The Brady Bunch Movie *** (1995, Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Christine Taylor, Michael McKean, Jean Smart) – Classic Movie Review 10,338

Director Betty Thomas’s light-hearted 1995 nostalgia comedy The Brady Bunch Movie brings a lot of laughs and simple fun at the expense of the Seventies and the original 1969–1974 television show The Brady Bunch in a comedy that falls happily between remake, homage and parody of the old TV series.

Shelley Long and Gary Cole are spot on as mom and pop Brady, Carol and her husband Mike. Michael McKean also enjoys a good role as their scheming neighbour Larry Dittmeyer. The original Carol, Florence Henderson, plays the family’s grandmother, Carol’s mother.

More genial and warm than sharply satiric, The Brady Bunch Movie hits exactly the right note of kitsch bewilderment. The fun is entirely about putting the original sitcom characters in a contemporary Nineties setting, and having a good laugh as their Seventies fashions and morals clash with those of the Nineties.

Amazingly, and gratifyingly, Long enjoys a long-awaited hit, grossing $46.6 million in the US and Canada, and a sequel was ordered called A Very Brady Sequel (1996), followed by the film The Brady Bunch in the White House on November 29, 2002.

Also in the cast are Michael McKean, Jean Smart, Henriette Mantel, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Christine Taylor, Jennifer Elise Cox, Paul Sutera, Olivia Hack, Florence Henderson, Megan Ward, Jack Noseworthy, Jesse Lee Soffer [Jesse Lee] and David Graf.

The Brady Bunch Movie also features cameos from Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork of The Monkees (as themselves) and RuPaul as Mrs Cummings, and the original cast of The Brady Bunch in new roles, apart from Robert Reed, who died on 12 May 1992, and Eve Plumb (the original Jan), who declined to appear in the film.

It is written by Laurice Elehwany, Rick Copp, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner, based on the characters by Sherwood Schwartz.

The US TV debut on NBC 29 November 1997 featured additional previously unseen footage.

It is shot on locations in Los Angeles, including Taft High School in Woodland Hills, and at Bowcraft amusement park in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.

The owner of the Studio City, California home used for exterior shots of the original TV show house refused to restore the property to its 1969 appearance, so the production built a façade round a house in nearby Encino and filmed scenes in the front yard.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,338

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