Before making a single edit, Tropedia EXPECTS our site policy and manual of style to be followed. Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so. Our policies can be reviewed here.
All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation.
All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO Janna2000, SelfCloak or RRabbit42. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP.
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.
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.
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.
YMMV • 
Radar • 
Quotes • (
Funny • 
Heartwarming • 
Awesome) • 
Fridge • 
Characters • 
Fanfic Recs • 
Nightmare Fuel • 
Shout Out • 
Plot • 
Tear Jerker • 
Headscratchers • 
Trivia • WMG • 
Recap • 
Ho Yay • 
Image Links • 
Memes • 
Haiku • Laconic • 
Source • Setting