Growing Pains

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Growing Pains
Image:Growing Pains screenshot1.jpg
The cast of Growing Pains.
Genre Sitcom
Running time 30 minutes
(with commercials)
Creator(s) Neal Marlens
Starring Alan Thicke
Joanna Kerns
Kirk Cameron
Tracey Gold
Jeremy Miller
Ashley Johnson
Leonardo DiCaprio
Country of origin United States
Original channel ABC
Original run September 24, 1985–April 25, 1992
No. of episodes 166
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

Growing Pains was an American television sitcom that ran on the ABC network from 1985 to 1992.

The show was about the Seaver family. Dr. Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke), a psychiatrist, works from home because his wife, Maggie (Joanna Kerns), has gone back to work as a reporter. Jason has to take care of his kids: 15-year-old troublemaker Mike (Kirk Cameron), 14-year-old honors student Carol (Tracey Gold), and rambunctious 9-year-old Ben (Jeremy Miller). The show was relevant in the mid-1980s as women going to work was becoming more and more common, as were stay at home dads.

Contents

[edit] Episodes

Main article: List of Growing Pains episodes

[edit] Later Seasons

The 1989–1990 season was retconned out of existence as a dream of Mike Seaver's after Kirk Cameron insisted that new castmate Julie McCullough be fired for posing for Playboy magazine. Cameron later apologized for his actions (see below). The previous season had ended on a cliffhanger in which Mike asked Julie to marry him. Initially the character of Julie abandoned Mike at the altar; there was a backlash by fans and she was brought back later to reconcile. McCullough did not find out she was being fired until showing up to film what she thought was a wedding episode.

After Cameron's religious conversion, his beliefs frequently interfered with production of the show. He insisted that no "adult themes" be incorporated into episodes, and he often demanded that entire episodes be re-written when he objected to the content (when one planned episode revolved around Julie giving Mike the key to her apartment, Cameron objected to the sexual connotations, and he forced a new script to be written). According to the Growing Pains episode of E! True Hollywood Story, Cameron at one point went so far as to call the president of ABC on the phone and refer to executive producers Dan Guntzelman, Mike Sullivan and Steve Marshall as pornographers due to the content of some of the episodes. In 1991, after the show's sixth season, the three men quit the show as a result of Cameron's actions and statements.

In 2003, according to the article "The Rebirth of Kirk Cameron" in Christianity Today, Cameron "admits he made some mistakes common to new believers — such as distancing themselves so far from the world that they do no good for anyone ... In time, however, he realized his missteps. In 2000, he rejoined his former cast members for a Growing Pains reunion movie. With a decade of spiritual growth under his belt, he stood in front of his TV family and apologized. 'I was a 17-year-old guy trying to walk with integrity, knowing that I was walking in the opposite direction from many other people. I didn't have the kind of maturity and graceful way of putting things perhaps that I would now,' he says. Cameron's fellow actors immediately embraced him."

At the beginning of the last season, a new character, Luke Brower, was introduced, played by a then unknown Leonardo DiCaprio in an attempt to salvage ratings, but the show was cancelled at the end of the season.

[edit] Theme song and opening sequences

The show's theme song is "As Long as We Got Each Other", performed by B.J. Thomas and starting with the second season, Jennifer Warnes and was made a hit with Dusty Springfield in 1988. There were seven versions of this theme song including an acapella version, that was used for most of the seventh season and a Halloween-themed version not sung by Thomas or Warnes.

The season one open featured various works of art closing with a shot of the cast which goes from black and white to color. The opening credits from seasons two through five featured an opening shot of the cast in front of the house where establishing shots of the Seaver house are used, switching to photos of each cast member from childhood and in Alan Thicke and Joanna Kerns' case, to adulthood, mixed with various episode clips. The end of each sequence also featured all but one member of the cast leaving to go inside the Seaver house with the other leaving seconds later, however one episode reversed this with Alan Thicke being the only one leaving, only to stop and turn back, and the rest of the cast leaves seconds later.

The opening used in seasons six and seven featured an opening shot of the mantle on the Seaver's fireplace panning over pictures of the cast. The past photos of each cast member were kept but the clips where each cast member's name is overlayed on was replaced with still current photos of each cast member. In this sequence, the male cast members wore tuxedos and the female cast members wore formal dresses. The only exception was Leonardo DiCaprio, whom when he was added to the cast, his photo featured him wearing a hooded shirt and jeans. The end of this sequence feature various still shots of the entire cast trying to get together for their picture, closing to a shot of the pictures on the wall on and above the mantle.

[edit] DVD Releases

In 2004, there was a second reunion movie. On February 7, 2006, Warner Bros. released the complete first season, with the first 22 episodes of the series, on Region 1 DVD. In conjunction with the release, the cast reunited for a CNN Larry King Live interview which aired on that same date.

[edit] Reruns/Syndication

[edit] United States

Reruns aired on the Disney Channel from 1998-2001 with the episodes featuring Leonardo DiCaprio given special emphasis in an attempt to draw in preteen crowds who had recently seen him in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic. The cable rights for the show moved to sister network ABC Family, where it ran from 2001 to 2004.

On November 20, 2006, i: Independent Television began running all 166 episodes of Growing Pains (albeit with the shortened theme song commonly used for syndication), with double runs airing weeknights at 9PM ET/8PM CT.

