Puck’s Prattle

I’m going to do some more Brady Bunch shit, if only because my Brady Bunch Hour post from early February still brings me a significant amount of traffic. I’m not even a Brady Bunch fan, really. I just enjoy the gaudiness of it all.

From 1972 to 1974, while the original Brady Bunch was still on the air, there was a Brady Kids cartoon. A really badly-animated cartoon; think The Archies. The Brady Kids go on various adventures with two pandas named Ping and Pong (because pandas are always named Ping and Pong), a dog named Mop Top, and a magical bird named Marlon.

The opening is pretty trippy. Damn, the Brady franchise got a lot of use out of what’s since been named the “Brady Grid”.

Let me point out something in the lyrics. The boys sing, “then there’s Jan the middle one who’s really groovy.” Come on, they didn’t think Jan was groovy; they all dumped on her.

In the next sequence, the Brady Kids get more mileage of of their song “Time To Change,” which was first used in a regular series episode in which Peter’s voice changed. There’s a subtext to this song, of course: it’s about pubes and periods, and we all know it.

Watch closely how Greg plays the guitar. Why do early 70s animated characters strum guitars with open palms? Archie and company did this too. It seems to me that would create no sound.

Check out this group shot:

Cindy Brady is playing what, exactly? A ukelele? I can accept Bobby on drums, but Cindy was a pretty dense kid, and she, not Marcia, should have been stuck on the lame-o tambourine and triangle, like Tracy Partridge before her.

I have to say, though, Jan’s looking pretty hot working the damper pedal on her Rhodes piano in that mini-skirt.

But wait a second, what’s going on here?

That’s really creepy. Time to change… the channel.

Next time: the Bradys tackle drama in the 80s.