Shelley Long and Gary Cole Weren’t Big “Brady Bunch” Fans When They Signed on to “The Brady Bunch Movie” and “A Very Brady Sequel”
Shelley Long and Gary Cole Weren’t Big “Brady Bunch” Fans When They Signed on to “The Brady Bunch Movie” and “A Very Brady Sequel”
Angela AndaloroMon, August 24, 2026 at 5:19 PM UTC
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Gary Cole and Shelley Long as Mike and Carol Brady in ‘A Very Brady Sequel’Credit: Everett -
The Brady Bunch aired for five seasons from 1969 to 1974
The classic family sitcom’s 1970s characters living life in the 1990s was the basis for 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie and 1996’s A Very Brady Sequel
Despite the fact that they weren’t Brady Bunch viewers, Shelley Long and Gary Cole gave an exceptional take on the beloved characters of Carol and Mike Brady
What started out as a parody turned into a classic in its own right.
The Brady Bunch Movie, released in 1995, and its 1996 follow-up, A Very Brady Sequel, dazzled audiences with big laughs surrounding a nostalgic pillar of TV history. There’s no understating what The Brady Bunch meant to the generation that grew up watching and the generations that have tuned in since.
At the time the two films were made, however, some of the actors who became members of the Brady family revealed they weren’t part of that original viewing audience. Shelley Long, 77, admitted she wasn’t keeping up with television when the series aired from 1969 to 1974, but watched some taped episodes while preparing to embody Carol Brady, played in the original series by Florence Henderson.
“I wasn’t really a Bradyite when it was first on the air,” Long told the Phoenix New Times in 1995. “I wasn’t really watching any television then–I was trying to get my own career off the ground. But I heard about the Bradys, though. I knew they were doing their thing and America was talking about them.”
The cast of ‘The Brady Bunch’ in 1969Credit: CBS via Getty
In a 2025 interview with Remind Magazine, Gary Cole, who played Mike Brady (originally played by Robert Reed), shared, “When it came on the air, it was 1969, so I was in junior high school, and it was Friday night, which was significant.”
“So I had one foot out the door on Friday nights, like most of my friends did,” the actor continued. “So I was not in a situation where I was sitting around with my family, because I was beyond that. We were all too cool to do that then. But I do remember all my friends talking about Marcia, for obvious reasons, when you’re a teenage boy.”
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The Brady Bunch Movie was a success, bringing in over $50 million at the box office. It also helped introduce new Brady memes and jokes into the marketplace — including Christine Taylor’s iconic delivery, as eldest sister Marcia, of “Sure, Jan.”
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Jennifer Elise Cox, Christine Taylor, Olivia Hack, Henriette Mantel, Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Jesse Lee, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Paul Sutera in ‘A Very Brady Sequel’Credit: Everett
In that same interview, Cole opened up about the surprising success of the films and what he attributes it to, three decades later.
“It was really well put together, to me,” he said. “I think the reason it worked, it was kind of a send-up, but it was a send-up with some sweetness attached to it. It was a tip of the cap to a show that was a big success and meant a lot to a lot of people.”
Cole added, “But what’s funny now is that someone said to me is they watched it, but even the people that regarded the Bradys as weird are also now [in] a time capsule because it’s so ‘90s if you look at that movie. So they’re just as dated as the Bradys.”
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
