During its five-season run in the 1970s, The Brady Bunch cast went on several trips, including the Grand Canyon and Hawaii.
But the ABC sitcom’s last on-location trip—to a theme park near Cincinnati—could have ended in disaster for the cast, which included Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, Christopher Knight, Eve Plumb, Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen and Ann B. Davis.
The episode, titled “The Cincinnati Kids,” was filmed at Kings Island over five days, from Aug. 20-24, 1973. It was the second year the park was open and the second time a major TV show filmed there—The Partridge Family had been there in 1972, per WLWT 5.
The plotline, about architect Mike Brady’s (Reed) sketches for a theme park expansion project, allowed for the park rides to be shown prominently—at one point the whole Brady clan was running around the park looking for the lost canister containing the plans. In the end, the family celebrated finding the canister by taking a ride on The Racer roller coaster—but that scene could have ended very differently.
In a video posted on the Kings Island YouTube page, Williams, who played eldest son Greg Brady on the series, remembered the episode as “one of the most exciting times in our filming.” But he noted that his TV dad took issue with filming the roller coaster scene.
“And The Racer presented a particular challenge because it’s like really a good roller coaster,” Williams said. “And all the things he didn’t want: fast, steep sharp. So he refused actually to go on the roller coaster.”
It turned out Reed, who had a reputation for being difficult on the set, had a better reason to refuse the ride than anyone could have imagined.
Co-star Eve Plumb (Jan Brady) wrote about Reed’s demands for the roller coaster ride in her book, Happiness Included.
“Robert Reed insisted that the roller coaster be sent around the track empty to test the safety of having a camera attached to it,” she wrote, adding that producers reluctantly complied and sent the coaster on a test run with no passengers.
“It came back with a fragmented brace on the front car and no camera,” Plumb continued. ”Mike [Lookinland] and I were the kids in the first car, so I’m pretty sure that Robert Reed being difficult prevented us from being badly injured or killed in one of his disagreeable moments.”
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A post on the Six Flags website also addressed the near-disastrous ride, noting that a large temporary camera mount was secured to the front of the train to obtain on-ride footage of the cast and that producers were “shocked” when the train returned from the test run with no camera mounted to it.
“The camera had dislodged and fell off its mount and backwards towards the seats. Had the cast been on board, they would have been injured,” the outlet shared.
Reed and Susan Olsen (Cindy) refused to go on the ride and are not seen in the episode’s roller coaster footage. Instead, a stand-in for Olsen was seated behind Williams, who was instructed to hold his hands up to hide her face.
While Kings Island was ultimately fun to film, Plumb admitted in her book that after the Hawaii episodes there had been talk of sending the Bradys to Japan.
“Then the announcement came that we would be filming episodes in Warren County, Ohio near Cincinnati,” she shared. “Truth to tell, I was still a kid enough to get excited about it!”
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