12 ‘Brady Bunch’ Behind-the-Scenes Facts You Probably Never Knew

“It's very rare that a writer knows exactly where his ideas come from,” series creator Sherwood Schwartz said. “However, in the case of The Brady Bunch, I know exactly what inspired that show. It was just a four-line filler piece in the Los Angeles Times. Just a statistic. It said that year, 1965, 31 percent of all marriages involved people who had a child or children from a previous marriage. It was just a statistic, but to me it indicated a remarkable sociological change in our country."

At the time, Hackman was still an unknown actor, and so producers settled for Robert Reed (Mike) because he was considered the most successful of the two.

"I sat on a chair across from the boy or girl I was interviewing. While I was asking the kids these general questions, my coffee table served as a sort of concentration test. I placed objects on the table directly between us that might be interesting to children. I wanted to see if they would be distracted from our discussion...I wanted children who could stay focused," Sherwood said. 

"We used to make out in the doghouse when we were nine," Susan said.

"It was our first kiss," Maureen wrote in her memoir. "It was wonderful, too, though [...] a part of me — a tiny part, admittedly — said to myself, 'Oh my God! I'm kissing my brother. What am I doing?'"

She had to keep her real hair hidden since it had been cropped short for her role in an off-Broadway revival of South Pacific.

Because Christopher Knight (Peter) couldn't throw the football correctly, writer Lloyd Schwartz stepped in to throw the ball at Maureen's nose. He nailed it in one take.

"I think it’s kind of petty," Susan Olsen said about the feud. "From day one with [Maureen and Eve], I have always been in the middle, and now it’s at the point where there isn’t even a desire to communicate through me. It’s all really petty."

(Click through to learn what Eve Plumb is up to today.)

He was later replaced with a lookalike dog.

"It wasn't that I sought [a relationship]. I just wanted to spend time with her," he said back in 1992.

Sherwood revealed that he casted children that had hair that matched the parents' hair. The one exception was Susan, whose hair they dyed blonder, and Bobby, whose hair they dyed darker.

“He wound up on a show that he didn’t want to do in the first place, and it became more and more difficult for him," Sherwood said. “His idea of a show was based on the Encyclopedia Britanica.”