would end up surviving Tony Randall by eight years.
* GrowingTheBeard: As far as the series is concerned, the first season kind of falls flat; between the single camera format and the LaughTrack, it comes off as just another standard, generic [[TheSixties 60s-era]] sitcom (despite premiering in 1970). With the second season bringing us a switch to a multi camera setup with a StudioAudience, and Tony Randall and Jack Klugman feeding off the audience's spontaneity, the series began to jell and find its voice.
* HilariousInHindsight:
** The ''movie'' could have starred Tony Randall and Jack Klugman.
** In "The Pen Is Mightier," after hearing Felix's poem "Ode To A Skyscraper," Oscar begs the question "Who's going to read a poem about the 40th floor except a sensitive window washer??" Twenty years later, Music/BarenakedLadies recorded "When I Fall," a song about a sensitive window washer (no mention of the 40th floor, though).
** Oscar asks the IRS official if they take credit cards. Big laugh from the audience. Guess what the IRS now allows...
** In the episode "Surprise, Surprise," Felix asks Oscar, [[Series/WhoWantsToBeAMillionaire "Is that your final answer?"]]
** The episode "The Rain In Spain" has a RunningGag about Myrna's fiance being named Sheldn (the "o" was left off his birth certificate). Forty years later, we'd get a [[Music/TheWeeknd pop star famous for having a vowel missing from his name]].
** On the subject of pop music and missing vowels, the gag in "The Subway Story" of the subway ad with comically omitted vowels ("F y cn rd ths, y cn gt gs jb") sounds like a precursor to Music/FallOutBoy's hit "Thnks Fr Th Mmrs."
* HoYay: And not just to modern eyes: Many a joke has been told about the peculiar nature of Oscar and Felix's relationship over the years. Creator/{{ABC}} was nervous about any such implications, which led Randall and Klugman to playfully film extra scenes with the HoYay dialed UpToEleven, just to give the censors fits.
* InformedWrongness: In "[[Recap/TheOddCouple1970S1E19YouveComeALongWayBaby You've Come a Long Way, Baby,]]" Oscar is treated like a complete heel (by Felix, his girlfriend Nancy, and the background music) for wanting to call the police and report a baby that was left behind by his mother at Felix's office several hours before.
* JerkassWoobie: Felix. He is the show's ButtMonkey, but others' frustration with him is often justified.
* RetroactiveRecognition:
** Creator/LeifGarrett -- before making it big as a '70s teen heartthrob, and a featured commentator on ''Series/WorldsDumbest'' -- as Felix's son, Leonard.
** Pre-[[Series/LaverneAndShirley Laverne]] Penny Marshall as Oscar's secretary, Myrna (both shows were coincidentally produced by her brother, Garry Marshall. Also coincidental is the fact that both shows were filmed on the same soundstage).
** And that's [[Series/{{Seinfeld}} Morty Seinfeld]] as a fellow juror whom Felix drives berserk.
* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: The show was notorious from the beginning for dancing around homoerotic implications. As Jack Klugman himself would later say, NOT having a Gay character on your sitcom these days is considered far less profitable than having one.

* SuspiciouslySimilarSong: The 1993 TV movie ''The Odd Couple: Together Again'' used one of these as its main theme, opting to use the Neal Hefti composition largely in the recap of the original series at the beginning.
* UnintentionalPeriodPiece:
** One episode has Oscar working at a ''Playboy'' clone. This at a time the magazine was more associated with sophistication rather than porn.
** Another episode had Felix's date working at a nude play, a genre then in vogue.
** "The Pig Who Came To Dinner" has some references to the "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match.
** Felix once delivered a baby in Times Sq., dismayed that the first thing the baby saw was a marquee for an X-rated movie.
** Myrna's boyfriend Sheldn sports an afro, bushy mustache and sideburns and wears a leisure suit with rhinestones.
* ValuesDissonance
** The 1968 movie features Oscar hitting on a waitress at one point, even going so far as play-biting her side. Innocuous in the '60s, not so much nowadays.
** By 1970, perceptions of masculinity were already shifting to "macho" archetypes, threatening to render ''the entire premise'' as unworkable without people not pondering about Felix and Oscar being an ''actual'' couple. Because of this, the network told the producers to indicate they were straight, divorced men.
** "The Pig Who Came to Dinner" featured a guest appearance by Bobby Riggs in which he played up his misogynistic public image, and his bigotry is generally played for laughs. If one were to swap out women with, say, African Americans, his jokes would never have been tolerated. Women, however? [[AcceptableTargets A-ok.]]
** "The Bigger They Are," in which Oscar is hired to shoot a "before and after" image for a diet pill, is basically 22 straight minutes of the cruelest fat jokes imaginable. It would be unthinkable to do an episode like this now that terms like "body shaming" and "body positivity" have entered the public vernacular.
** "The Sleepwalker": After Felix is convinced he should move out because Oscar's efforts to be civil to him all the time have resulted in Oscar whacking Felix in the head while asleep, he admits to Oscar that Gloria (his ex-wife) used to hit him in the head as well. This elicits uproarious laughter from the studio audience. The entire episode from when Oscar hits Felix for the first time could easily count for this trope since the studio audience laughs at it every single time, but Felix admitting to his ex-wife hitting him gets an impressive amount of laughter even compared to the rest of the episode. It's unlikely AT BEST that a major sitcom would play any sort of domestic violence for laughs now, and even less likely people would laugh so hard at a wife hitting her husband.
** "[[Recap/TheOddCouple1970S3E20LetsMakeADeal Let's Make A Deal]]": Oscar falling asleep in Felix's bed while smoking a cigar before the events of the episode is treated as a mostly-hilarious example of Oscar's carelessness both by the characters and by the studio audience that at most results in Felix's bed plus the floor in his room getting a massive smoking hole in it and there being a terrible smell in the building. No mention of the possibility that Oscar falling asleep while smoking could have burned out the whole apartment, let alone the entire building.
** "The New Car": Oscar mouth-kisses and can be seen flirting with the models posing on and around the new car. The models seem perfectly alright with this, but it's hard to imagine ''anyone'' being alright with it nowadays.
* ValuesResonance
** While jokes at the expense of everyone else were up for debate, any jokes involving race had the white characters (usually Felix) as the butt, usually in the form of him saying something InnocentlyInsensitive, like apologizing to Deacon Jones for the 200 years of slavery that might have led to his bad attitude, leading to Jones pushing him out of the way.
** Homoeroticism aside, there were a few episodes which subverted the stereotype that RealMenHateAffection. Many end with Felix and Oscar resolving their conflict of the week by respectfully sharing their feelings on the matter with each other, and while that kind of sensitivity is to be expected from a CampStraight character like Felix, the traditionally masculine Oscar doing the same is never treated ironically, which is something you rarely see with similar characters in ''contemporary'' sitcoms, let alone ones from the early 1970s.

* TheWoobie: Felix. He always generally means well. Sure, [[WellIntentionedExtremist he gets a little carried away sometimes]], but sometimes the others overreact.

** [[https://youtu.be/_U40AmMBHiI The funked-up rearrangement]] of Hefti's theme used for ''The New Odd Couple''.

* ItsTheSameNowItSucks: The reason ''The New Odd Couple'' lasted only 18 episodes. Eight of those episodes were {{Recycled Script}}s from the 1970-75 series, meaning viewers were watching more or less the same exact episodes, almost verbatim, with actors who weren't Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. Viewers weren't interested.

* RecycledScript: ''The New Odd Couple'' reused 8 scripts from the original.