The ’90s are less of a distraction from ’70s sitcom artificiality in A Very Brady Sequel
Film Features A Very Brady Sequel
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Coming 2 America now available to rent from home, we’re offering our own belated sequel to a past Watch This theme and singing the praises of more good comedy sequels.
A Very Brady Sequel (1996)
Those of a certain age will be alarmed to learn (or just sorry to be reminded) that The Brady Bunch Movie, released in 1995, is now a more ancient cultural artifact than the original TV series had been when the movie came out. That distance inevitably undermines its inspired conceit, which placed the Brady family, unchanged since the early ’70s, in what was then the modern world. Juxtaposing their groovy threads and squeaky-clean sitcom personalities with hard-boiled “reality” fueled most of the jokes, which makes it difficult, today, not to be constantly distracted by elements that are nearly as dated: gigantic car phones, 90210 fashions (though some of those are back, god help us), omnipresent grunge. We’re meant to laugh at the Bradys, trapped in the wrong decade, but twin layers of nostalgia now create a strange crosstalk.
That’s much less the case in A Very Brady Sequel, hastily assembled the following year (before the kids playing Bobby and Cindy could outgrow their roles, presumably; they were already roughly the age that Mike Lookinland and Susan Olsen had been when the show was canceled). Its screenwriters—including Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, who’d go on to write and direct Josie And The Pussycats—apparently decided that there wasn’t much more comedy gold to be mined from ’90s folks gaping at ’70s refugees. Sequel instead leans hard into the Bradys themselves, acknowledging that they were blatantly artificial even when they were contemporary. Carol (Shelley Long), who was little more than relentlessly cheerful in The Brady Bunch Movie, becomes a even more pointedly useless appendage here, visibly awaiting her cue while Mike delivers yet another bromide and then chirping “Your father’s right, kids.” Impromptu musical numbers are delightfully absurd for their own sake, not because we all know that kids used to sing and dance in unison on airplanes but don’t do that anymore. Most of the jokes would have worked equally well had this movie been made in 1975, just after the series went off the air. The Bradys were always ludicrous.
Technically, there’s still a modern-day subplot, featuring Tim Matheson as a con man who poses as Carol’s deceased first husband (don’t ask) in order to steal a valuable antiquity that wound up among their house’s kitschy knickknacks. The movie doesn’t really care about its ostensible narrative, though, and Matheson—unlike Michael McKean, who played the first film’s antagonist—doesn’t get a whole lot to do. That leaves more time for Gary Cole to show off his pitch-perfect replication of Robert Reed’s maddeningly measured vocal cadence, and for Henriette Mantel to rattle off Alice’s corny one-liners, and for Christine Taylor to just somehow uncannily be Marcia, to the point where it’s actually hard to believe that she’s not Maureen McCormick. Sadly, Sequel pulls back a little from its predecessor’s characterization of Jan as utterly psychotic, but Jennifer Elise Cox still pushes the ignored-middle-child neurosis to goofy, wild-eyed heights. You don’t even necessarily need to have seen the George Glass episode, though that’ll help… and this film generally indulges in many more callbacks to the original series, tossing in gags that will mean nothing to viewers who’ve never seen it. There are more such viewers with each passing year, no doubt. Time destroys everything.
Availability: A Very Brady Sequel popped up on both Amazon Prime and Hulu just a few days ago, as it happens. It’s also available to rent or purchase digitally from Google Play, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango Now, Redbox, DirecTV, and VUDU.
100 Comments
The absolute best joke in the sequel is the very end, making Carol’s missing husband the Professor from Gilligan’s Island.
That’s actually earlier in the movie. The very end is Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie showing up as Mike’s first wife!
You’re right! I haven’t seen the movie in forever, so maybe it’s time for a rewatch.
I think they just said Carol’s ex was lost at sea when Tim Matheson shows up, but its not until the end in Hawaii do they confirm he was lost on the Minnow with John Hillerman’s son, Gilligan.
