The Brady Bunch Quiz

Mike’s wife passed away, but the fate of Carol’s husband—last name Martin—officially remains unknown. Sherwood Schwartz, the creator and producer, said that he intended for Carol to be a divorcee, but that notion was too hot for primetime in the 1960s.

The Bradys lived in a split-level ranch in Los Angeles. Their house had to be large enough to shelter two parents, six kids, and a live-in maid.

The six kids shared one Jack-and-Jill bathroom, meaning it had one door to the girls’ bedroom and another to the boys’. At the time, the networks could not show a toilet bowl on television, so the large bathroom did not have one.

In the pilot episode, the Bradys’ story was sung by a group called Peppermint Trolley Company. The rest of the first season featured vocals by various studio musicians. From season two onward, audiences got to hear the actual Brady kids singing their life story.

Sherwood Schwartz, the creator and producer of the show, saw a stat in the Los Angeles Times, regarding marriages: In 1965, evidently, 31 percent of marriages involved at least one child from a previous marriage. Schwartz also created Gilligan's Island (which featured no kids).

Jan, the middle girl, is jealous of her older sister, Marcia. Jan’s teacher even goes on about how great Marcia is. Appropriately, the episode is called Her Sister’s Shadow.

Sherwood Schwartz shopped his idea for a show about a blended family, calling it Yours and Mine. Studios rejected the idea, but then Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda starred in a film called Yours, Mine and Ours, about a blended family with 18 children! Talks resumed between Schwartz and ABC, with the show being called The Bradley Brood for a time.

In A Fistful of Reasons, a bully named Buddy teases Cindy about her lisp. Susan Olsen, who played Cindy, actually had a lisp and had surgery to correct it when she was an adult.

Some episodes of the show featured the Bradys singing, probably to emulate the popular Partridge Family. Christopher Knight, who played Peter, usually had to lip-synch because he was not a good singer. In a song called Time to Change, the idea was to incorporate Peter’s cracking voice while he was going through puberty, but even then his vocals had to be dubbed.

In the show’s first episode, The Honeymoon, the boys had a dog, Tiger, and the girls had a cat, Fluffy. Sadly, Tiger was written out of the show after the dog was hit by a car in real life. Fluffy was never seen after the first episode, for reasons unknown. It was not good to be a Brady pet.

The six kids perform as the Silver Platters as an inside joke. They had ordered an engraved silver platter for their parents’ anniversary, believing that the engraving was a flat 85 cents. In fact, the engraving cost 85 cents per letter. The Brady kids enter a talent show, hoping to win $100 to pay for the gift.

In the episode The Subject Was Noses, Christopher Knight (as Peter) was supposed to throw a football at Maureen McCormick (as Marcia). However, he did not have the necessary skill. A staff member stepped in and hit her right in the face—with more speed and accuracy than intended.

The Bradys had a 1971 Plymouth Satellite Wagon and a Chevrolet Impala convertible. In the episode called The Winner, Mike and Carol drive to an ice cream shop in their station wagon but leave in their convertible. Oops!

Mike designed the split-level ranch where his family lived, and he had an office with a drafting table just off the sunken living room. In The Bradys, a 1990 CBS special, Jan was also an architect, following in Mike’s footsteps.

In the episode Juliet Is the Sun, Marcia is cast as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, even though she had auditioned for a smaller part. During rehearsals, Marcia’s ego expands, and she even wants to rewrite Shakespeare’s dialogue. She is let go, but ultimately she plays Juliet’s mother when another girl gets the mumps.

In the episode Sorry, Right Number, after Mike gets tired of high phone bills and squabbles over whose turn it is to use the phone, Mike installs a pay phone in the family room. Legalities aside, this seems like a crazy solution. (For younger readers: phones used to be connected to walls and have cords, and public phones had coin slots that took nickels, dimes, and quarters!)

Alice leaves the Brady household when the kids think she has tattled on them, and she takes a job as a waitress. Kay, the new maid and Alice’s friend, tells the kids where they can find Alice to apologize.

In the episode Getting Davy Jones, Marcia foolishly promises that Davy Jones of the Monkees will perform at her school's prom, just because he is supposed to be in town at the time. Of course, in the magical world of scripted television, Davy comes through.

Eight-year-old Oliver, who is Carol’s nephew, comes to live with the Bradys because … well … six kids just aren’t enough. Adding a new, younger cast member to a show to liven things up is now a trope, known as “Cousin Oliver Syndrome.”

Robert Reed, who played Mike, frequently complained about the show’s scripts. He especially disliked the script for what turned out to be their final episode, in which Greg accidentally colors his hair orange just before his high-school graduation. Mike's character was written out of the script.