Patrick's Place

(Link in blogroll)
Saturday Six

From the original meme site: Forty years ago today, a silly little sitcom premiered on ABC. It was about a widower with three young sons who married a widow with three young daughters. And the rest, as they say, is television history! I figured, why not celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Brady Bunch here at the Saturday Six.

1. Were you alive when The Brady Bunch premiered?

I was alive, but I was not-quite-6 and not really watching sitcoms yet. We didn't even have a color TV till 2 years later!

2. When do you remember watching the show for the first time?

After school when I was 11 or 12, I guess. It may have been on the same night at The Partridge Family a few years later, which I did watch fairly religiously due to David Cassidy's presence. But if it was, I only watched because of the bleedover of show audiences. I don't remember much of it until I was older, for sure.

3. If you had been the seventh kid in the house, which sibling do you think you would have most likely gotten along with the best?

I expect that I would have hung out with Alice. All the kids were super-annoying, although I crushed on Peter for awhile when I was older. He really was the only fun one. And I always preferred the company of adults to children when I was a kid.

4. Same scenario: which sibling would you have least gotten along with?

Marsha or maybe Cindy. Marsha was way too bossy and pretty, and Cindy...it would have been a jealous-competition thing: I'm the youngest!!

5. Take the quiz: Which Brady Bunch character are you?

You are Jan. Without you, Marcia and Cindy would kill each other.

Pretty accurate, considering I'm actually the youngest in my family.
Full Disclosure: I have never once watched a full episode of Saved By the Bell. So, depending on the weight that question has, I could be borked with my answer.

6. Robert Reed, who played patriarch Mike Brady, sent a now-infamous memo to the show’s creator and writing team, (read it here if you haven’t seen it before) in which he lectured them about the differences between comedy and slapstick because he felt a script about Greg’s hair turning orange from a bottle of hair tonic Bobby sold him was so outrageous, he felt he couldn’t play his part in that show. What’s your opinion on that: was it an actor taking his role in a goofy sitcom a little too seriously, or an actor who felt strongly about something taking a reasonable stand?

I admire his knowledge, but yeah: this is NOT Shakespeare. It's a little like Steve lecturing writers on Blues' Clues about the humorous content of the show (not that I'm aware of him ever doing that). Still, the hair-tonic-is-seriously-dated point is valid if slightly condescending considering that a lot of dads still did used "a little dab" in their hair daily in the 70s. [The mere fact that I know to what this refers and can even 'replay' the ad in my head confirms that I'm right about this, anyway.]