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Susan Olsen on the stigma of being a child star
Olsen did her best to clarify the confusion surrounding The Brady Bunch.
When it comes to The Brady Bunch, everybody has their favorite conspiracy theory. There's all the misinformation about Florence Henderson dating younger castmates. Then there's the ever-popular "Cindy is dead" rumor. Don't even get us started about all the hoaxes about Cousin Oliver, either.
While she wasn't disputing her own death, Susan Olsen (The Brady Bunch's Cindy Brady) spent a lot of her time setting the record straight about other things. In fact, Olsen was so passionate about clearing things up that it led her to produce a one-hour ABC special.
In 1995, Susan Olsen served as co-executive producer for Brady Bunch Home Movies, which allowed the cast to share their memories and update fans on their lives after Brady.
"So many people just didn't get it," Olsen told the Los Angeles Times. "They wanted to turn it into some reunion show full of contrivances and just trying to dictate how it should be. My whole point was just let the material speak for itself. Just let us be ourselves. This is the first time anybody has ever seen us not be our characters. That's where the home movies came in handy."
But one of the main reasons for the special's existence was because Olsen was "sick and tired of these crybabies who get on TV and say my life is so terrible because I had the good fortune of being on a TV show when I was a kid. I don't mean to be unsympathetic to those people, but what was starting to happen was that instead of people coming up to me and saying, 'That must have been so neat to do that show,' they were coming up and saying, 'How messed up are you?' I wanted to show we are six people who may not necessarily have gone on to be actors, but we are all successful people."
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About the only thing that might have buzz-worthiness in regard to the show was Robert Reed's need for accuracy in episodes/scenes, but all that did was slow down production and excluded Mr. Reed from the last episode.
