Line #1 YMMV/TheBradyBunch


1	!![=YMMVs=] for [[Series/TheBradyBunch the series]]
2	* CommonKnowledge:
3	** Carol is commonly depicted as a widow, however it's never actually clarified what happened to her first husband. She was intended to be a divorcee, but the networks didn't agree on that, so her past marriage was kept ambiguous. Although the fact that her daughters' surname is changed to "Brady" seems to imply that Mike legally adopted them, and therefore that their birth father is dead.
4	** The oldest daughter's name is spelled "Marcia” not "Marsha". Although "Marsh-uh" is not the correct pronunciation of this Spanish name - it's "Mar-see-uh" – it is the common American pronunciation among non-Spanish-speakers. Although it is shown onscreen in a few episodes, the closed captioning on [=MeTV=] airings sometimes use the incorrect spelling.
5	** Cousin Oliver is often unfairly thought of as a horribly annoying character who directly caused the show's cancellation when his introduction was an attempt to bring the show's ratings back up. In fact, he was really just a symptom of the overall decline the show was already in, with the writers clearly having no interest in actually doing anything with him once he was introduced.
6	** Some people will claim that the Bradys' status as a blended family was more or less irrelevant to the show, that it was really just an "excuse" to have a sitcom about an unusually big family, because the kids "always" acted like biological siblings and treated their stepparents like real parents. Actually, Creator/SherwoodSchwartz specifically chose to create a sitcom about a blended family, because of the rising number of blended families in '60s America, and many of the first season's episodes revolve around the two halves of the family adjusting to each other's presence.
7	** Jan is usually treated as unpopular in pop culture, especially thanks to the movies. It doesn't help that the scene with her getting laughed at a party thanks to her showing up in a black wig is a very well-known scene. However, it's usually taken out of context. The guests, Jan's friends, assumed she was being silly, even saying she has such nice real hair, and immediately apologize when they realize what happened. The infamous "George Glass" storyline is also a complicated one. Jan isn't exactly unpopular with the boys in her class, she's just seen as OneOfTheGuys. And in true sitcom fashion, she eventually wins over the boy she likes. Of course, the movie resolved that in another way...
8	** Thanks to the movie, many people misremember the aforementioned "George Glass" story ending with George turning out to be RealAfterAll. Granted, it helps that some people simply prefer that ending...
9	* DoNotDoThisCoolThing: In "Will the Real Jan Brady Please Stand Up?" Mike and Carol lecture Jan about the folly of artificially changing her appearance by wearing a wig. The episode happens to fall right in the middle of a several-episode stretch in which Carol's signature "hair of gold" is dyed several shades darker.
10	* EnsembleDarkhorse: George Glass, Jan's imaginary boyfriend. He was so popular, that he was not only in a "two"-person Funko Pop with Jan, but he was referenced in ''A Very Brady Sequel''. He first appeared as a dummy Jan brought on a double date that Marcia and Greg were having [[spoiler:and then she met and fell in love with the ''real'' George Glass, a real teenage boy she encountered in Hawaii.]]
11	* HarsherInHindsight:
12	** During Oliver's official introduction, his clumsiness causes so many accidents around the house that he's convinced he's a [[TheJinx jinx]]. It was played for comic relief and mild angst, but it's not so funny when you remember the series was cancelled shortly afterwards ([[Series/SanfordAndSon although not necessarily and solely because of the addition of Oliver]]).
13	** In Season 4's "Greg Gets Grounded," Greg is prohibited from driving after his distracted driving nearly causes an accident on the freeway. Nearly a year after that episode aired, Barry Williams was involved in an accident caused by distracted driving (although the other driver was at fault).
14	** In Season 1's "The Undergraduate," when Marcia is advising Greg on the qualities women look for in a man, she claims he should be "sort of innocent, like Creator/DustinHoffman''. Since TheNewTens have seen Hoffman accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and assault over the course of his long career, hearing him described as "innocent" rings all too ironic.
15	** The fact that in the never-produced Season 6, Creator/SherwoodSchwartz planned to kill off Mike due to Robert Reed's HostilityOnTheSet, and later planned to do the same in ''The Bradys'' only to be stopped again by the show's cancellation. As it turned out, in 1992, Robert Reed was the first of the main cast members to die.
16	** A 1990 guide to the series ''The Brady Bunch Book'', quotes Robert Reed as saying that any classically trained actor like himself "would rather have ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}'' on his tombstone than ''The Brady Bunch''"; but the books' authors conclude "Hamlet on his tombstone? No, Robert Reed will remain the Brady patriarch forever." Reed died just two years after the book was published, and as it turned out, his tombstone makes no reference to ''The Brady Bunch'' and does say "Goodnight, Sweet Prince."
