The Brady Bunch (1995)

The 90s became a pandemic for adapting old TV shows into movies. Some work great; others should have stayed cancelled. Where you fall on 1995’s The Brady Bunch will depend on your stomach for them. What The Brady Bunch does differently than most remakes is taking the tongue-in-cheek approach, satirizing both the 70s and 90s at the same time. The Bradys are stuck in their groovy era living in the in-your-face 90s. The Bradys’ casting could not have been better. Gary Cole perfectly channels Robert Reed, Shelley Long is a dead ringer for Florence Henderson, and the Brady kids all have the look and feel of the characters. On the surface, it looks like the movie is making fun of the Bradys, but the reality is, it shows the kinder America of their era is what the 90s were in need of. However, to perhaps illustrate the point, The Brady Bunch wasn’t a big hit, it was big enough it got A Very Brady Sequel. If you weren’t alive in 1995, most of the jokes about the 90s are going to go right over your head, because the humor is very topical. Including when carjacking was a new thing and the movie thought it could be funny. It’s also a movie that requires some knowledge of the TV series and understanding just how big The Bradys were from the 70s into the 90s, having six spin-off TV series. The further we get from that era, the more of an oddity The Brady Bunch will be.