Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (48 page)

But since Marcia has to return next week, she can't run off with an
older man, and the older man absolutelypositively can't bag Marcia.

Marcia's dreams all come tumbling down when Jan finds out
that Dr. Vogel's ... gulp ... married! And it's only as Marcia tries to
dump the guy that she realizes he never wanted her in the first
place. It was all just one of those kooky sitcom mixups.

WRITER: Martin A. Ragaway

DIRECTOR: George "Buddy" Tyne

EPISODE 85: "EVERYBODY CAN'T BE GEORGE
WASHINGTON"

The Bradys have school-play problems yet again. They survived
Marcia's big-headed Juliet debacle, and muddled through Mike's
poetry at Westdale High's Family Frolics, only to run smack into
the Peter Brady/Benedict Arnold dilemma.

In a nutshell, Peter tries out for his school play hoping to audition well enough to land the part of George Washington. He suc ceeds ... too well. He's too good to merely play the father of our
country, and instead lands the play's most difficult part ...
Benedict Arnold.

Once that's established, Pete spends the rest of the half-hour
trying to weasel his way out of the role, until finally he realizes how
important Benedict Arnold is to the play, and how his classmates
are depending upon him.

The stage play fills out the episode, and it's pretty funny, especially Peter's/Benedict's deathbed schtick.

WRITERS: Sam Locke and Milton Pascal

DIRECTOR: Richard Michaels

Nepotism Alert! Barbara Bernstein, Florence Henderson's
daughter, is back again, this time playing a gal named Peggy.

EPISODE 86: "GREG'S TRIANGLE"

Greg's hanging with this extra-curvy cheerleader named
Jennifer who's just plain throwing herself at him. Turns out she's
paying attention to Greg only because he's judging the headcheerleader competition and can snag her the position she's
always wanted.

Trouble brews and Marcia stews, because she wants to be head
cheerleader too. She disses Jennifer to Greg, thus becoming the
second hopeful looking to take advantage of her relationship with
the head judge.

Finally, when push comes to shove, Greg makes like a Brady and
does the right thing. He doesn't vote for Jennifer, doesn't vote for
Marcia, and instead votes for Pat, the girl who's ... the most talented.

WRITERS: Bill Freedman and Ben Gershman

DIRECTOR: Richard Michaels

• Pat is played by a young actress named Rita Wilson, who'd one
day grow up, fill out, and marry a guy named Tom Hanks.

EPISODE 87: "BOBBY'S HERO"

Bobby unexplainably decides that Jesse James is now his hero
(he was originally supposed to worship a skyjacker, but the network nixed it as "too real"). Mike, Carol, and Bobby's teachers
unanimously hate the idea; but books about Mr. James and even a
movie about the bad guy fail to dissuade Bobby's enthusiasm.
Only a visit from an old geezer named Jethro Collins, whose
entire family was wasted by James, and an eerily realistic nightmare in which Jesse James offs the Bradys (to the delight of every TV critic in America) and slaps the deranged Brady kid out of his
infatuation.

WRITER: Michael Morris

DIRECTOR: Leslie H. Martinson

• During the "mass murder of the Bradys" scene, look closely at
Mike Lookinland's face. You'll notice that he seems genuinely horrified at the cartoon-style carnage taking place around him. That's
because Lloyd Schwartz took the kid off into a corner right before
the scene and basically just scared the hell out of him. Lloyd tells it
this way:

"I knew that the family was going to die funny, but I wanted
genuine horror to show up on Bobby's face. I knew those two
things would work against each other, and that was the effect we
were going for.

"First we did the scene with no rehearsal for Bobby. We
rehearsed the `funny dying,' but he had no rehearsal for the actual
shooting. So I took Michael outside and proceeded to discuss with
him things like having his dog run over, or his parents being shot,
lying in the street with blood oozing out of them and maybe their
brains splattered on the sidewalk, and I just filled his head with
these horrifying gory images, because I wanted him to think about
those things while the whole shooting scene was taking place.

"I told him, 'You're not to see the Bradys dying funny. You're to
see Jesse shooting your real parents, and they're really dying.'
That's why when you watch that episode, you'll see real terror in
Bobby's face. The whole thing worked really well.

"And then I had a debriefing with Michael right after."

• Burt Mustin, who played Jethro Collins, owned one of those
familiar but nameless TV faces and was often referred to as "that
old guy." He was past eighty-eight when we shot this episode, but
he kept right on performing (he had a recurring role on "All in the
Family" as the guy Edith sprang from the old folks' home) until his
death, in 1977, at the ripe old age of ninety-three.

