A generation later, Mark Linn-Baker would pen an almost identical memo to his show’s producers. Presumably, his notes were greeted as warmly as those of accomplished thespian. the late Robert Reed (link swiped from Boing Boing)
The most generic problem to date in œThe Brady Bunch has been this almost constant scripted inner transposition of styles.
1. A pie-throwing sequence tacked unceremoniously onto the end of a weak script.
2. The youngest daughter in a matter of a few unexplained hours managing to look and dance like Shirley Temple.
3. The middle boy happening to run into a look-alike in the halls of his school, with so exact a resemblance he fools his parents
And the list goes on.
Once again, we are infused with the slapstick. The oldest boy™s hair turns bright orange in a twinkling of the writer™s eye, having been doused with a non-FDA-approved hair tonic. (Why any boy of Bobby™s age, or any age, would be investing in something as outmoded and unidentifiable as œhair tonic remains to be explained. As any kid on the show could tell the writer, the old hair-tonic routine is right out of œOur Gang. Let™s face it, we™re long since past the œlittle dab™ll do ya era.)
Without belaboring the inequities of the script, which are varied and numerous, the major point to all this is: Once an actor has geared himself to play a given style with its prescribed level of belief, he cannot react to or accept within the same confines of the piece, a different style.
When the kid™s hair turns red, it is Batman in the operating room.
I can™t play it.
Reed never did a scene for the show again after this episode- missing the last episode entirely.
It actually is a very strange episode filled with odd references to past episodes of the show (they raid the wardrobe department and wear clothes from classic episodes) and in a sort of finale it reveals the last name of Sam the Butcher. I think it’s the strangest of all the episodes.