17	* HilariousInHindsight:
18	** Greg's stage name in one episode and in the first movie, WesternAnimation/JohnnyBravo.
19	** While trying to meet up with a girl who works as a park mascot in "The Cincinnati Kids", Greg approaches the wrong employee and hears an exaggeratedly gravelly voice from under the costume ask "Does this ''sound'' like a 'Marge' to you?" Actually, [[WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons yeah; it kinda does]].
20	** In one episode Greg makes reference to the Indy 500. Starting in the 1990s and until her death, native Hoosier Florence Henderson sang "God Bless America" before the start of the race.
21	* HollywoodHomely: Jan and occasionally Peter, but it's almost always all in their heads.
22	* InformedWrongness: In "Treasure of Sierra Avenue" the boys are portrayed as being in the wrong for not wanting to share the money that they found with their sisters, despite the fact that the girls not only weren't there when they found the money, but automatically assumed that the boys were going to allow them some of it too, and the girls proceed to throw a tantrum by refusing to "share" anything with them until Mike and Carol have to step in and force the boys to split the money if they get it in order to get some peace back in the house.
23	* MemeticLoser: Jan's MiddleChildSyndrome gets exaggerated into her being a whiny loser who's always in Marcia's shadow. The 1990s films went with this and [[CharacterExaggeration rolled with it]].
24	* MemeticMutation:
25	** Jan's "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" quote. She only uses it ''once'' but it's often mistaken for her {{catchphrase}}.
26	** Jokes about the character's being FlirtyStepsiblings are common in parodies.
27	** Cindy shouting "Thailboat!" when trying to work around her lisp in "A Fistful of Reasons".
28	** Alice's "love" for hot dogs, spun off from the multiple times she serves hot dogs in "The Slumber Caper".
29	* MisaimedFandom: The episode "Is There a Doctor in the House?", where the kids get measles and the disease's seriousness is severely underplayed, has been co-opted by the anti-vaccination movement to downplay and dismiss how dangerous measles is in real life, much to the dismay of several of the show's actors and crew. Creator/MaureenMcCormick was [[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/04/28/717595757/brady-bunch-episode-fuels-campaigns-against-vaccines-and-marcia-s-miffed especially livid,]] as she had measles as a kid and got far sicker from it than Marcia did, and as such, she vaccinated her own daughter the moment she was able to.
30	* NarmCharm: Pretty much the shows' defining characteristic.
31	* NightmareFuel:
32	** The tarantula in the Hawaii episodes, as well as the music that plays during Bobby's dream when he sees the UFO.
33	** The nightmare in "Bobby's Hero" where Jesse James shoots the Bradys as Bobby pleads with him to stop. This doubles as an in-universe example.
34	* OnceOriginalNowCommon: The entire premise of the show, about a mixed marriage family, has fallen victim to this since non-traditional families have become far more common. Also, how the Schwartzes -- in their autobiography -- view Robert Reed's vision of the show ... mindless "lectures" rather than just letting the scriptwriters do their work and taking reasonable input into consideration for script changes.
35	* RetroactiveRecognition:
36	** Ben Starr wrote three episodes. Starr is best known for co-creating ''Series/SilverSpoons'' and co-developing ''Series/TheFactsOfLife''.
37	** Alan Dinehart wrote an episode. Dinehart is best known for voicing Tiny Harper and Chief Anderson in ''Anime/BattleOfThePlanets''.
38	** Howard Leeds also wrote an episode and served as producer. Leeds is best known as creator and executive producer of ''Series/SmallWonder'' and also co-created ''Series/SilverSpoons'' and co-developed ''Series/TheFactsOfLife''.
39	** Robbie Rist, the original CousinOliver, would go on to have a successful career as a voice actor, including Michelangelo in the first three live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films and voicing Chouji Akimichi in the English dub of ''Manga/{{Naruto}}''.
40	* PeripheryDemographic: Similar to ''Series/FullHouse'' years later, the show is, for better or worse, very popular among people who've had abusive or otherwise traumatic childhoods. After all, what's a better escape from that than a show where a big, loving family have two equally loving, {{reasonable\|AuthorityFigure}} [[GoodParents parents]] and every conflict is, at worst, a minor inconvenience that can be solved in twenty minutes?
41	* TheScrappy: CousinOliver. Probably one of the most well-known scrappies ever. In fact, he was a Scrappy ''before'' the TropeNamer was conceived.
