Boomers may be horrified, but for the 25-to-35 generation, “The Brady Bunch” is both camp and comfort zone. The show ran from 1969 to ’74, when TV families were still functional (even if real ones weren’t) and a teenager’s worst nightmare was braces, not AIDS. It’s a flashback to a pre-ironic age when it was OK to be uncool, to get excited about a family potato-sack race. Unlike those other sitcom movies (“The Addams Family,” “The Beverly Hillbillies”), “The Brady Bunch” isn’t just about a TV show. It’s about an entire era. Audiences break into song when the theme music kicks in and the new cast fills up the hokey ticktack-toe board of Brady faces that began every show. “Here’s the story/Of a man named Brady …” Oh, we know the story: widower with three boys marries widow with three girls. Two decades later, we still can’t get enough of it.
The movie’s inspired premise is that the Bradys are living in 1995 but trapped in 1972. Time-warped in their own private Encino, they’re still wearing hip-hugging bell-bottoms and saying “far out” a lot. They’re oblivious to wisecracks from neighbors and grunged-out high-school kids. “Doug, your hand is on my shoulder,” prim Marcia (Christine Taylor) rebukes a date. “That’s third base, and I don’t go that far.” Next to the blissed-out Bradys, the movie’s ’90s characters seem terminally jaded. But last week’s big showing at the box office means that jaded MTV kids are into it, too. “We’ve gone beyond the core,” says executive producer Alan Ladd Jr. “Non-Brady people are also enjoying themselves.” The plot–an evil mini-mall developer (Michael McKean) tries to force the Bradys to sell their house–is an anemic pretext to cobble together everybody’s favorite Brady moments. Jan (Jennifer Elise Cox), the conflicted middle child, whines about living in the shadow of “Marcia Marcia Marcia”–her pretty, popular, perfect older sister. Greg (Christopher Daniel Barnes) transforms himself into rock star “Johnny Bravo.” Mike (Gary Cole) delivers rambling paternal homilies, while doting wife Carol (Shelley Long) nods her blond flip. These ludicrously banal scenarios are re-created with deadpan goofiness by director Betty Thomas. Her actors aren’t playing Bradys; they’re channeling them. Cameos by Ann B. Davis (the TV Alice) and a couple of original Brady kids remind you how eerily “real” their impostors are.
As the Bunch’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, likes to say, “You can’t kill the Bradys.” His shots at bringing them back in TV-series sequels died because nobody wants to see aging Bradys; we want them forever frozen in ’70s time. That’s what made Barry Williams’s 1992 tell-all, “Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg,” a best seller. And it’s why a Chicago theater troupe scored a cult hit by performing entire “Brady Bunch” episodes verbatim. (One lucky parodist from the play even landed a stint doing Jan on “Saturday Night Live.”) The current wave of Bradymania is the product of corporate synergy and strategic hype. Paramount’s “Brady” movie was heavily promoted on Nick at Nite, the classic-TV cable service owned by Viacom, Inc., the media monster that also owns Paramount, whose TV division syndicates reruns of the original series around the country–and the globe.
“An American-cheese sandwich on white bread,” is how screenwriter Bonnie Turner thinks of her adoptive family. The savvy pop-cult archivists at Nick at Nite also produced a tongue-in-cheek mock documentary called “Brady: An American Chronicle” in the style of PBS’s “The Civil War,” complete with grainy stills, banjo music and fake historians close-reading the show as “a beacon of unity after the dark divisiveness of the ’60s.” To sell the Bunch’s symbolic resonance to the next generation, Nick set up an Internet site where an image of the young, geeky Greg can be morphed into the fully permed, sideburned hunk of the show’s later years. So now there are even interactive Bradys. Far out.
Screenwriters Bonnie and Terry Turner have captured the lure of the campy TV family by making ‘The Brady Bunch Movie’ a parody of the show. While the film is set in the jaded 1990s, the Bradys, uncanny look-alikes, remain in the ’70s, worrying about braces and oblivious to their surroundings.
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