Welcome back to My 70’s TV Childhood! This week, we’re exploring a show that was a very unusual example of a US import being shown on UK TV before it was actually shown in the US. I remember the first episode very well, as I must have seen it when I got back from school one afternoon in May 1976. The show was “Big John, Little John.”
It was a bit different from many of the short-lived US shows we got to see in the 70’s. It was slower, more deliberate in its plotting and acting, and generally tried to be a show which made both children and their parents laugh.
The show’s main premise was that a forty-year-old school science teacher called John Martin (played by Herb Edelman) drank from a spring which turned out to be the legendary Fountain of Youth. The water changes him into a twelve-year-old boy (played by Robbie Rist), and back again, with many hilarious consequences. Only his wife, Marjorie, and son, Ricky, know his secret.
Throughout the series, “Big John” unsuccessfully tries to find a cure for his predicament, but his experiences as “Little John” often give him insight into what his students are facing. The show combined sitcom misunderstandings with moral lessons, slapstick, and a light touch of fantasy. All quite attractive to the nine-year-old me during the spring and early summer of 1976.
We also discuss the show’s cast, including child star Robbie Rist, who was already well known from “The Brady Bunch.” His late introduction to that show as Cousin Oliver led to the creation of a new term in TV production: the “Cousin Oliver effect,” where a new, young character is inexplicably introduced into a show to boost ratings, often with disastrous results.
So why did the show only last one season of thirteen episodes? We explore the reasons, from its struggle to find an audience to its competition with brash cartoons and the mayhem of Saturday morning US TV. It remains well remembered, I think, because it was a bit different and also because of that earworm of a theme tune.
Do you remember “Big John, Little John?” Have you discovered the fountain of youth on a recent holiday? If so, then do get in touch!
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