Don't get me wrong - whoever decided to make her a maniac is a God, given this version of Jan is the funniest thing ever (I quote her weekly).
But I'm wondering why they made her crazy? She's not like that at all in the show. In fact she's probably the quietest of the Brady kids.
CDEGFEDCC.
I guess since they decided to make Marcia the perfect, enviable older sister they took it in the total opposite direction with Jan, probably to parody her insecurities about being a middle child. What's even stranger is they made Greg a total loser. I would have expected the opposite because he was the male equivalent to Marcia on the show.
shareFor parody.
shareWhat I liked about the rest of the cast is that everyone resembled the original, even down to voices. This new Jan Brady had no resemblance to the original Jan Brady. They could have kept her crazy, a maniac, everything about parodying how jealous and desperate she was, but the actress they picked is just a plain bad actress. Also, the original Jan is actually very pretty.
shareWhat they did was take characteristics from the original show and exaggerate them for parody. Marcia was a little self-centered in the original show (remember when she played Juliet? Or when she wanted to marry her dentist?), but was ridiculously self-involved in the movie. Jan was a little neurotic in the original (being jealous of Marcia in several episodes, or wanting to be an only child), but that was exaggerated for comic effect as well. I thought Jennifer Cox did an excellent job in the role.
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Jenifer Elise Cox was great as Jan. No she didnt resemble her but she had the voice and mannerisms down. And she was the ony one not wearing a wig.
shareBasically ever Jan episode of the series is her having some neurotic complex, and then everything is cool at the end, but the next time you swing around to a Jan episode, she's back to having the same old problems. The movies just make fun of that.
"Mr. Bond, you defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you."
All the Bradys were exaggerated for comic effect. Jan was emotionally needy and that worked great for the movie. The premise of the movie was that The Bradys were stuck in the '70s. The lines that worked so well for Greg in the '70s sounded pathetic in the '90s. Marcia was good looking and stayed that way. But she was clueless about life in the '90s.
shareThat is true, this is why in my other thread I said they should have made Bobby extremly SHORT, b/c his heigth seemed to be a reoccuring issue with him throughout the series.
Just because we lose today's battle doesn't mean we've lost tommorow's war.
I think there was a Saturday Night Live episode, where they had a spoof of Jan going "Marcia Marcia Marcia!" I am not sure, but I think it aired before this movie was made. I'm pretty sure that no one really made fun of Jan before Saturday Night Live got the ball rolling... Maybe it was one of the inspirations for making the Brady Bunch Movie in the first place.
Yes, OK, I can't completely nail when that skit was on Saturday Night Live, but it looks like Melanie Hutsell was the actress portraying Jan, and she was only on SNL in the early 90's, before this movie came out.
I agree with the OP that Jan was a pretty regular kid, in the original show. Maybe she had one or two episodes where she was jealous of Marcia, but, so what. She was definitely not a total psycho, like in this movie.
You are toast, my toasty friend.
I would have to say in the original show, Jan seemed to be about the most level headed down-to-earth kid of the whole bunch.
Bobby also had a few episodes where he felt inferior, in one he felt like he could never win at anything, then it one he felt like he would never grow anymore. I wonder why they didn't exagerate those things in the movie?
Just because we lose today's battle doesn't mean we've lost tommorow's war.
All their characteristics were exaggerated in this film, Marcia was not the stuck up bitch that she was in this film either.
Just because we lose today's battle doesn't mean we've lost tommorow's war.
All the characters were turned into extreme parodies of their television counterparts.
shareThe '70s was the classic original Jan. The animated "Brady Kids" and the '80s spin off series gave us nerdy Jan. The '90s movies gave us psycho Jan.
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