When it comes to nostalgia, very few shows match “The Brady Bunch”. If you meet a person of a certain age and sing, “Just sit right back and hear a tale…”. Wait. I’m sorry, that’s from “Gilligan’s Island”. No, really, if you start off with “ Here’s the story… of a lovely lady”, they will finish the song for you with no prompting at all. They surely would love to see this video from the show.
We see two Brady Bunch clips. They are on some variety show and they perform two numbers, “Sunshine Day” and “Keep On Dancing”, while doing coordinated dance moves and wearing matching outfits. If this were filmed today, they would be on a show like “American Idol” and Simon Cowell would be scowling at them from behind his podium. Carol, Mike and Alice would all be backstage, rather than watching this on television.
The musical numbers that were on these show were cloyingly sweet so as to get past any network censors. That’s not the case today, where even shows on “family” networks have edgier numbers from teens like Sabrina Carpenter – yes, I have a young child that watches The Disney Channel. These kids were all goody two-shoes, even when they argued with each other. “Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!”
These clips hearken back to a time when television was extremely family-friendly. The family units had to be ultra-supportive of each other and musical numbers like this were par for the course. Even the shows in the seventies, although slightly edgier, still had a good message underneath. It wasn’t until “Married With Children” showed the darker, yet funny, side of family life. “Roseanne” was a look at blue-collar life. I don’t think that Becky (either one), Darlene and DJ would ever do a number like this.
What was your favorite episode? Was it the “Football Hits Marcia’s Face” episode? Please list it in the comments below, along with any commentary about it you can think of. Also, it would be swell if you could “Like” us on Facebook.