Barbara Eden must be Paul Rudd’s mother, she barely had aged at all since the tv show
Not gonna lie:
Upon reveal of The Professor angle, I sat in the theater utterly stunned. My latchkey kid brain went whirling with all the possibilities of a “cohesive sitcom universe”, and I missed the next two minutes of movie dialogue.
I love A Very Brady Sequel soooooo much.
No, the VERY best gag is that the boys’ mother is Jeannie! I would definitely have been up for THAT sequel.
This is one of my top “guilty pleasure” movies and it’s better than it has any right to be. It’s written like a peak-era Simpsons episode, Gary Cole is fantastically surreal and shows why he’s quietly one of our greatest comic actors. Most of all Jennifer Elise Cox as Jan steals the movie and should have had a long career in comedy. I’ll stick up for the first Brady Bunch movie too. It’s more of a predictable and formulaic comedy but Cole and Cox are just as good and it’s probably the most 90s of all 90s movies since it hits all all of the “modern” cultural touchstones so hard. It weirdly plays better now as 90s nostalgia than it did then as 70s.
I can’t think of one bad thing Gary Cole has done.
He killed my pet dog when I was 7.
Yeah, but your dog was in the middle of robbing a bank at the time.
I have it on good authority that it was self defense!
your dog knew what he did.
Yeah, but he did it hilariously.
I found a few episodes of ‘Midnight Caller’ on YouTube and had a blast watching them. Wish that one was more widely available.
He always pops up in places I least expect, like I just discovered he’s the principal in Family Guy
Harvey Birdman!
Yeah, that was yet another one I just recently realized was him
Well, he did eat all those people.
Some people need eating.
they know what they did.
Gary Cole is amazing in everything, but it still takes me 5 seconds to realize he is not Gary Coleman every single time his name comes up.
Fun fact: His IMDB page shows 184 acting credits, and while, say, the Trolls cartoon looks pretty dire, percentage-wise, he’s clearly killing it. For context, De Niro has 125, and I can name a half dozen stinkers without scrolling down.
“IS THAT A HUFFY? THAT’S A NICE BIKE.”
He had cold eyes in A Simple Plan.
He even managed to be funny in The Ring 2!!!
He wasn’t very honest. I am pretty sure at least few of those times he knew exactly what Willis was talking about.
The taboo of Greg and Marcia developing feelings for each other was so subversive.
The song they used when they’re getting ready for bed with the curtain between them is so great “If Loving You is Wrong, I don’t Want to be Right”- even as a 9 year old I got what they were going for.Also this movie is probably the inspiration for step-sibling porn
I was right there with Greg on this one. I don’t know how any hetero male could watch this film and not feel… things… for Christine Taylor.
She was, and is, totally dreamy.
Neil Patrick Harris dated her for a little while in the 90’s and he said that the fact that he didn’t feel real chemistry with someone as gorgeous and amazing as her is basically how he realized he was gay.
I’ve done the math and, this take checks out.
Yeah, reeeeally loved her husky “Yes, Greg?”. Maureen McCormick said sometimes watching one of the movies she’d find herself thinking “I don’t remember filming this scene”. I’ve found that “Sure, Jan” is a thing with some people too young to have seen the movie, which is kind of awesome. And “This is all Jan’s fault!” is just one of my favorite little things ever. I think I need to watch this again.
The “Sure , Jan” meme will be their lasting legacy, and I’m fine with this. Proud, even. Love these comedies and I’m just glad they’ll have a legacy at all
In a very strange bit of synchronicity, “Greg” Christopher Daniel Barnes starred in a generic, short-lived family sit-com that’s only really notable for a pre-Seinfeld Julia Louis Dryfuss and a very young Thora Birch.
In an episode of that show, he dreamed he was “Chuck” Brady, living in The Brady Bunch, with the original Brady actors reprising their roles (including a very pregnant Maureen McCormick running for student council, or something.) Then a few years later, he’s cast as Greg.