42	* SignatureScene: If the general public remembers one specific moment from the series other than theme song, it's Marcia's nose getting hit by a football and swelling up in 'The Subject Was Noses."
43	* SpiritualSuccessor:
44	** To the 1968 film ''Film/YoursMineAndOurs'', although Creator/SherwoodSchwartz conceived the idea for ''The Brady Bunch'' first.
45	** To ''Series/FamilyAffair'', another [[SweetnessAversion sometimes saccharine]] 1960s DomCom about an unconventional yet loving family (in that series three orphans raised by their bachelor uncle and his valet), with a teenage sister to provide romance and high school plots, and younger kids to provide cuteness, including a little blonde girl with GirlishPigtails consisting of twin sausage curls. (Cindy's hairstyle was directly inspired by Buffy's.)
46	* SweetnessAversion: The show is ''very'' saccharine, even by family sitcom standards.
47	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot: In "The Possible Dream," Marcia gets to meet Desi Arnaz Jr. because Alice is a friend of [[Creator/LucilleBall his mother's]] housekeeper. It's too bad that more wasn't made of this connection, and the Bradys never got to meet Lucille Ball, since the series is in some ways a SpiritualAdaptation of her film ''Film/YoursMineAndOurs''.
48	* TookTheBadFilmSeriously: Robert Reed, by all accounts.
49	* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: The show screams "early [[TheSeventies '70s]]" harder than just about any other product of its era. The show even captured a picture of how mainstream American society was moving at that time; from the early episodes where Carol had a bouffant, the girls wore skirts and dresses, the boys and Mike all had short hair to the later episodes where Carol relaxed on the haircare product, Mike and the boys let their hair grow out to their temples or shoulders, and the girls were seen in more slacks and jeans. This was a series that also depicted a married couple sleeping together (and with no additional children being conceived, possibly a reference to the increased availability of birth control) and of a blended family where both parents have been married before. [[note]]''The Goldbergs'' in 1954 depicted Molly and Jake in bed in an episode, but it wasn't a OncePerEpisode aspect like ''The Brady Bunch''.[[/note]]
50	* ValuesDissonance: While the show has stood the test of time for the most part, a handful of episodes have moments that clearly didn't age well past the mid 1970s:
51	** "The Liberation of Marcia Brady" and "A Fistful of Reasons" had very anxious female characters tell a Brady woman (Marcia and Carol, respectively) that they fear verbally disagreeing with male members of the family (Mrs. Hinton's case is her husband) would lead to something horrible. Most sitcoms today wouldn't be so blithe about DomesticAbuse and many people would see these as a cry for help.
52	** Also from "A Fistful of Reasons": Cindy is being bullied because of her lisp. When Peter stands up for her, the bully gives him a black eye. Today, bullying and violence are taken ''much'' more seriously in schools, and many of them have zero-tolerance policies. The bully would be at the very least be suspended. The conflict is also resolved by Peter finally punching the bully. Most modern family shows that deal with bullying usually find some way to solve the problem without violence.
53	** "Goodbye Alice, Hello" had Alice make some corny jokes and order the youngest Brady children to cover their birthday suits before going to a next-door neighbor's pool where the husband swims in the nude. At the time of this episode, the sexual revolution was in full swing, and it extended to boundary pushing about nudity in-family. This instance wasn't particularly sexual (as Bobby and Cindy are still clearly children), but the more "progressive" families would have been fine with it.
54	*** Not just the sexual revolution. Throughout much of the twentieth century, until UsefulNotes/TheSixties, boys' swimming lessons in pools, via high school, college, or the YMCA, were all nude, as nude swimming in pools was deemed more hygienic and (initially, at least) swimsuit fibers were seen as clogging hazards for swimming pool drains.
55	** In the premiere episode:
56	*** Carol tells Mike to take a tranquilizer for his anxiety over their wedding. When he tells her he already has, she nonchalantly tells him to take another one. This would probably be a rehab trigger today, but it goes a long way toward explaining TheSixties.
57	*** The boys bring the dog to the wedding in the pilot, and then leave the dog ''locked in the car''!
58	** Another Season 4 episode "Bobby's Hero" is set off when Bobby, pretending to be UsefulNotes/JesseJames, brings a cap-gun to school and pretends to hold other students hostage during recess. Mike and Carol are called up to the school, and everyone becomes more concerned with Bobby's idolization of a villain than anything and Bobby gets off with little more than a stern talking to about Jesse James later on. Post-Columbine, Bobby would likely be expelled.
