'Brady Bunch' kids reveal why filming the iconic blue-box opening was so 'insidiously difficult'
They seemed happy, but they weren't.
The introduction to "The Brady Bunch."
The Brady Bunch ran for five seasons from 1969 to 1974 and is one of the most beloved television shows in TV history. For many Gen X kids, the reruns were a staple on TV in the ‘70s and ‘80s, so kids saw the classic episodes countless times, burning iconic scenes in their memories—from Jan stomping and yelling “Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!” to Cindy being bullied for her lisp to the crackling sound of Peter’s voice changing.
Kids who grew up with The Brady Bunch also have the song and imagery from the show’s iconic blue-box intro etched in their minds forever. The intro is like comfort food for people who grew up with the show, but for the cast members who had to shoot a new intro before every season, it was torture.
On a recent episode of TV We Love, Barry Williams, who played the oldest son, Greg, and Christopher Knight, who played middle son Peter, explained why doing the intro was so difficult.
“Filming those credits was probably one of the most uncomfortable things of all that we had to do,” remembers Williams. “There’s really nothing to do but be on a chair and look around. So, someone would say, ‘And down,’ and you’d look down, ‘Bottom right,’ and you’d look and pretend to be making contact with Cindy. And then I’d look over here and they’d go, ‘No, no, Alice is not in here yet!’”
“Insidiously difficult,” Knight adds. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Nobody’s really describing to you, clearly, what you’re doing — ‘Look up! OK, not that far up!’ They weren't really sure where we were going to be in those boxes." Knight said that in the first season introduction, he looks in the wrong direction.
The idea for the blue-box intro came from the show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, who believed that television was all about close-ups. But how was he supposed to have close-ups of the six kids, two parents, and Alice the housekeeper? Schwartz solved his dilemma by drawing a checkerboard with nine boxes for nine smiling faces.
"One day, I came into the living room and dad was at the bridge table, drawing a diagram of how he could get nine people into boxes, at the beginning, and could see their faces,” Sherwood's son, Lloyd Schwartz, told TV We Love.
Why does Alice show up last in the introduction? It’s because actress Anne B. Davis had it written into her contract that she would receive a unique intro that would stand out from the other cast members, according to Flavorwire.
The show’s theme song was a follow-up, of sorts, to Schwartz’s previous hit Gilligan’s Island. The theme of Gilligan’s Island was a way for him to placate the network, which thought that new viewers would be confused about why the castaways were stuck on an island. So he wrote a theme song that told their story.
The Brady Bunch theme song does the same by explaining how the parents met and created a blended family. However, it doesn’t explain why Carol and Mike weren’t with their first spouses. It was described in the pilot episode that Mike’s wife had died. As for Carol, Schwartz later said that he wanted her to be divorced, but given the taboo surrounding divorced women in the ‘60s, the circumstances surrounding her daughters’ father were left vague.
For many generations of viewers, The Brady Bunch is more than a TV show; it’s a window into a simpler time when all our troubles got wrapped up in 30 minutes, and how, after two parents with three kids each had to move on from their first spouses, they could still create a harmonious and loving family.
Those blue boxes may have been tough for Williams and Knight to sit in, but for millions of people, they represent how nine people could somehow form a family.
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