Janet Hubert-Whitten, the actress playing Vivian at the time, was pregnant. It’s always a question what to do when this happens: write in a pregnancy (Fresh Prince, Murphy Brown, Family Ties) or try to work around it (The Nanny, Kate & Allie, Seinfeld). Either way, the show has a shark.
I know it didn’t last five years, but if you combine them What’s Happening, and What’s Happening Now lasted five years.
Actually, Newhart was pretty funny, but not because of Bob Newhart. It was the rest of the cast that made it great, especially Larry, Darryl and Darryl.
Fight waltz?
[sub]Really not being judgemental here. I can’t; my college mascot is a mollusk.[/sub]
I don’t know about your school, but at my middle school, there was a period when all of us boys wore bandannas around our legs.
I wasn’t allowed to watch TV at the time, so I’m just now learning that I was emulating Scott Baio. I suddenly feel like I need a shower.
Would this have been late 70s/early 80s?
My bad- I’d forgotten that Daphne Reid only assumed the role and that another had played it first.
Candice Bergen’s daughter was born before Murphy (she’s now 20).
I know that Meredith Baxter (formerly Birney)'s pregnancy was real on Family Ties, but just had to mention- that was a pretty bad long running show itself. It had a cute premise that it quickly forgot about, became totally a star vehicle for MJF, couldn’t have cast kids who looked less like their TV parents, gave high-paying employment to Marc “Skippy” Price (still against the law in most countries), had umpteen and three dozen “special” episodes (Alex loses his best friend [who has strangely never been seen or mentioned before on the show] being one that comes to mind), had the “amazingly fast aging kid” stunt, characters who became cartoons very quickly and one of my personal pet-peeves- a house that was just absolutely architecturally impossible (and ironically the mother was an architect). No wonder that Meredith went on to receive 832 diseases in her later movies.
Trivia: Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter were born the same mm/dd/yyyy. His sister is SNL alum Mary Gross and her mother was Grace Whitney (who played the mom on Hazel and later became a very successful producer/director [One Day at a Time being her most lucrative creation]).
Yeah, maybe 1983ish? I was in 7th or 8th grade in Atlanta at the time, so it would have been somewhere in the '83-'85 range. Now that I think about it, maybe it was in '84 sometime. That’s about as close as I can get.
Yep, fight waltz. As far as I know, the only college fight song in the U.S. in 3/4 time. Here are the lyrics; think “oom-pah-pah” band, and you’ll get the correct impression. (syllables in CAPS are on the downbeat)
We COME from Saint OLaf
We SHURE are the REAL stuff
our TEAM is the CREAM of the
COLleges GREAT.
we FIGHT fast and FURious
our TEAM is inJURious
toNIGHT Carleton COLlege will
SURE meet it’s FATE.
UM! yah! yah! UM! yah! yah!
UM! yah! yah! UM! yah! yah!
UM! yah! yah! UM! yah! yah!
UM! yah! yah! YAH!
Link to RealMedia recording of the St. Olaf Band playing the song.
OMG. That’s just…
breathtaking.
I know I’m gonna regret asking this, but why do you say the house was “architecturally impossible”? Do you mean that you can’t make any kind of sensible floor plan(s) from whatever information you can glean from the various sets?
That’s what I thought was meant. I don’t remember enough about the Family Ties house, really. I remember the foyer/living room and the kitchen sets. So far as I remember, there was no impossibility in those two, but I’m sure if you looked at all the sets in detail, there would be some problems.
Sitcoms are notorious for these architectural anomalies. The most famous one is the Brady Bunch house, in which there is no way to draw a floorplan of the second floor. The bigegst problem with that one is that the girls’ room and the boys’ room share a bathroom, but when they show the upstairs landing, you go in two different directions to get to the rooms; they don’t look like they could be adjacent.
I also believe that the house on *That '70s Show is architecturally impossible. Notice that the exit from the basement to the outside is on the right (viewer’s perspective), but when someone comes up from that way, he or she ends up on the left side of the house (next to the garage).
I was at a jail recently (not in jail yet) and the deputy at the booking desk had Magnum on. I watched about five minutes and saw Rick running around being generally useless.
Now, Magnum is the leader. TC is the pilot and old Vietnam buddy. I think Rick was also an old 'nam buddy. But what did Rick DO? Was he supposed to be the ladies man? Because if he is, he was one of the smallest ones I’ve ever seen.
-Joe
Rick was the one that ran a club and had all the underworld contacts–like the aforementioned Icepick, who Rick was always bringing up in conversation.
Rick was the guy with “street smarts”. He ran a club and, by logical extension in Hollywood, he knew shady characters who could help out a private eye.
Yep. The back door is on the front. Sometimes there’s a formal dining room and an office that are somewhere between the living room and K (rather like sometimes the Brady attic is 3 feet high and sometimes it’s huge) and other times there’s not. Where the bedrooms are in relation to the staircase landing upstairs would defy the laws of gravity (unless they’re built on stilts over the front lawn).
IIRC there’s been a whole thread devoted to this, and The Brady Bunch is mentioned below, but other impossible TV floorplans that come to mind: The Jeffersons (where are the bedrooms?), Happy Days (which also had the most unrealistic outdoor sets of all time) and lots of other shows. (Shows in which the architecture makes perfect sense include Bewitched, All in the Family and Dallas, though few of these agree with the exterior shots of the house used in the credits.)
Geek rant out.
Thanks!
I’m pretty sure that Oscar’s garbage can is also architecturally impossible.
Actually, I remember a lot of houses from the '70s whose “back” door (leading into the kitchen) was next to the driveway and garage and the “front” door (which no one used) was around the corner on the side of the house.
I’ve posted this elsewhere, but not everybody loves Raymond.
That show was soooo bad. And everyone is all weepy and orgasmic over it. You’d think their brother had died when the show’s end was announced.