Blergh

It wasn't just Sam's family Darren #2 hated. He seemed to hate everyone to the point that when Sam wound up saving his own parents' marriage, he seemed mad at HER! Still, even before the Switcheroo Darren seemed to have lost virtually all the bemused infatuation he had for Sam in the early years [and a low point was when Sam dunked a drunken 'masher' when she thought Darrin wasn't around and, rather than be happy she could take care of herself in his absence and or even slightly upset at the 'masher' for putting the moves on his own disinterested wife, , Darrin#1 behaved like a #2 re the 'No more witchcraft' scolding]!

pandora, I don't disagree that Endora definitely wanted Sam to be a 'creature of the wind' but, alas, Sam had TWO masters- Endora and Darrin! Sam seemed to spend the entire show believing that she had to please both of them and, in doing so, she could somehow guilt each of them into making peace with the other. Alas, while that's a funny concept in sitcoms, this sort of thinking often proves the ruin of many a family. I always wish there had been a episode in which Sam told BOTH of them off. All that said as malevolent as Endora could be, she was easily the most interesting and fun character, IMO- and it's to the show's credit that they respected Sam's bond with Endora enough to scuttle the idea of having the Darrin Switch be from Endora's spell with only the viewers but not Sam knowing.

What works? The End Credits! No matter what happens during the hour before, they never fail to let everyone know that for at least the next 23 hours, there's no show to watch so it's no wonder there's such great cheering! What do I appreciate? The fact that I don't know anyone involved in this!

If this is true, does this mean that Zeek's mother Blanche [who was seen celebrating her 86th Birthday two seasons ago] would have to deal with outliving her child and how would the family help her out? It's one thing to outlive a parent, a sibling or even a spouse but outliving one's child?

oceanblue, Considering that automatic windows [which is how Tiger made his escape] were VERY much a novelty for cars back then, it would be most likely that the car ALSO had A/C- and they WERE Bradys so I can't imagine they'd have left a dog inside a hot, unventilated car. Still, if the automatic window worked, that likely means that Mike kept the car ON with the keys in the ignition! Lucky that no car thieves tried to drive off with their car during the ceremony! LOL OK, if you can believe the possibility that Tiger was inside a nice air-conditioned car, would you STILL think it was a bad move on Mike's part to try to keep Tiger there? Oh, as for Tiger's actual demise? Barry Williams has said that while shooting the First Season Episode 'Katchoo' [where Jan has the fakest sneezes outside grade school plays which gets everyone thinking she's ALLERGIC to Tiger], the original Tiger got run over by a florist truck- and the dog trainers subbed a vague lookalike who was so inadequate for the part that they had to nail the collar to the floor and strap Fake Tiger in it just to get him to sit still while the Bradys said their 'goodbyes'! GH Scorpions Rule, Yeah, we know Mike was definitely a widower but nothing ever was mentioned whether the Martin union ended in divorce or Mr. Martin's death. We can speculate all we want on how they met but I think since Carol occasionally was a reporter, she may have met Mike doing a story on one of his projects- or maybe they met in the PTA .

I recently re-watched the pilot ['The Honeymoon'] and was amazed on what I didn't pick up on when I first saw it as a kid- like the fact that Mike and the boys lived in a one-story house that seemed would have barely had room for a newlywed couple- much less 'four men' and Alice. Of course when the series started all nine were in the iconic two-story , three bathroom [with all six kids grudgingly sharing one but never considering using the folks' or Alice's bathroom] pad. Also if the Brady men drove to the Tyler house with Tiger, how did Alice get there before the nuptuals since she didn't drive? But the funniest thing is that I remember when I was a kid, I thought both Mike and Carol were way too harsh on their kids during the Tiger-Fluffy Wedding Feud but as an adult I now I think Carol WAS right to try to get the girls to 'stop that screaming' [which really wasn't helping solve anything ] and Mike WAS right to tell the boys to remind them to 'put that dog back in the car' (even though Mike needed to kick himself for letting the boys guilt him into bringing Tiger along in the first place). Also, back then, I thought it was perfectly logical for them to invite the entire Bunch on the honeymoon to make up for things but now I wonder where the other seven were supposed to squeeze in with the parents taking up the only bed! Anyone else surprised how they've grown to side more with the folks than with the kids? LOL

On paper, one would think that having the name of Emily and being a schoolteacher would have made Emily a dull, nebbishy helpmate of Bob but Miss Pleshette turned Emily into the coolest of cool characters on that show and even when she showed her flaws [e.g. fear of flying], Emily never lost that coolness. Also, I like that she was a genuine friend to Carol instead of considering her just her husband's employee OR someone to be irrationally jealous of! Miss Pleshette said she told the writers to write the character 'like a man and I'll turn the lines into a girl' and she did it perfectly! Oh, and unlike The Fonz, Emily never had to snap her fingers and SAY she was cool, she just WAS.

