Inundated by The Brady Bunch New release has 75 hours of live and animated features
Gather ‘round, kiddos, for this review of The Brady-est Brady Bunch TV & Movie Collection will, as never before, attempt to make sense of this unkillable piece of pop culture iconography. Your humble reviewer was in the thick of things when The Brady Bunch, the 1969-74 family sitcom, staked its claim onto the American consciousness, and can offer a bit perspective those generations, just before and since, can’t quite reconcile. But before we do that, let’s first point
DVD REVIEW
STUART GALBRAITH IV
out that this compact if unruly boxed DVD set, with a total running time of around 75 hours (!) of material includes
with one notable exception just about everything Brady-related one might possibly ever want: the original series; The Brady Kids animated spin-off; The Brady Girls Get Married TV movie and its short-lived sitcom follow-up, The Brady Brides; A Very Brady Christmas, a later TV reunion film and its series follow-up, The Bradys; the two Brady Bunch theatrical features satirizing the original show, as well as The Brady Bunch in the White House, a third satire so bad that it went straight to TV; and Growing Up Brady, a sentimental TV movie adaptation of co-star Barry Williams’s making-of/autobiography. What’s missing, of course, is The Brady Bunch Hour, the awesomely bad musical variety series guaranteed to turn one’s brain into cottage cheese, a series so mind-bogglingly weird it must be seen to be believed. That short-lived series, however, was produced by Sid & Marty Krofft Productions, not by Paramount Television. Theoretically it could have licensed it from the former, but that’s OK.
Some personal background: Like most kids growing up in the early 1970s, I didn’t watch The Brady Bunch during its primetime network run. Not many did. It ranked near the bottom of the ratings during its first and final seasons, and even at its peak never broke into the Top 30, let alone the Top 10. I think I caught all or parts of an episode twice. However, after its five-season run ended, The Brady Bunch immediately went into syndication. Boy, howdy, did it go into syndication. In the Detroit TV market where I lived, The Brady Bunch at its peak aired at least 15 times per week, twice back-to-back in the afternoons, and then again at 7 pm. (I think it also aired once or twice over the weekend.) Like it or not, an entire generation of American children were pretty much stuck watching The Brady Bunch. And because they were run and rerun into the ground, their very unavoidability seared our collective consciousnesses with “Oh! My nose!”
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66 August 6, 2020 DuluthReader.com
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