I’ve never heard of this, but I watched this all the way through, just so you know. The Brady fantasy is AMAZING. It’s also not lost on me this episode is basically what WandaVision was (and it even begins with “In BradyVision!”) Marvel’s hit series may have been going for deeper cuts than I ever realized.
It’s a remarkably good episode of an incredibly forgettable show.
Agreed. Both are great fun to watch especially if you were like me and watched the reruns incessantly back on channel 32 in Chicago. Also, “The Bradys were always ludicrous.” is spot on. I started watching when it was originally on and I and everyone I knew understood that the show was insane.Greg: Bobby is being a real stinker.
Carol: Greg, you know I don’t like that word.God help me, though, I loved it and still do.
(From the pilot)Peter: I’ve never been on a honeymoon before! What should I bring?Greg: A girl, dummy!Mike: Now Greg, that’ll do.
Carol truly was the worst Brady.
I think the one bold thing they did was show Mike and Carol in bed after every episode, having married couples in the same bed was still kind of a novelty, as was the implication they were about to go for lucky #7. Apparently they also had wanted to state that Carol was divorced in her first marriage, but they weren’t allowed.
It’s definitely a go to when I want to feel exactly like a teenager again, Clueless too.
Fun fact: the guy who plays Greg in these movies was previously on a sitcom called ‘Day by Day’ and they did an episode where he dreamed he was a Brady.
Thank you for posting that. I barely remember that sitcom, but I always remembered that particular episode. And it’s kind of funny how the episode lampoons how dated and 70’s the Brady Bunch was when the (real) show’s intro is the most 80’s looking thing I’ve seen in a long, long while.
Me too. I remember nothing about that show other than that episode and that Christopher Barnes was on it. I don’t even remember Julia Louise Dreyfus being on it, and I was already familiar with her from Saturday Night Live.
It was part of the ‘Family Ties’ universe (there’s an episode with a visit from the FT dad and kid), so, yeah, very ‘80s.
“Peter and Bobby are working on their science project, Greg is out back fixing his bicycle, Marsha’s at cheerleader tryouts, Cindy’s at her bake sale, and Jan just ran up to her room and slammed the door.”-
I love that even back then, the jokes about Jan were starting to bear fruit
How the hell did I just end up watching that whole damned thing?
TIL this show was created by Andy Borowitz, who is hilarious.
Hmm hard disagree here. The original’s better as a movie and a parody. If anything, the “time capsule within a time capsule” nature of the original only helps its main conceit the more “dated” it is. The sequel is really just a dated comedy and falls on a bunch of lazy sex jokes, mostly with Tim Matheson’s character and the weird faux-incest step-sibling thing. It’s got some inspired bits too, and the performance are great, but the original holds up much better imo.
Thanks to Nick@Nite, I definitely understood every joke and reference, and loved this film. It’s astounding to think more time has passed between then and now compared to 1996 and the early 70’s. I also didn’t realize that was Gary Cole, or Michael McKean in the first one, but it now totally makes sense!
I’ve actually never seen the original show (I believe it was fairly popular in the UK in the 70s, but didn’t have the extensive second life it had it had in the US), but I’d picked up enough about it through pop cultural osmosis to get most of the relevant gags by the time I saw the film’s around 99/00.Love these films, much prefer them to the Addams Family films as far as these kind of things go. I even liked the cheap made for TV third film with recast kids, although I remember almost nothing about it besides a terrible sped-up sequence at the start (and a bit where Jan goes “Martians! Martians! Martians!”) so I won’t stand by that too hard.Around the same time as she played Marcia, Christine Taylor played Marilyn in a Munsters TV movie. She was the go-to casting for “everyone will recognise them as attractive” characters in the mid-90s.