Nick at Nite also shows it in Latin America every night at 1:00 A.M. ET/PT

[edit] Trivia

Audio sample of opening credits:
  • Despite the character of Mike being older than Carol, Kirk Cameron is actually one year younger than Tracey Gold.
  • The last name "Seaver," and the last name of the Seavers' fictional next-door neighbors, "Koosman," were the last names of the 1969 New York Mets number one and number two starting pitchers, Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman.
  • The junior high school (Alfred Landon Jr. High), high school (Wendell Willkie High School), and junior college (Thomas Dewey Junior College) that the Seaver children attended were named after three presidential candidates defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt (Alfred Landon in 1936, Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Thomas Dewey in 1944).
  • Actress Tracey Gold was absent for most of the final season due to her personal struggle with an eating disorder.
  • Ben's full name was Benjamin Hubert Horatio Humphrey Seaver. Aside from the comedic effect of three middle names all beginning with an H, Hubert Horatio Humphrey was a real person, a United States Senator and the 38th Vice President of the United States who was the Democratic Party's candidate for President in 1968. In constrast, the full name of Mike's best friend, "Boner," was Richard Milhous Stabone. His character was named after President Richard Milhous Nixon, the man who defeated Hubert Humphrey in the Presidential Election of 1968.
  • The character of Chrissy was "jumped" five years in age over the course of only one year to bring more interest to the show and to give the writers more to play with in terms of storylines.
  • Elizabeth Ward was cast as the original Carol Anne Seaver, but was replaced by Tracey Gold (who had auditioned for the part but at first didn't get it) after the pilot was shown to test audiences with poor results prior to the network premiere of the show.
  • Julie McCullough was fired after nude photos of her were published in Playboy. It is rumored that Kirk Cameron was behind the termination because of his strict Christian faith. (She had also posed for Playboy once before, several years before joining the show, and the cast and crew were aware of this when she was brought in.)
  • ABC ran the final episodes of Growing Pains, Who's the Boss? and MacGyver on the same night.
  • Maggie Seaver hums the opening tune to Who's the Boss? at the beginning of the Pilot.
  • As with other classic TV shows, Growing Pains was referenced numerous times on Family Guy. In particular, the episode entitled "The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire" features Mayor Adam West imitating a Buckingham Palace guard, trying to keep a straight face. But, he thinks of Growing Pains, and of the character Boner, and instantly cracks up.
  • The pilot episode of Nobody's Watching also jokes about Growing Pains, in the way one of the main characters of that show is a fan of the show. Alan Thicke, who played Jason Seaver, also appears in the pilot.
  • Growing Pains was unusual because it not only satirized sitcoms, it satirized itself.
    • Before appearing on Growing Pains, Alan Thicke hosted a late-night talk show called Thicke of the Night. Joanna Kearn's sister is Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona. On the first episode, Mike asks Carol if she had seen Mom. When Carol asks, "Mom?" Mike responds, "Short woman, looks like Donna de Varona." Later in the episode, Mike asks Carol if she had seen "Dad." Again, Carol responds with the question, "Dad?" to which Mike replies, "Tall man, looks like a talk show host."
    • In one episode (Mike visits his girlfriend from Maui), Carol quips "Show me that smile again" just before the opening theme whose first line is "Show me that smile again".
    • Humorous opening themes were produced for Halloween and other events. One showed male and female guest cast members with the show's stars names superimposed: "ALAN THICKE (but that's not him)", "JOANNA KERNS (but that's not her)"... "JEREMY MILLER (you guessed it)"...
    • "Meet The Seavers" was an episode in which Ben awoke as Jeremy Miller, star of the fictional television show Meet The Seavers, providing a satirical behind-the-scenes look at Growing Pains. Some of the show's actual behind-the-scenes staff made on-camera appearances as themselves, notably the script supervisor, Susan Straughn Harris.
    • In one episode, Ben takes a taxi cab driven by Alan Hale, the actor who played the skipper on Gilligan's Island. Ben suggests that the cab driver is, in fact, the Skipper, which leads to a dicussion about television shows. The cab driver asks Ben what his favorite programs are, and Ben responds that he likes "ABC's Tuesday night lineup." He adds that he is especially fond of Who's the Boss, Moonlighting, and "the program that is on between the two of them, especially the little kid." The reference is, of course, to Growing Pains and the character of Ben.
  • Most years, Growing Pains had Halloween episodes conceptually similar to The Simpsons Halloween episodes:
  • Growing Pains was run on NHK of Japan in the name of "Yukai na Seaver Ke(愉快なシーバー家)" (translates conceptually to "Pleasant Seaver family") from 1997 to 2000. In the Japanese version, all the cast were dubbed in Japanese by Japanese voice actors.
  • The Willies (IMDB: The Willies) was a B-movie horror-comedy produced by many Growing Pains talent and behind-the-scenes staff. Jeremy Miller (and his little brother Joshua), Kirk Cameron and Tracy Gold all made appearances; Cameron and Gold did so on the Growing Pains set, while Miller was one of the movie's stars. Many frequent Growing Pains guest stars were also cast.

[edit] Main cast

[edit] Minor Recurring Characters

Guest star Brad Pitt as Jonathon Keith, Ben's idol. Season 4, "Feet of Clay"
Enlarge
Guest star Brad Pitt as Jonathon Keith, Ben's idol. Season 4, "Feet of Clay"

[edit] Notable Guest Stars

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[edit] External links

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