All in the Family/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • I Am Not Spock:
    • Try to imagine Jean Stapleton as anybody other than Edith Bunker. Just try it.
    • Oddly enough, the only one out of the core foursome to fully escape this was Sally Struthers, who put on quite a bit of weight, and then became widely known and ridiculed for those commercials shilling correspondence diplomas (you know the ones) and later, Narm-laden appeals for children-oriented charities.
    • Even Rob Reiner, who became a successful director, has often said that if he were to win the Nobel Prize, all the headlines would read "MEATHEAD WINS NOBEL PRIZE". It was a double trumping as he was first known mostly as Carl Reiner's son.
    • Somewhat averted with Carroll O'Connor, thanks to the TV version of In the Heat of the Night.
  • Mean Character, Nice Actor: Carroll O'Connor used to get piles of hate mail while he played Archie Bunker from people who thought he was like his character. In Real Life, O'Connor was involved in the boycott of Florida orange juice, in protest of the Florida Citrus Commission's support of Anita Bryant and her anti-gay Save Our Children coalition. He did this in The Seventies, an era when gay people were Acceptable Targets (both in the "butt-of-jokes"- and the "thrown paving brick"-sense) and anybody who supported any form of equality for gay people was suspected of being gay themselves.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: With its storylines almost always centered around the current events and culture of the time, it's a pretty insightful look into the things going on in the 70s.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • The pilot episode, "Meet the Bunkers", was actually the third pilot produced. In both pilots prior to the one that was greenlit, Michael was an Irish-American named Dickie and the Bunkers' last name was Justice. The first pilot, produced in 1968, was entitled "Justice for All" and was actually filmed in New York; the second pilot, filmed in Hollywood in 1969, was called "Those Were the Days". "Dickie" and Gloria were recast twice; the same actor played Lionel in both original pilots but was replaced for the final 1970 pilot.
    • Two famous casting tidbits: Mickey Rooney was the first choice to play Archie, and Harrison Ford was actually cast as "Dickie", but both backed out because they found the playing of Archie's bigotry for humor to be offensive.
    • Long before she became Laverne, Penny Marshall was up for the role of Gloria. Had she gotten it, she could have worked alongside then-husband Rob Reiner.
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