59	** In "A Clubhouse is Not a Home", Mike is asked what he would do if his sons wanted to play with a dollhouse. Mike answers that he would take them to a psychiatrist which was standard parenting for 1969. If the show aired these days, gender rights advocates would demand that Mike be the one to see the psychiatrist for making a comment like that.
60	** The Season 1 episode "Is There a Doctor in the House?" treats the potentially fatal disease of measles as sitcom tomfoolery. Come TheNewTens and the anti-vaxxer movement defending this episode's portrayal of measles, [[https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/29/entertainment/maureen-mccormick-measles-anti-vaxxers-the-brady-bunch/index.html much to the horror of Maureen McCormick and Lloyd Schwartz.]]
61
62	!![=YMMVs=] for [[Film/TheBradyBunch the movies]]
63	* AdaptationDisplacement: Most young people discovering the movies through social media aren't aware of the show's existence and are legitimately shocked when they find out that the movies are based on a real sitcom from the '70s.
64	* AudienceColoringAdaptation: As the movies deliberately exaggerated the most memetic parts of the original series (like Jan's MiddleChildSyndrome and Marcia hurting her nose), their depictions of the characters tend to be the ones most remembered by modern audiences.
65	* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: [[Music/TheMonkees Davy Jones]] shows up to sing "Girl", accompanied by some grunge instrumentals. It works surprisingly well considering The Monkees were the polar opposite of grunge.
66	* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: Two from ''A Very Brady Sequel''.
67	** Trevor's hallucinations of the Brady kids in a cartoon. While fans of the franchise would recognise it as a nod to ''WesternAnimation/TheBradyKids'' cartoon, it still feels out of place simply because nothing actually happens in it.
68	** The Brady Kids performing "Good Time Music" while flying a plane to Hawaii.
69	* ContestedSequel: While ''A Very Brady Sequel'' has by and large been VindicatedByHistory, whether it remains overshadowed by the first movie or is a SurprisinglyImprovedSequel is open for debate. In particular, arguments tend to crop up about whether the shift toward more irreverent humor fit better or worse with the overall tone.
70	* CriticalDissonance: The first film got some downright nasty reviews from critics who didn't really know what to make of its AffectionateParody tone. The expectation was that it would be a BoxOfficeBomb as a result, but positive word-of-mouth made it one of the bigger hits of the DumpMonths of early 1995.
71	* CultClassic: Both the first and second films qualify in slightly different ways. Neither did well critically, but the first ended up a bonafide hit at the box office due to good word of mouth and is now often touted as one of the comedic high marks of UsefulNotes/TheNineties. The second didn't do nearly as well financially but has since been VindicatedByHistory for taking the humor of its predecessor in a more irreverent direction without losing its sharpness, and is today generally seen as a worthy or even SurprisinglyImprovedSequel. [[{{Sequelitis}} The third movie wasn't nearly as lucky]].
72	* HamAndCheese: Creator/ShelleyLong and especially Creator/GaryCole both take the cheesy, hyper-earnest characterizations of Carol and Mike from the show up to eleven, and are clearly having a blast doing it. Since Cole hadn't done much comedy up to that point, his performance was a pleasant surprise.
73	* HeartwarmingInHindsight: Almost 25 years after Paramount released a movie all about keeping the Brady Bunch's horse inside their house, HGTV moved the ''Brady Bunch'' movies' horse from Paramount's storage facility, to the real-life version of the Brady House; the original Peter Brady, Christopher Knight, even called it "a member of the family" before replacing its missing legs with 3D-printed reproductions.
74	* HilariousInHindsight:
75	** At the end of the first movie, Cindy is shown being jealous of her sister Jan's attention. Fast-forward a few years and find her actress, Olivia Hack, voicing [[WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender a certain girl with 'six identical sisters' and her rant that sometimes she felt like she didn't even have her own name.]]
76	** Both Peter Tork and Creator/MichaelMcKean appear in the first film. Both actors would play the part of Topanga's dad on ''Series/BoyMeetsWorld''.
77	** The first film shows the family [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rKeqPEGMvM going to a Sears department store and singing "Sunshine Day"]]. At the time of the film's release (1995), Sears could be reasonably said to be one of the biggest department store chains in North America. Twenty-three years later, they went bankrupt in the face of mounting online pressure and fierce competition from other retail chains like Target and Walmart. While the joke at the time was that the Bradys getting all excited about going to a large lower-end department store is a prime example of IncrediblyLameFun (though at least a bit more modern than their obsession with TheSeventies), these days, with Sears itself as now a relic of the past, it just makes them look more dated, and unintentionally makes the joke even funnier.
