The Brady Bunch Episode #19
Welcome to my Brady Bunch Blog! For your pleasure, I’ll be reviewing The Brady Bunch Episode 19 today. This is called The Big Sprain and originally aired on February 6, 1970. This episode is about Alice spraining her ankle and the kids being all stupid trying to cook and clean. Enjoy.
The show opens with Alice washing up the dinner dishes in the groovy Brady kitchen. Mike walks in to say he just got off the phone with Carol (thus explaining to the audience why Florence Henderson is gone). Carol is off somewhere helping Aunt Mary. Mike tells Alice he hopes that running the place single handedly won’t be too much for her. Uhh….does Carol ever really do anything anyway?
Alice goes into the dining room to get the leftover apple pie and slips on the Chinese Checkers that were left on the floor. I remember playing that game when I was a kid. Memories. Anyway, I really don’t know how Alice didn’t see that right there on the floor. I guess the storyline wouldn’t work though if Alice saw it.
Mike calls a family meeting to tell the kids they’re stupid for leaving their crap out. He tells them that Alice has a bad sprain and that the kids will have to do all of the housework.
Alice is sad that she’ll have to miss the meat cutter’s ball Saturday night with Sam. She had a pretty yellow dress picked out and everything. Oh well. Life sucks sometimes.
Cooking & Cleaning
The girls are in the kitchen the next morning fighting. Jan doesn’t want to clean all of the dishes. Marcia isn’t doing them because she made the eggs. Big whoop. Thindy is talking to the toaster yelling for the toast to come out. Marcia continues to yell and be a bitch while Eve Plumb (Jan) is mouthing her lines. Cindy keeps looking at the toaster while smoke pours out of it.
Breakfast sucked but the girls are back in the kitchen burning things while trying to make dinner. Thindy is crumpling up the salad. I think she’s trying to tear the lettuce but it looks more like wadding up the lettuce like a used tissue.
Carol calls from Aunt Mary’s house (which is actually her and Mike’s bedroom set) and Mike tries to stay calm. He decided to end the call when Greg tells him that Peter’s shirt is stuck in the vacuum cleaner and that Peter is still in it! How dumb are these Brady kids?
Sam the Butcher
Sam brings Alice candy and flowers and makes a bunch of stupid jokes. Mike comes in after he leaves and offers to put the flowers in water for Alice. You can see the boom mic shadow on the wall and Mike’s head as she says some stupid line about being able to water them herself (with her tears).
Marcia talks to Greg while he’s playing basketball and says the sappiest crap that no child would ever say. All the kids come together to work hard on the house. They show a little montage of the kids being perfect and stuff. It ends with the kids serving an absolute perfect meal to Alice and Mike. Right….
Mike holds another late night family meeting but this time it’s to tell the kids how proud he is of them. The kids feel bad that Alice’s love life is ruined since she can’t go to the ball. They devise a scheme to make her forget about the dance. First up, Marcia and Jan invite her into the kitchen for peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. Next, Peter and Greg excitedly invite her to watch a wrestling match on TV. Finally, Cindy and Bobby ask Alice if she wants to play Old Maid. That makes Alice weepy. Maybe everyone can come to the pity party.
Nosegay?
Sam shows up with nosegay. What? Alice says she has the gayest nose in town. I guess lingo was different back in the 70’s. Sam decides to skip his big dick meat cutter’s ball to hang out on the patio with Alice and look at the stars. Happy ending.
The tag of The Brady Bunch Episode #19 is everyone all excited because Carol is home. As everyone is running out to the driveway to see her, Alice trips over the vacuum cleaner that was right in front of her face. The end.
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