Trivia / The Odd Couple (1970)

• Acting for Two: Tony Randall occasionally would also play Felix's relatives, such as his father in a flashback, and his grandfather in an episode where Grandpa Unger is thrown out by his wife and moves in with Oscar while Felix is out of town on business.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • The TV show featured a greatly increased focus on Oscar's gambling, especially at the track, and Felix's love of opera because those were particular interests of their respective actors.
  • Oscar's wardrobe on the show was, in many cases, Klugman's own.
• Approval of God: Both Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, who starred in the original play and film adaptation, were fans of the series and greatly admired Klugman and Randall's take on the characters.
• Corpsing:
  • Klugman seems to have been particularly prone to this, based not only on the outtakes but on several episodes in which his slips were concealed or controlled quickly enough that they didn't ruin the scene and were left in (e.g. "Murray the Fink", "Two Men on a Hoarse").
  • One scene, which is usually played in the opening, in which Oscar dries his hands on Felix's shirt (after Felix yells at him not to do it on the curtains) has Randal turning to the camera as if testing himself to see if he won't break.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Jack Klugman and Tony Randall's favorite episodes were "Sleepwalker", "Password", "Last Tango in Newark", and "The New Car".
• Edited for Syndication: When Klugman and Randall complained about the laugh track during the first season, ABC aired a trial episode without one (the episode in which Oscar gets fired from the paper and takes a job with a girly magazine). While initially syndicated without a track, one has been edited in in recent years.
• Enforced Method Acting: Klugman and Randall didn't particularly get along at the beginning of the first season (Marshall had insisted on Jack over Randall's own recommendation, Mickey Rooney, who had co-starred with him as Oscar on Broadway), and the tension was only made worse by the aforementioned first-season laugh track, which both actors, as veteran stage performers, considered a poor substitute for a live audience.
• Executive Meddling:
  • As it happened to The Brady Bunch, ABC's standards at the time still forbade as late as 1971 that divorced characters could have children. Oscar (who had two sons in the play and movie) became explicitly childless, while Felix's kids began appearing in the second season.
  • In the third season the network decided that what the show needed were guest stars. The show almost became a Lucy-like star-of-the-week clone, with everyone from Howard Cosell to Bob Hope to Bobby Riggs to Rodney Allen Rippy taking their turn at bat.
• Gay Panic: The show wasn't allowed to hint, much less outright reference, to homosexuality. This is why the "Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?" spiel was added to the opening credits; it also resulted in one script being tossed out completely and the end of another ("The Flying Felix") being heavily rewritten.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Some scripts were like this, allowing Tony Randall and Jack Klugman to improvise. For example, a script might say "Oscar teaches Felix how to play football."
• Only Barely Renewed: Despite a respectable five-season run, the show was actually canceled after every season after season 2 due to poor ratings, only bouncing back when it would go into reruns during the summer. Klugman and Randall would hype up the series when it was off the air by doing a touring production of the original play, encouraging audiences to write in and request that the TV show remain in production.
• Prop Recycling: The 'black donut' painting from the second season episode "Security Arms" shows up again in season three's "Take My Furniture, Please".
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Husband and wife Jack Klugman and Brett Somers playing a divorced couple. In real life, Klugman and Somers split up during the series and she still came back to guest star, meaning they were a separated couple playing a divorced couple.
  • Klugman's son Adam appeared as "Little Oscar" in a few episodes.
  • In her final episode as Myrna Turner, Penny Marshall's real-life brother (Odd Couple producer Garry Marshall) and sister appear as her character's siblings, Werner and Verna Turner; her then-husband Rob Reiner played Sheldn, Myrna's boyfriend.
• Recycled: The Series: From a play to a movie to a TV series. Many prefer the series to the film.
• Recycled Set: The first season was shot on the same apartment set as the film.
• Throw It In!: The scenes of Felix and Oscar out in the streets of New York during the intro were completely improvised. One of the show's directors simply followed Randal and Klugman around New York and filmed them doing various things in-character.
• Trolling Creator: Randall and Klugman would intentionally play up the homoerotic subtext on certain takes and the producers would put those into the initial cuts sent to the network censors because they knew it would cause studio executives' heads to explode.
• Vindicated by Reruns: The show kept shifting timeslots while on the air, so only during summer reruns, when it was on at a consistent time, did it gain a significant audience. When the series finally ended and went into syndication, it got those consistent timeslots once again. Its popularity skyrocketed (just as Klugman himself had confidently predicted).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Art Carney and Dean Martin (!) were both considered for Felix.
  • Mickey Rooney was considered for Oscar.
  • For the second season, the network gave the producers two options: include the narration during the opening title, "Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?", or add lyrics to the theme song that basically proclaimed Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?.
  • There was an alternate finale filmed that would have aired in the event that the show was picked up for a sixth season.
• Written-In Infirmity: Klugman and Randall took on the roles again in a series of late '80s/early '90s commercials for Eagle brand potato chips, all of which had to be written around Klugman's nearly non-existent voice after his heavy smoking resulted in him losing a vocal cord. Later came 1993's The Odd Couple: Together Again, by which time Klugman had regained some volume, but still spoke in an extremely raspy and wheezy voice, so Oscar is said to have recently had the same throat operation.
• You Look Familiar:
  • In one episode Allan Arbus (best known as Dr. Sidney Freeman) plays a hypnotist; in another a Hollywood director.
  • Comedian John Bynner plays a parking lot owner in one episode and a weight-loss pill company exec in another.
  • John Fiedler played a dog trainer in one episode and the owner of an ultra-secure security building in another, as well as playing Vinnie in the movie and Felix in some Broadway productions.
  • Richard Stahl appeared in nine different episodes as nine different characters. Among them are a monk, a minister, and a pet shop owner.

---