78	** Tim Matheson playing Carol's [[spoiler: fake]] first husband, Roy, is pretty amusing for fans of ''Series/TheWestWing'' where Matheson played Vice President Hoynes for the first four seasons. When his character was written out, he was replaced by Bob Russell played by Creator/GaryCole who plays Mike Brady.
79	* HollywoodHomely: CharacterExaggeration causes the other characters to talk about Jan as though she were hideous despite her being perfectly fine-looking. This is all PlayedForLaughs and serves to further emphasize Jan's MiddleChildSyndrome opposite the stunning Marcia.
80	* ImprovedSecondAttempt: ''A Very Brady Sequel'' gives the George Glass storyline a more heartwarming ending than the TV show did. [[spoiler:In the original episode, boys only returned Jan's affections after she conformed to their expectations of feminine beauty. In the movie, George and Jan both love each other for themselves.]]
81	* MemeticMutation: When Creator/{{Netflix}} added ''A Very Brady Sequel'' in 2015, younger viewers got a kick out of the scene where Jan came up with her fake boyfriend George Glass, and 19 years after its original release, it became a huge Tumblr meme, centered on Marcia's "That's funny, I've never heard of a George Glass at ''our'' '''sküle'''", and her "Sure, Jan" becoming a popular reaction gif to express doubt at a statement.
82	* DarthWiki/NightmareFuel: [[EvilSoundsRaspy Jan's third inner voice]], signifying the precarious state of her emotional well-being after getting pushed aside one too many times.
83	* OlderThanTheyThink:
84	** The concept of a revival of the series that satirizes the original owes a lot to ''The Real Live Brady Bunch'', a stage show debuting in 1991 that simply re-enacted episodes of the series, but with heavy doses of {{Irony}} and AffectionateParody. The connection is very direct because Christine Taylor and Jennifer Elise Cox played Marcia and Jan, respectively, in regional productions of ''The Real Live Brady Bunch'' before they were cast as those roles in the films.[[note]]The original Chicago production of ''The Real Live Brady Bunch'' had [[Series/TheOfficeUS Kate Flannery]] as Carol, with Creator/JaneLynch as her understudy, and [[Series/SaturdayNightLive Melanie Hutsell]] as Jan. When it moved to New York for an off-Broadway run, Flannery and the original Mike dropped out, so Lynch took over as Carol and Creator/AndyRichter was brought on as Mike[[/note]]
85	** The TV show previously gave Jan an inner voice in "Her Sister's Shadow", tempting her to accept an award that she only won because the teacher miscalculated her points.
86	** George Glass actually comes from the original series. Many assume it was a joke invented for the film. Jan's quirky delivery of the line "His name...? Is George!" is a direct lift from the original episode.
87	** The 1993 theatrical remake of ''Series/TheBeverlyHillbillies'' drew humor from the fish-out-of-water plot of showing a classic TV family with old-fashioned values clashing with modern-day Los Angeles values, two years before ''The Brady Bunch Movie''.
88	* {{Sequelitis}}: ''A Very Brady Sequel'' wasn't as successful at the box office, and was criticized for being a bit raunchier and more contrived than the first movie, though others felt it was a SurprisinglyImprovedSequel. (Ironically, it is better remembered ''today'' because it is the source of the "sküle" and "Sure, Jan" memes.) ''The Brady Bunch in the White House'' is unanimously considered less funny than the earlier movies.
89	* TakeThatScrappy: In ''A Very Brady Sequel'', [[spoiler:after Bobby unsuccessfuly stops CousinOliver from running out into the street after Tiger, he and Cindy hear a car screech. Instead of checking for an accident, Bobby and Cindy just shrug their shoulders and continue eating.]] For those who aren't kosher with the idea of a PG-13 comedy movie [[spoiler:offing a dog and a child for laughs, keep in mind that if the producers really wanted to drive (no pun intended) the joke home, you would've heard a tire screech AND a thump.]]
90	* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: Dittmeyer's attempt to defame Mike as a shoddy architect could only have worked in an age where the internet wasn't readily available to refute his lie.
91	* VindicatedByHistory: ''A Very Brady Sequel'' was less warmly received than the first film when it was released, but has since gained recognition as a solid movie in its own right. The shift away from the first movie's emphasis on juxtaposing the Bradys with the culture of UsefulNotes/TheNineties has even caused some to declare it to be a SurprisinglyImprovedSequel.
92	* TheWoobie: Jan in spades. She's jealous of her sister, she tries to prove herself to be a better person, craves attention even in the most unnecessary methods such as the wig and finally runs away after Marsha steals her idea. You can't help but feel sorry for her.

Context YMMV / TheBradyBunch