‘The Brady Bunch’ 50th anniversary box set celebrates iconic TV series, films

If you’re of a certain age, or a fan of syndicated classic TV shows, you know very well the “story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls,” and “the story of a man named Brady, who was busy with three boys of his own.”

It was 50 years ago come Sept. 26 that TV audiences were introduced to “The Brady Bunch,” perhaps the most recognizable television family this side of the Partridges.

To commemorate the milestone for the series, which ran from 1969 to 1974 on ABC, “The Brady-est Brady Bunch TV & Movie Collection,” 30-disc DVD set was released in early June by CBS Home Entertainment. The box set includes every episode of the series, plus the spinoff series (“The Brady Kids: The Complete Animated Series,” “The Bradys” and “The Brady Brides”) and five films (“The Brady Bunch Movie,” “A Very Brady Christmas,” “The Brady Bunch in the White House,” “Growing Up Brady” and “A Very Brady Sequel.”

Courtesy CBS Home Entertainment

September 9 marks the debut of HGTV’s series “A Very Brady Renovation,” featuring the renovation of the Los Angeles home made famous in the exterior shots used on the series, and a longtime drive-by tourist favorite for series fans.

Christopher Knight, who starred as Peter Brady, alongside the rest of his “family” cast — dad Mike Brady (Robert Reed) mom Carol (Florence Henderson), Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb) and Cindy (Susan Olsen), Greg (Barry Williams), Bobby (Mike Lookinland) and the beloved housekeeper Alice (Ann B. Davis) — recently chatted with the Sun-Times about the series and the box set.

Q. Does it feel like 50 years have gone by?

A. For us it’s been 51 years because we did the pilot in October or November of 1968, and then were brought back the next year when the show got picked up. We started shooting in summer of 1969. The show premiered in September of 1969. I was 10.

ABC

Q. What attracted you to the show, and playing this middle kid in a blended family?

A. There wasn’t any consciousness or want in it. My dad, Edward Knight, was an actor in New York. We lived in one-bedroom flat in the upper East Side in New York. My dad was trying to make ends meet. He had a giant opinion that all real acting only happens in theater. But he had a family to support so we drove out to do Thanksgiving with his mom and dad who’d moved out to California to retire. So in 1959 we drove across country when I was two years old to live with them. My dad was out in L.A. because his agent in New York had an agency office in L.A. and he had to find work to support our family.

This TV thing was opportunity for him to tap into to make money to raise his family. ... But he was really Old School — so it was that Old Scool mentality that kids worked. So when I was 7 he got me and my brother an agent. He didn’t say it was to help support the family but clearly that was what ended up happening. My brother who was a year older than me went on all the same interviews I went on but he didn’t get any work. So he stopped going. I just lucked out. I ended up getting this thing called “The Brady Bunch.”

Anthony Barcelo/Ernie Carswell & Partners via AP, File)

Q. You were a middle kid playing a middle kid. Was that easy or hard to do?

A. I guess it was typecasting. [Laughs] But they weren’t even looking for kids who could act, quite frankly. I couldn’t really speak on cue. It’s as though the whole sentence came out sideways. Not in a sequence of words but all of them blurted out in some kind of jumble. I found out later in life as an adult I had ADD and dyslexia. When we had table reads I couldn’t read. I still can’t cold read.

Q. What was life on “The Brady Bunch” set like?

A. We were on set [each year] from June 19 to right around November then we have couple weeks off, then we’re back in February for another couple of months. And it was like that every year for five years. And I was 11! The show helped me find a whole other view as to what family could be. A validity, wholesomeness. It wasn’t a place where survival was in play.

Q. Which of the kids did you bond with right off the bat?

A. Mike [Lookinland]. We were like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was my lieutenant. I was the kid given to not getting into trouble, but not necessarily believing just what I was told. [Laughs] But always needed to test that to a degree. And I would have Mike as my little henchman. Barry [Williams] on the otherhand, at least through the pilot, he had two older brothers and fashioned himself to be their age. They were four years and 8 years older than him. So he was always [acting like] an adult. I was the only one other than Mike who wasn’t the youngest of the family in real life: Mike was in the middle and I was in the middle. That’s a much different place to be.

Matt Harbicht/HGTV via AP

Q. Did it feel like a family when you all were working together and it all clicked?

A. Oh yeah, more so than my own family. Because everyone was so supportive.

Maureen [McCormick] and I drove [to the set] together. So she and I had all this other time together. We lived in the same community not that far apart so we picked he and her mom up every morning and every night took them home. So I had an extra two hours each day in the car with Maureen. Maureen was exactly like my sister; somebody to poke fun at. Somebody to play jokes on. She was sugar and spice and everything nice and I was Huck Finn. .. She was an oddity to me, so squeaky clean. She needed mud on her [Laughs]. Literally they’d write that in to episodes. She was fun to poke fun at. It was all out of a loving closeness.

Q. Did you have crushes on Eve Plumb or Maureen McCormick?

A. Eve had this crush on me from about the third year. But I matured rather slowly an didn’t know what to do with the attention. I would be filled on it all by Maureen. But honestly there wasn’t really time for a crush.

Q. If you had to pick your all-time favorite “Brady Bunch” episode or two, which would you pick?

A. Doing a split screen in [“Two Petes in a Pod”] where I played Peter and Arthur [the transfer student], because it was really an arduous process for an actor. But it was a privilege. That’s an experience that no one other than Florence or Bob had when they played their own parents [in another episode] got the chance to do. Then of course the moments when the real me was able to coalesce with the real character, that would be the exploding volcano. And of course the football episode. I was the one who throws it at Maureen. They intially wouldn’t let me throw it because they had the prop man there but he had hard time doing it. They did have me do some takes throwing it, but then I went off to school. But I believe they ended up using one of my takes.

Q. Everybody wanted to live in that house, have those bedrooms, have Alice for a housekeeper. It was an unrealistic look at family life for some.

A. As I heard over the years, my mom hated [the show] because nobody could have that family life. Ours certainly wasn’t. ... The Bradys were the antitheses of what I was experiencing in real life, and my mom said there was no family like the Bradys. But I would also come to learn [from various other sources] that “our family is just like the Bradys.” “We love the Bradys.” “That’s who we are.” At the same time, we had people who were like me: “I love the Bradys because it’s nothing like my family. I’m a latchkey kid.” So it didn’t matter if your family was like the Bradys or not like the Bradys. It still served a purpose of being a home for you. A place for you to feel at home. ... The Bradys [were all about] a warm environment. The best Christmas celebrations I remember — of course there was a television show budget to throw it — were Brady Christmases. And it was thrown by Sherwood Schwartz who doesn’t celebrate Christmas!

Q. Growing up what TV shows did you watch?

A. “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “Munsters,” Gilligan’s Island,” “Bewitched” “Patty Duke,” “Andy Griffith Show,” all those late 1960s TV shows. I loved “Combat.”