Addams family never really did that much for me, I much preferred the Munsters. I think I liked their working class/immigrant family appeal compared to the more genial Addams’. Also the theme song is a classic, the Addams family one just annoys me.There are a few things like that for me that I’ve just seen enough osmosis to get, like Citizen Kane. I finally saw it a few years ago, and I pretty much knew it by heart
addams family>munsters
I’ll side with you on The Munsters theme song over the Addams Family. It’s a shame they haven’t been as relevant in pop culture. The grandpa was pretty funny, and they had the one non-freak, hot daughter which was a great joke unto itself
One of Rob Zombie’s biggest hits was named after the Munsters’ car, Drag U LA, or Dragula.
The grandpa easily stole the show, he ran for third party offices for years after that, and usually insisted people called him Grandpa. His actual age was shrouded in mystery. The jokes about Marilyn being the “ugly duckling” were also great, agreed on that
Oh God, the third movie, The Brady Bunch in the White House, was awful. My family loved the first two, particularly since my parents grew up when the original Brady Bunch was a thing, and my mom watched reruns on Nick at Nite, which I only watched because I liked I Love Lucy and Bewitched and it was just… on and I was already there. So we got all the jokes, but by the time the third came out and we actually scheduled time to watch it live… The writing just wasn’t up to the same standard, the kids didn’t click, and we ended up changing the channel. A couple years ago, I finally watched it when it showed up on Netflix, and it feels like a bad knockoff of itself that somehow still stars Gary Cole and Shelley Long. Plus, they’re not even really the same characters. There’s a scene where they think the country is going to be nuked, and they just cheerfully wave goodbye to the villain, not knowing he’s the villain, through the window of the bunker, basically telling him to shoo and go die now. It would’ve been funnier and much more in character if Mike tried to solve a nuclear crisis with one of his insane old fashioned values lectures to one of the world leaders supposedly nuking them, but no. Just a cheerful, vapid, “Okay, bye!” It’s like they thought that humor was that they were just idiots rather than absurd. So bad.
Yea, I bought the set and the White House one, which I’d never seen, was included. It reminds me a bit of Home Alone 3, where it’s terrible entirely because a crazy new idea doesn’t mask the fact that the joke ran dry. And I strongly agree that the Brady’s don’t quite feel like the same characters anymore.
This is a great assessment. There’s something to be said of the reboot that pulls the piss out of the original which I feel had just not been done before these movies… Idk correct me if I’m wrong.I only disagree about the role that the fake ex-husband plays. While in the first movie all of the 90s played the “straight man” to the Bradys’ insanity, this time we get to funnel all of the straight man gags onto this one man who basically plays victim to their unwitting hijinx and sure he could’ve used more personality or something but having some “evil” character take all the brunt of their sitcom gags, adventures, and cheerfulness is what makes the movie work, in my eyes.
“…and this film generally indulges in many more callbacks to the original series, tossing in gags that will mean nothing to viewers who’ve never seen it. There are more such viewers with each passing year, no doubt. Time destroys everything.”I’d be interested to read more of Werner Herzog’s summer comedy reviews. Vegas Vacation came out the following year. Let’s go down that rabbit hole of greed and unrecognizable faces of one’s offspring.
This is all I want now.
“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia… You have grown up to be so gorgeous! Jan, isn’t Marcia gorgeous?”
“Jan, cut the crap!”
That’s the first movie.
The sequel had instead “Moesha, Moesha, Moesha!”
The two Brady films remain some of my absolute favourites. Growing up watching the Bradys as a kid, the joke absolutely landed and they’re just a blast from start to finish.
The guy who played Greg IIRC voiced Spider-Man in his cartoon that was on at the time, which put another warp or two into my noggin.
He also voiced Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid.
“I’LL CHASE YOU TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH!” Dude was so extra when he was mad on that show.