EPISODE 88: "THE GREAT EARRING CAPER"

Carol lends her favorite antique earrings to Marcia, and they
promptly come up missing in action. Why? It's simple. Cindy stole
'em, then proceeded to lose em.

Desperate, the youngest, blondest Brady sucks up to Peter and
begs him to employ his new detective kit in searching for the earrings. Twenty-two minutes go by, and they fail ... miserably. It's
only after Cindy confesses and the entire Brady brood "re-enacts
the crime" that the earrings show up safe ... but unsound. Turns out they ended up in the washing machine, where one earring survived untouched, but the other got mangled.

The Bradys' only unhappy ending.

WRITERS: Larry Rhine and Al Schwartz

DIRECTOR: Leslie H. Martinson

EPISODE 89: "GREG GETS GROUNDED"

Greg is rubber necking sidewalk babes while driving and nearly cracks up the family wagon. He swears Bobby to secrecy, but
the little guy blabs almost immediately. Mike and Carol are justifiably pissed off, and they take away Greg's car privileges for a
week.

Oh no, not that-not when Greg's got rock-concert tickets!
Hmmmm ... Greg ponders his punishment, and with the buglike dexterity of a divorce lawyer, chews himself a loophole.
Y'see, Mike took away Greg's family car privileges for a week, but
if he could get a buddy to lend him some wheels, he could still
take a date to the concert without ever really breaking a single
rule!

So that's what he does. Mike's angry about this sneaky behavior, but realizes that there's nothing he can do about it.

Then he hears Greg promise to take Peter, Bobby, and their
enormous toads to the "big frog-jumping contest." When Greg
later tries to back out of the deal (he's got a hot date with
Rachel) Mike makes sure that he keeps his word-after all,
wasn't that what their car argument was all about?

Flash forward and we find that Greg's reluctantly driven the
boys to their contest, brought them home, tossed them out into
the driveway, and peeled out of the driveway to pick up his date.
Jump cut, and we find Greg at the drive-in, cuddled up with
Rachel, while Bobby and Peter's boxful of frogs lies unnoticed in
the back. Now, before you can say "Quick, get me the Compound
W," the biggest, fattest, slimiest toad of all has leapt out of the
box, over a bucket seat, and onto Rachel's head.

The date goes downhill from there.

WRITER: Elroy Schwartz

DIRECTOR: Jack Arnold

• Susan Olsen remembers that in between shots, the younger
Brady kids spent a lot of the week chasing Maureen McCormick
around the set, making her scream by threatening to put our special-guest frog on her head.

EPISODE 90: "THE SUBJECT WAS NOSES"

Jack Arnold wins the prize for capturing on film the most memorable Brady visual ever! Pigskin meets pug nose.

Over and over again I'm asked how we faked bashing Marcia's
face with that football, and the answer, I'm happy to report, is "We
didn't." Mo just stood on her spot and the propman lobbed the
thing into her face. Later, with slo-mo added, and some sound
effects ("Oh, my nooooose!') Maureen really looks like she's been
given a free rhinoplasty. Fortunately we only needed to shoot it
once, and Mo recovered quickly.

Marcia makes a date for the school dance with nice but unspectacular Charley, then dumps the poor geek for school superjock
Doug Simpson. She cuts Charley loose with a rude, yet effective,
"Something suddenly came up" (Greg's all-purpose surefire date
buster), and vainly primps for her big date.

Enter that football, exit Marcia's WASP-Y little proboscis.

Enter Doug Simpson, who gets one look at Marcia's new Karl
Malden look and promptly cancels their date, saying that "something suddenly came up."

Marcia's crushed, hurt, and embarrassed-not only about her
looks but also about how she treated good of Charley. She calls
the guy, apologizes, reinstates their date, and another Brady's
learned another life lesson.

WRITERS: Al Schwartz and Larry Rhine

DIRECTOR: Jack Arnold

EPISODE 91: "HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS"

Peter Brady begins a lifelong tendency toward messing up every
career opportunity that comes his way. Here, he lands a job fixing
bicycles at Mr. Martinelli's bike shop, where his enthusiasm is overflowing, but his plodding work habits and lack of mechanical aptitude get him fired in just three days!

He comes home dejected and, after dinner, prepares to discuss
his business bust with the folks. Problem is, just as Pete's about to
drop the bad news, Alice shows up sporting an absolutely humongous cake (did ya ever notice how much cake we Bradys ate?) complete with "Congratulations Peter" scrawled on top. That takes the
wind out of Pete's sails, and he just can't bring himself to fess up.