Watching this show, I have to wonder if there will be ANY granite left over in another ten years since these homeowners seem to think 'granite countertops' are as vital as air [evidently never having heard about how hard it is to clean once knives cut grooves into it]and there's NO more granite being made for a few more million years!

Interesting to know, Trooper York. Typical that they couldn't just let Hoss's Uncle visit without killing him. Now why didn't Adam's maternal grandfather the sea captain ever bother to visit? Could he have just been confident that Adam would grow up to be just as boring as his late daughter was?

Good point, Maverick! There seemed to be a GREAT deal that went unexplained re Carol in addition to how she knew these kooky folks. Like did she just sponge off her folks [the Tylers] for the 'few years' after her marriage to Mr. Martin ended and did Mr. Martin die or did they divorce? They never said on the air! I tend to side with the idea that they divorced if for no other reason than the fact that she insisted the girls change THEIR surname to Brady as soon as she wed Mike while I think had Mr. Tyler been someone who'd died, she'd have mourned him and wanted the girls keep that surname until their own marriages [as things usually went back in the day]. Also, why didn't she, her daughters or any of her side of the family ever interact with the Tylers after she married Mike? Apart from one time she said they couldn't babysit The Bunch in 'The Babysitters' due to them being out of town, neither she nor any of the above even refer to the Tylers again much less interact when visiting the Bradys. Oh well, it still was a fun show even if they all needed an Alice to keep things going! LOL

BW Manilowe, I think you could be right- especially since the way the Bradys acted 'naturally' on the commercials was almost EXACTLY the same as when they used 'Meerna's' techniques. I never understood how Carol had become acquainted with Meerna in the first place,though. Even her being a friend of a friend meant that that middle linke would have had to have been REALLY kooky. LOL

I know it was dealing with death but didn't care for Phil's funeral. I mean we never seen the character on screen and whenever Sophia told stories she almost always said "except Phil" so I really felt no connection or anything like that. Maybe if they had Phil visit maybe 2 or 3 times then maybe. And I [usually a fan of Sophia] thought they let Sophia get away with too much stuff against his widow Angela. First of all, she actually insisted that one reason she hated Angela was due to the dowry check Angela's late father had made BOUNCING and then wouldn't take Angela's check without a driver's license. WHY didn't someone point out that, after a husband dies, the husband's family is supposed to pay the widow the principle of the dowry. Hence, Angela owed HERSELF the money not her owing Sophia. Then, too, if Phil was such a 'great father' why is that NONE of their children made it to the funeral or even had anyone explain their absences? Still, what saved it for me was that Sophia actually admitted that a BIG part of her problems with Angela [and Phil] was that she felt guilty over his crossdressing. And, even though it was somewhat uncharacteristic of the character [and the show], it was very moving when Sophia FINALLY broke down and cried 'My baby boy is dead'!

I always thought it was a bummer that after the disastrous "Golden Palace", Sophia got sent BACK to Shady Pines [as if Dorothy or even Gloria didn't have the means to have her live somewhere she liked ] just so she could keep wisecracking on the last gasps of "Empty Nest". Then again, I just prefer to pretend the last episode onwards never happened and Sophia and the Girls just kept living together.

"The Talking Machine" was full of anachronisms. For starters, this Season Two episode was supposed to take place sometime around 1876-1877 when Laura was about ten but the Edison phonograph wasn't even invented until 1877- much less marketted yet. Even if somehow had some assistant sneak it out of the lab and instantly get it to Walnut Grove, the sound quality it produced would have been decades ahead of what was feasible at the time. A listen to Handel's 'Israel Out of Egypt' by the Crystal Palace choir in 1888 with literally thousands of singers barely sounds like two folks sing-whispering in a cave and the recording couldn't amplify the sound so Willie hiding the machine to record Laura and having Laura's speech be perfectly understood by the entire class would have been impossible- to say nothing of Laura's speech sounding perfectly synchronized as though Nellie would be able to crank the cyclinder to play exactly the same speed as Willie did to record. Oh, and they used the word 'airplane' a quarter century before devise was invented and fifty years before the term was. LOL

