THE BRAINY BUNCH

THE BRADY BUNCH
1969-1974 NBC

THE BRAINY BUNCH
Cracked #89, November 1970
a: John Severin

Obscure sitcom barely remembered today about widowed wife Carol and her three daughters Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb), and Cindy (Susan Olsen), who re-marries Mike (Robert Reed), who's busy with three boys of his own: Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight), and Bobby (Mike Lookinland). They knew they must somehow form a family, and that's the way they all became the Brady Bunch. The Brady Bunch.

The Cracked version portrays the family as living in chaos.

There was a housekeeper Alice (Ann B. Davis).

The mustache and teeth in the middle panel on the bottom were drawn in ballpoint pen by the original owner of the magazine.

Not sure who the father is supposed to be a caricature of. According to real-life Brady Bunch lore, Carol's original husband is the Professor from Gilligan's Island, which they decided was in the same universe because it had the same producer.

The new housekeeper is Juliet Mills from Nanny and the Professor.

From When All TV Must Grant Equal Time in MAD #158, April 1973 by Tom Koch and Angelo Torres. My Three Sons is kind of parodied here too.

Even though the show went off the air in 1974, the cast has been doomed to be the Bradys for the rest of their lives. There was The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, The Brady Brides, and several made-for-TV specials and movies. You always see Where Are They Now? stories about them. The answer: Same place they were when you saw them a few months ago.

THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE (1995)
dir: Betty Thomas

THE BARFY BUNCH Cracked #300, August 1995
w: Tony Frank (Lou Silverstone)
a: John Severin (incorrectly credited)

And if this weren't all enough, there was The Brady Bunch Movie in 1995 which cashed in on the nostalgia of the show while also mocking it. The premise was the family stayed as they were in the seventies while the rest of the world changed with the times. The movie was recast with Shelley Long (Carol), Christine Taylor (Marsha), Christopher Daniel Barnes (Greg), Paul Sutera (Peter), Gary Cole (Mike), Jennifer Elise Cox (Jan), Olivia Hack (Cindy), Jesse Lee Soffer (Bobby), and Henriette Mantel (Alice).

Jan is jealous of Marcia's popularity and hair and hears inner voices.

Their neighbor Mr. Dittmeyer (Michael McKean) is a real estate developer who keeps trying to buy the Bradys' property, since they're the last holdouts on the block keeping him from building a mall. They find they owe thousands in property taxes and the children go off to school where they're made fun of behind they're backs for being anachronistic.

(Oops, forgot to “colorize” the page below. You'll live.) One of the movie's campy in-jokes is that Marcia doesn't realize her best friend Noreen (Alanna Urbach) is a lesbian.

At home, Cindy overhears the parents owe taxes and the kids all decide to raise money doing chores in the neighborhood.

The plot of Marcia breaking her nose comes from the TV show.

Mike is an architect and thinks he can get a bonus at work selling designs for his houses. They're all turned down by investors for being from another era until he has some success with some clients from Japan.

Mr. Dittmeyer doesn't want the Bradys to come up with the money so he convinces the clients Mr. Brady is a bigot and gets them to pull out. The kids didn't make enough money doing chores so they enter a talent competition, except for Jan, who runs away and walks around the city hoping people will think she's cool. It's not mentioned in the parody, but it's established that she's nearsighted, which gets her in trouble.

Cindy tells the parents that Jan has run away. (The father's advice is always double-talk aphorisms that make no sense) The family finds her though their CB, where they locate a truck driver that rescued her. The truck driver is played by Ann B. Davis, who played Alice on the original show.

The kids win the talent show and come up with the money, which the Bradys use to buy back their home.

In another nod to the TV show, the original actress Florence Henderson plays the grandmother. The skeleton is a joke about how the original father was long dead when this movie was made.

A lot of the movie has sexual overtones and innuendo like Greg and Marcia almost sleeping together, the neighbor trying to seduce Peter, and Alice the maid and her butcher boyfriend making meat references. It's still innocent enough for a PG-13 rating.

But if hardcore pornography's your thing, there's this.

UPDATE:From The Final Episodes of Soured Sitcoms in Cracked #232, November 1987