‘Brady Bunch’ cast jokes about the disappearance of family pets

The Brady Bunch was not known for its logic.

Several former cast members — Barry Williams (Greg), Eve Plumb (Jan), and Christopher Knight (Peter) pointed out one problem Thursday, when they reunited on Today to mark the show’s 55th anniversary.

Near the end of the interview (about 8:19 in the video below), cohost Carson Daly said he had one more question: “Tiger the dog, was their ever a real closure for Tiger? I don’t remember an episode where Tiger, like…. All of the sudden he wasn’t there.”

“Well, Fluffy, as well,” Plumb broke in. “The pets… they just sort of faded away after the flea powder episode.”

Fluffy was only a part of the pilot episode, and shows often see tweaks after the pilots. But Tiger seemed to be a real part of the blended Brady household. The episode that Plumb mentioned, in which the family learned that Jan was allergic to Tiger’s product, aired in the first season.

The iconic family sitcom originally aired from September 1969 to March 1974, ending five months before the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It has, of course, continued to air in reruns and will quite possibly until the end of time.

“That’s TV. Stuff comes and it goes,” she added.

Knight, who’s rewatching the series for his podcast with Williams, The Real Brady Bros, agreed that Tiger deserved a better send-off.

“We haven’t watched them in 40 years, but watching the early shows with Tiger, Tiger’s an important element,” he said. “You’re right, and he just disappears.”

Williams, author of the 1992 book Growing Up Brady, noted that, “Continuity was not one of the strong points of our show. And so, one day he’s there, one day he’s not there.”

The real story of the dog who played Tiger was a sad one: After leaving set one day, he was killed by a car, series creator Sherwood Schwartz told the Television Academy Foundation in 2010. The trainer then attempted to trick the show by getting a replacement dog who looked like Tiger, but it quickly became obvious that he was untrained. The trainer confessed. They’d already filmed half the episode, though, so they needed the dog to stay.

“We solved the problem by nailing Tiger to the floor,” said Schwartz, who died in 2011. He then clarified that “we nailed the collar down to the floor.”

“That was the end,” he continued, “because we had an untrained dog. We weren’t gonna deal with that.”

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In 1995, the parody The Brady Bunch Movie was in on the joke. It featured a scene in which mom Carol (played by Shelley Long) used the word “tiger,” then asks herself out loud, “Whatever happened to that dog?”

All six of Brady kids, including Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Susan Olsen (Cindy), and Mike Lookinland (Bobby) reassembled in 2019 to film the HGTV series A Very Brady Renovation. The actors were also on Today to promote a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry, in which fans can enter to win brunch with them at their former TV home, which they’re calling The Brady Experience.