5 Ways the Brady Bunch Could Have Used Twitter

FROM LAURA NACHMAN

Here’s a cute post about how The Brady Bunch would’ve handled Twitter.

http://lauranachman.wordpress.com/


The Brady Bunch was a television situation comedy that aired for five seasons on the ABC network. It was a moderate Nielsen Ratings success, usually maintaining a spot in the Top 30. There were 117 episodes in all, and the first episode was broadcast in September, 1969. The basic premise was that two single parents, each with three kids, fell in love, got married and settled in the Los Angeles suburbs.

There were no personal computers in 1969. There were no cell phones, no internet, no social networking sites and snail mail was the order of the day. You wouldn’t have friends all over the world unless you actually traveled the world; there was no “virtual” reality, only “real” reality.

The show would certainly be different if it aired today and utilized current technologies. Following are some things that would be changed if the show were being produced now.

1. No Phone Huddle – Counting the housekeeper there were nine members in the household. There were many scenes where one of the family members would be on the telephone, and everyone else would be huddled around, trying to listen to the conversation. That scene wouldn’t happen in a Twitter world.
2. #9 – This first season episode was about Mr. Brady’s frustration with the high telephone bill. His solution was to install a pay phone in the house. Calls were a dime, and the phone had a rotary dial (Brady’s never even made it to push-button phones during the series). Today, dad would be complaining about the kids talking on their cellphones instead of using their unlimited texting and twitter accounts for communicating with their friends.
3. #1 – In the first regular season episode, the kids read a letter in a newspaper advice column that they think one of their parents wrote, and they believe at least one parent is very unhappy with the whole household. The kids all write letters and mail them to the newspaper and. . .well, none of this would have happened. Kids don’t read newspapers and they don’t mail letters. They would all have been tweeting and retweeting or else creating a facebook thread.
4. #27 – In this 1970 episode, the two oldest kids, Greg and Marcia, volunteer to babysit so their parents can go out for the evening. The parents aren’t comfortable leaving the children home alone and they repeatedly try to call home but the phone is constantly busy. Worried, the parents return home to check on the kids, but the youngsters think the parents are burglars, so they call the police and. . . If Twitter was available, then the whole episode would have collapsed; 140 characters or less would manage to communicate that all was well from Greg or Marcia to Mom’s cell phone.
5. Back to the Future – If a studio tried to film this show today it would be a one-episode disaster. Imagine a nine-member household (plus easy to trip over dog) where everybody is wandering around, thumbing, thumbing, thumbing, and nobody is watching where they are going. If there was a second episode, it would be set in a hospital, and everybody’s legs and thumbs would be in casts.

I am sure the bunch would have no trouble getting into crazy situations today, but there would certainly be a few different ways for them to get there. LOL.

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