"That's For Me to Know" (Season Seven). I usually liked Dorothy but IMO, this episode epitomized one of those times she got away with more than she should have. Yeah, I know Sophia was literally opening a Pandora's Box by telling Dorothy that she had something in a box and it was PRIVATE but, Dorothy was SO determined to record 'THE family history ' [read: HER interpretation of the family history] that she broke it open expressly against Sophia's permission. Then rather than apologize for having blatantly violated Sophia's privacy and gone against her wishes, Dorothy kept self-justifying her motives saying that her grandson Robbie had to know ' THE family history' and practically ordered Sophia to quit being mad at her. OK, Sophia fessed to a hithero unknown first marriage but even then, Dorothy went FULL BLAST to dictate the account of it even AFTER Sophia told her it would 'change their relationship forever' . Yes, I will admit that it was touching that Dorothy explained how Sophia having her earlier arranged marriage annulled so she could eventually marry the man she loved [Dorothy's father Sal] was a 'strike for women's rights' AND a good thing and it was good that Sophia realized that she shouldn't be ashamed of her past actions there. However; I REALLY wish Sophia had told Dorothy that, even though it WAS good of Dorothy to get her to think of the annulment on positive terms, that that STILL did not justify Dorothy into breaking into her stuff and going against her express wishes AND that Dorothy was just going to have to accept that it would be a LONG time after a LOT of effort on Dorothy's part before Sophia would consider Dorothy someone to TRUST again. Sorry, two wrongs on Dorothy's part weren't made right by her new interpretation of Sophia's past, IMO.

Anyone else wonder why everything about Dorothy's background [age, ages of kids, how long she'd lived in Miami,etc.] changed EXCEPT that she'd been married to Stan for 38 years before he dumped her?

How can anyone who saw it forget the episode in which Rose inheritted an ailing PIG and they all turned into one-dimesional cons to try to care for it just to get a large windfall? Talk about veering into 'Here's Lucy' territory?

What was odd was that Adam's and Hoss's doomed mothers each had surviving kin yet had no problems with Ben taking their late daughter's/ late sister's baby boy to parts unknown- and NEVER attempted to visit them at the Ponderosa. Only Little Joe's hithero unknown uterine half-brother did so and that was only after he found out that his paternal grandmother faked his death so her hated daughter-in-law would vamoose New Orleans with Ben.

Agree with ALL the above. Also, why did they spend SO much time dealing with John-Boy and Janet having their twins on the Mountain [and turning all other sibs into wallpaper], only to end the last movie with the news that they were boy-girl twins and NOTHING more [like given them names]. FWIW, I 'd like them to have named the boy ' Rome Zebulon' and the girl 'Rebecca Esther' [and NOT use their first and middle names e.g 'John Curtis'].

Since you all spelled out the Walton In-Laws Pitfalls so well, no WONDER Drew just stayed Elizabeth's 'steady ' for something like 20 years! LOL

A fairly good, funny, clever show in its time [well, especially the early pre -Avery years]. However it was SO topical that even viewers who'd lived through the 90's would have needed to have 1990's World Almanac or search engines to get the bulk of the jokes! I wonder if Bea Arthur [who lived to see "Maude" overlooked for the same hyper-topicality and heeded that lesson by pleading with "Golden Girls" writers to keep it as non-topical as possible] ever tried to reach out to Candice re topicality pitfalls before it was too late.

I always thought they left a LOT of stuff unsaid between the two characters- like once how Esther said she's borne 'THREE babies' yet only John was the only evidently living offspring and his brother Ben had volunteered for WWI against Zeb's wishes only to be killed so what was the fate of their THIRD child? The closest clue given was that once Elizabeth or another grandchild happened upon a picture in the attic and Zeb said in a choked voice that that was 'Amy'. Was Amy their daughter and, if so, what happened to her? Oddly, neither Zeb nor Esther ever got upset at the Godseys' adoptive daughter being named 'Aimee'. Also, was Esther related to Martha Corinne besides being her sister-in-law through Zeb? I seem to recall them having the same maiden name of Tyler [and it was hardly unheard of for brothers to marry two girls from the same family].

I'm not arguing with that. However; the few times he was allowed to be a musician, he seemed happiest -until Steve, Katie, Bub or Uncle Charley shot down his ambition. Perhaps if they'd let him be a beatnik instead of a square, he wouldn't have taken his frustrations out on everyone else. Just a thought.

I read Gavin MacLeod's bio- and perhaps the most stunning revelation in it re Ted Knight was that he and Gavin were BEST FRIENDS and Gavin was the one most broken up by Ted's death. That's even more shocking than learning that Cloris and Valerie were chums despite their characters despising each other!

I liked how, regardless of how bitterly Lucyfelt about Desi's contribution re the state of their marriage and its end, Lucy ALWAYS vigorously touted how vital his contributions were to the show's existence much less the success of the individual episode.