SHOOOCKERRRR
“Hip-hop? Sounds like something a rabbit would listen to!” is maybe my favorite movie line ever
This movie carries significant trauma for me because we were watching it stoned, when all of a sudden the walls started to melt and I became convinced that only half the actors were actually the Bradys and the rest were imposters. And around then I couldn’t remember how to breathe properly, I figured my brain was fried for life like a Douglas Rushkoff character in ‘The Ecstasy Club’ and that’s why I didn’t touch pot again for a good five years. I maintain the Bradys were to blame.
I put this in almost same category as Adams Family Values. While it’s nowhere near the unrecognized classic I consider that film to be, it’s still much more enjoyable for me than its predecessor. And I think the review pinpoints the exact reason – it’s not just a formulaic 70’s fish in 90’s waters comedy. Instead, it focuses on the ridiculousness that was always inherent in the Brady family, even back in the 1970’s. You really couldn’t do something like this with, say, Eight is Enough as your source material.
That’s why The Addams Family keeps getting brought back; their concept is kind of timeless. Even the recent movie showed that, warts and all.
– I’ll be the victim!
– Your whole life.
It’s really a shame that Raul Julia died, one of the reasons being that Paramount totally could’ve crossed over the two movie revivals. It probably would’ve sucked, but then again, maybe it wouldn’t have? Wednesday and Jan probably would’ve gotten along.
I actually think Values is the better movie compared to the first one. Mainly for the summer camp subplot. Both are good fun though.
The key, I think, was bringing on Paul Rudnick to write the script. It’s just
endlessly quotable.
Jeez, kids, could you lighten up a little?
I remember this sequel as being kind of a whiff, except for the George Glass business (which birthed the never-not-funny “Sure, Jan” meme) and the gag about Carol waiting her turn to chime in with her thankless “Your father’s right, kids.”
Pretty sure that I read the phoned-in subplot about the antique horse came about because the producers found the actual Brady horse statue in the Paramount lot and thought and decided to write the story around it.
Could you imagine creative serendipity like that when writing the goddamn Brady Bunch sequel??
I was 7 when this movie came out and watched Brady Bunch episodes on Nick at Nite so I was pretty much unable to tell the difference between this movie and the actual Bradys.Also, this film spawned my all-time favorite meme and/or reaction gif:
wow, even now I couldn’t tell that wasn’t the original. I thought it was from the show. Their casting was perfect
The funny thing about the nostalgia dissonance is that it still works in Back to the Future. 1985 was the modern day for that film, so traveling back to 1955 was meant to be a shock. Thing is, now 1985 is nostalgic, but the opening scenes are so aggressively 80s that the change in decade still works.
“I’m tripping with the Bradys”
I don’t know why, but I always loved the follow-up to that scene of Alice, having also consumed the mushrooms, just casually walking into the fridge for the night and coming out in the morning unfazed. It’s always suggested that she’s got a lot going on in the background, including some late night sexcapades with Sam the butcher (cue meat puns).
cue Beastie Boys.
You’ll have to forgive my limited knowledge of the Beastie Boys and help me out on this one.
Never been dumped ‘cause I’m the most mackinest
Never been jumped ‘cause I’m known the most packinest
Yeah we’ve got beef chief
We’re knocking out teeth chief
And if you don’t believe us you should question your belief Keith
I’m like Sam the butcher bringing Alice the meat
Like Fred Flintstone driving around with bald feet
Gotcha. Thank you!
I remember seeing this on television in the last year or so. John Hillerman is in it! Wild stuff, and more than a little dumb. At least Barbara Eden shows up at the end.
Carol Brady at the salon: “Where’s that bald girl?”
The Brady films are some of my favourites of the 90s, if only for Jan. Jan, the fucking nutjob of that whole incestuous clan (so American) who is also, bizarrely, the one we all want to know.
OH COME ON NOW KIDS, you have to include my favourite scene. Four…four…four…yes Greg?
I remember before the first movie was released there were rumors that at the end the Bradys would get into a spaceship and fly away to their home planet. That would’ve been awesome.