The Brady Bunch: Two Petes in a Pod (1974)

"Two Petes in a Pod" originally aired 8 February 1974; sure, a few months after Halloween...but that didn't keep the writers from having Peter dress up for a costume party as Dracula. The plot is a bit of a stretch: one day at school, Peter runs into a student that looks exactly like him (except with glasses). Thinking about the fun he could have with an identical twin, Peter has the guy, Arthur, go inside his house to see if he can fool his family. Arthur pulls it off, except that Mr. Brady (thinking Arthur is Peter) asks him if he can take out his boss' niece, Pamela, Friday night. Not knowing that Peter had already made a date with Michelle for that night, Arthur agrees. So this obligates Peter to secretly entertain both Michelle and Pamela...at least until Arthur can show up. We see Peter changing in and out of his Dracula costume multiple times as he runs back and forth between the two dates. The tag at the end of the episode also has some Halloween-related dialog between Mrs. Brady and Alice. Incidentally, after this one aired there were only four more Season 5 episodes before the series was canceled. Denise Nickerson, who plays Pamela in this episode, appeared later in the movie Child of Glass.

By the way, while watching this episode I noticed a certain "ghostly" apparition after Peter runs into his double in the school hallway. As Arthur rises into frame, you can see an old man's profile rising with him, just peeking past the split-screen line. Apparently, this was a stand-in used to match the actor's movements between the two exposures. The fact that it's an old man's profile adds an eerie quality to it, and I bet if VHS had been available back in 1974 that more people would have noticed and possibly concocted stories about the ghostly image (like what happened with the unintended appearance of the cardboard stand-in from Three Men and a Baby). Here are a couple of stills of the profile from the video. (The extra profile does not appear on the DVD version of the episode.)




Don't miss the other Brady Bunch episodes: "To Move or Not To Move", "The Slumber Caper," "Fright Night," and "Out of This World."