Why Did Tiger, the ‘Brady Bunch’s Family Dog, Mysteriously Vanish?
Here’s a story of a lovely doggy, who was … wait, wasn’t there a dog on The Brady Bunch?
It was quite a full house when The Brady Bunch premiered in 1969; audiences were introduced to Mike (Robert Reed) and Carol (Florence Henderson) Brady and their blended family: Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight), Bobby (Mike Lookinland), Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb) and Cindy (Susan Olsen). Throw in a housekeeper named Alice (Ann B. Davis) and that’s enough, right?
Well, don’t forget Tiger. Yes, the Bradys had a pet dog when the show began, but the pooch was nowhere to be seen after the second season. What happened?
Tiger “just sort of faded away,” Plumb said when she, Williams and Knight visited the Today show in 20024. “That’s TV. Stuff comes and it goes.”
Everett Collection
“Watching the early shows with Tiger, Tiger’s an important element, you’re right,” said Knight. “And he just disappears.” Williams, who hosts The Read Brady Bros. rewatch podcast with Knight, added that continuity “was not one of the strong points of the show. And so, one day he’s there, one day, he’s not there.”
Tiger was at the center of the first Brady Bunch episode, “The Honeymoon.” Mike and Carol’s backyard wedding goes awry when Tiger chases the girls’ cat, Fluffy.
Fluffy would not appear again beyond that first episode, but Tiger would make sporadic appearances throughout the first season, including a somewhat controversial appearance on the fifth episode, “Katchoo.” When Jan appeared to be allergic to Tiger, the family prepared to send him to live with their grandmother (turns out, Jan is allergic to Tiger’s new flea powder).
However, the dog at the end of the episode is not the one at the start. Sherwood Schwartz, the series’ creator, wrote about the incident (and what happened to Tiger) in his memoir, Brady, Brady, Brady: The Complete Story of the Brady Bunch.
“The dog was placed in the boys’ bedroom set, and I retrieved Mike Lookinland from the schoolroom. Bobby Brady was ready. The dog was ready (so I thought) and the camera rolled. The director said, “Action!” And the dog promptly ran off the set,” wrote Schwartz, who then went to the trainer for an explanation.
‘That’s not Tiger. Tiger was home, and he got out. He was hit by a car and killed,” said the trainer. Schwartz was taken aback by the news.
“Then, I realized that if this dog wasn’t Tiger, who was it? I asked, ‘Then what dog is this?’ [The trainer] confessed, ‘I didn’t know what to do, so on the way in, I stopped off at the pound and…’”
Though aggravated that the trainer put an untrained dog in the middle of an active TV set, Schwartz made it work. They nailed the dog’s collar to the ground to keep the pup in place for the final scenes.
Afterward, they replaced Tiger with another dog that wasn’t as untrained. Ultimately, the show’s producers decided to phase out the pooch.
Now, can someone tell us what happened to Fluffy?
Puzzler '80s Comedy Classics
Vol 1, Issue 6
This issue is packed with puzzles and trivia from all your favorite '80s sitcoms.
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