Follow TV Tropes

Following

Recap / The Brady Bunch S 5 E 11 The Cincinnati Kids

Go To

On April 29, 1972, Cincinnati, Ohio-based Taft Broadcasting (owners of Hanna-Barbera, among other assets) opened Kings Island theme park in Mason, a suburb of Cincy about 35 minutes north on I-71. To promote the park, the next year Paramount, a large Taft shareholder, decided to produce a Brady Bunch episode set in the park.note 

Once again, the kids are impatient as Mike has a surprise for them. So he finally comes home, and gives the grand announcement: his boss, Mr. Phillips, asked him to deliver some plans for expansion for a theme park in Cincinnati, and he offers to take his whole family along. So the Brady kids are for some time now Cincinnati Kids.

After arriving in the Queen City, the Bradys head out to the park... where Greg tries to flirt with a girl named Marge, who is filling in for her brother at a ball toss game, Bobby and Cindy spend much of the time eating, and Jan manages to win a poster. The family meets up for lunch just before Mike is due to leave for the 1 PM meeting with the manager. Seeing the yellow canisters containing the blueprints, Jan asks if he could fit the plans into one canister and lend her the other for the poster. Mike agrees...

...only that when he arrives at the meeting, he discovers that he took the wrong canister with him - so instead of the blueprints for the expansion, he presented a Yogi Bear poster. However, as the managers have to catch a plane to New York in half an hour, he quickly races off to meet his family and recover the posters. Only that when Jan arrives, she has lost the canister! So the family sets out to find it. Retracing their steps, Jan and Marcia manage to find the canister in the rowboat where Jan had left it. They run off towards the manager's office, but it's quite a long way to go, so the Bradys (except Mike, who in the meantime gave up on finding the plans, decided to go to the managers' office and face the music) end up having a relay race. Getting tired, Marcia and Jan pass the canister over to Alice, who takes it to Bobby and Cindy, they pass it over to Greg and Peter, and finally, they take it to Carol. The managers are now leaving to catch the plane... but Mike says he could call his office and ask them to send them copies. Albeit it's no good, as they have to make the decision in the morning. However, just then, Carol arrives with the canister. Discovering that it has the blueprints, not another bear poster, Mike just barely made the deadline, the blueprints have been passed on, and the managers are on their way to the Big Apple. Just then, the kids and Alice, all exhausted, arrive, ready to go to bed, only for Mike to tell them that he was planning to take them all to the rollercoaster. And suddenly, they're not tired at all and all enthusiastically agree.

Then the next day, as Mike and Carol are packing for leaving, Mike gets a call from Mr. Phillips, telling him that the clients just called from NY, and they had approved the plans! So Mr. Phillips decided to give the Bradys a few extra days at the park on the company's account. Just then, Peter comes in, dressed as a mascot. As Marge was again filling in for her brother, Greg still wanted to take her out to lunch, so he paid him $5 to fill in for her!

Tropes present in this episode:

  • Enforced Plug: The episode's plot — Mike taking a business trip to Cincinnati and getting to take everyone along — takes a backseat to promoting the then-newly opened King's Island.
  • Just in Time: The Bradys get the blueprints to Mike, who is able to give them to his client mere seconds before the dreaded deadline.
  • Race Against the Clock: Everyone tag-teaming and sprinting across King's Island to get a set of recovered blueprints to Mike in time for a 5 o'clock deadline.
  • Satchel Switcheroo: A container with Mike's plans for an expansion to King's Island accidentally gets swapped with one containing a Yogi Bear poster that Jan picked up at the park.
  • Technology Marches On: In 1974, Mike mobilizes his family to find the blueprints and deliver them to the manager's office, and they end up having a relay race to deliver the plans on time. Today, he could have just called Jan on a cellphone from the office and ask her to find the plans and deliver them to him, or at least meet up somewhere. Also, instead of the plans on paper, he more likely would have them on a external computer flashdrive, that he would keep on him the whole time. Or maybe even easier, have them in an online cloud server.

Top