‘Sure, Jan’: How ‘A Very Brady Sequel’ Became a Trippy, Quippy Cult Classic

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nb...y-brady-sequel

Here’s the story of how a ridiculous, low-budget Brady Bunch movie sequel struck comedy gold and launched a meme that broke the internet.

By Ashley Spencer
August 5, 2021, 9:50am

When Elizabeth Olsen was prepping to play a heightened version of a 70s sitcom star in WandaVision, her main source of inspiration, she’s said, wasn’t The Brady Bunch or even The Brady Bunch Movie. It was A Very Brady Sequel, an outlandish, campy parody-homage from 1996.

That film didn’t perform at the box office and received generally worse reviews than The Brady Bunch Movie did the year prior, but for many fans, and seemingly Olsen, too, A Very Brady Sequel is the holy grail, that rare second film that manages to be even better than its predecessor.

Like The Godfather and The Godfather Part II before them, the merits of both 90s theatrical Brady films, and which is the superior, can be debated endlessly. The Brady Bunch Movie, directed by Betty Thomas, set the tone, surrounded the Bradys with 90s grunge, squashed Marcia’s nose with a football, and featured Jean Smart as a perpetually hungover neighbor. A Very Brady Sequel, directed by Arlene Sanford, cranked up the camp to give the world “Sure, Jan,” step-sibling incest, a psychedelic mushroom trip, and an actual trip to Hawaii.

Throughout both, the Bradys remain eternally stuck in their sugar-coated sitcom bubble, with plenty of callbacks to the original’s scripts and quirks, while the rest of the world moves on without them.

“Had they just tried to redo The Brady Bunch and put everyone in that period, it wouldn't have been nearly as funny,” Gary Cole, who played Mike Brady in the films, told VICE. “That's why everybody enjoyed it so much: We were the straight men and everyone else was regarding us as freaks.”

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Progressive, subversive, and somehow still extremely comforting and optimistic, the Brady Bunch movies found a devoted fan base that spans generations and has only grown more powerful in the age of streaming and social media. (Horrifyingly, more time has now passed since the release of A Very Brady Sequel than existed between the end of the original show in 1974 and the films.)

“We really didn't know how it was all going to be perceived,” Christine Taylor, who played Marcia Brady, said. “It was like icing and sugar and sprinkles on the cake when people really loved the movies.”

Twenty-five years later, the cast and creatives behind A Very Brady Sequel reveal what it was like resurrecting America’s most-famous sitcom family (again) and creating an offbeat classic.