Pete keeps trying to wriggle out from under his dishonesty, but
somehow, with the rest of the Bradys so proud of his budding business acumen, he just can't. Instead, he passes his "work hours" by
sitting in the park and feeding the pigeons (watch for Pete to actually pick up and pet one of those disgusting little rat-birds).

Enter Mike and Carol ... on brand new bikes. Uh-oh. They pedal their cycles toward Pete, flick their kick stands, and tell him
that they've just come from Mr. Martinelli's store, where they
bought new bikes and found out all about Pete's predicament.
Mike tells Pete that losing a job is nothing to be ashamed of, and
that "heck, I've been fired lots of times."

Somehow the news of his father's ineptitude makes Peter feel a
whole lot better. Everybody hugs. Then, after a long dissolve and
an even longer camera shot of the Brady brood on cycles (Alice's
bike comes equipped with training wheels), we coast once more
into our closing credits.

WRITER: Gene Thompson

DIRECTOR: Robert Reed

• Even in Brady reunions, Peter's pretty much a total failure.
He's a struggling, unhappy airman in the Air Force when the Brady
girls get married (Chris Knight says he believes Pete had to enlist
after placing a bun in the oven of a local girl ... yeah, right) and a
struggling, unhappy businessman throughout Brady Christmas
and "The Bradys." I guess Pete's as close to a black sheep as the
Brady family will ever get.

EPISODE 92: "AMATEUR NIGHT"

WARNING! WARNING! RUN! RUN! The Brady kids are singing
again!

This time around, we've entrusted that dumbhead Jan to purchase a silver platter for our parents' anniversary, but her misunderstanding over the cost of engraving (it's eighty-five cents per
letter, not "altogether") leaves the six of us $56.23 in debt.

Our solution? Get jobs? Borrow? Steal? Nope, we Bradys decide
to secretly form a musical group and win first prize on a local TV
talent show!

We audition for the show by belting out another one of those
headache-inducing Brady pop classics. This time we warble a groovy,
overly optimistic ditty called "It's a Sunshine Day (Everybody's
Smilin')," and it's good enough to get us on the air.

Come showtime, we're calling ourselves the Silver Platters, and
we're loaded for bear. We've got our vapid little song down pat,
we're outfitted in ultra-seventies/ultra-cool blue-and-white bell-bottomed outfits, and we've got choreography cheesy enough to
make Paula Abdul cry. Sadly though, despite our brilliance, we lose
to Patty's Prancing Poodles.

No need to worry, though because Alice, Mike, and Carol all just
happen to catch our act on live TV and hear our explanation of
why we need the prize money.

By the time we get home, the platter's been purchased (Mike
picked it up), the problem has been solved, and the Bradys are
smiling once more.

WRITERS: Sam Locke and Milton Pascal

DIRECTOR: JACK ARNOLD

• Hal Peary, who played "The Great Gildersleeve" on radio-the
guy who pronounces the word "yes" as "muhhhyeeeeeesss"-
appears as the bank manager, Mr. Goodbody. He's a genius!

EPISODE 93: "YOU'RE NEVER TOO OLD"

Carol's grandma Connie (Florence Henderson under gobbedon latex wrinkles) pays a visit, and so does Mike's great-grandpa
Hank (Robert Reed under even gobbier goo).

Grandma's a real swinger. She shoots hoops, jogs, even uses
the newest and grooviest expressions like "far out" and "whatever turns you on." Great-Grandpa, on the other hand, is pretty
much dead from the neck down. He looks like a cadaver, and
basically, he hates everything ... especially Grandma Connie.

The Bradys set the old folks up on a date, and the results are
predictably disastrous ... until the old geezers have a change of
heart and end up eloping to Las Vegas (somebody's gonna break
a hip), thus turning Mike and Carol into brother and sister, or
something like that, and all six Brady kids into cousins ... I
think.

WRITERS: Ben Gershman and Bill Freedman

DIRECTOR: Bruce Bilson

EPISODE 94: "A ROOM AT THE TOP"

Greg starts acting like a normal human being and decides he
wants out of the Brady house. He's sick of sharing his bedroom,
sick of putting up with geeks like Peter and Bobby, and really sick
of having no privacy. He wants to move in with a college pal, but
Mike says "not until you're eighteen." As a compromise, Mike also
suggests that with a little effort, Greg could fix up the attic and turn
it into a pretty cool bachelor pad.