Sketch o’the Week: Good Times!

Click here if you are interested in this original sketch

DYN-O-MITE! It’s yet another 70’s sitcom sketch with the cast of “Good Times”: Jimmie Walker, Ja’Net Du Bois, Bern Nadette Stanis, John Amos, Esther Rolle and Ralph Carter!

“Good Times” is another Norman Lear show, spun off from “Maude” with was spun off from “All in the Family”… that’s a lot of spinning. Esther Rolle’s character Florida Evans was a housekeeper for Maude and was married to a NYC firefighter named Henry, but the characters and their family dynamic was changed considerably for the new show. They became poor and lived in a Chicago housing project, with basically no mention of having been middle class New Yorkers. Oh yeah, and Henry forgot he was a firefighter, and became a sporadically employed manual laborer named James. Really only the actors were the same, so “spin off” was a loosely based concept.

The show was a groundbreaker in that is was the first American series that was centered on a Black family with both a loving and engaged mother and father present. Lear said that while the family would deal with the reality of their world of poverty and the challenges they faced, they would keep their heads above water themselves, with the strong bond of family at the heart of the show, and the determination for the kids to get an education and overcome their circumstances. The idea was, like many of Lear’s shows, to deal with serious life problems through humor and positive characters. Unfortunately there ended up being a number of cast conflicts because of the sudden popularity of Jimmie Walker’s “J.J. Evans” character and the direction the show took as a result.

Walker’s J.J. was an aspiring artist (or as he would say “Ar-TEEEEST”) and the oldest of the children. The character was an immediate hit with audiences and his catchphrase “DYN-O-MITE!” caught fire in pop culture. This caused the show to focus on J.J.’s antics as opposed to the more serious themes stars Rolle and Amos expected it to, and they were vocal about their dissatisfaction. Amos’s contract was not renewed after season three and his character was killed off in a car crash, and Rolle left after season four, although she did return in the final season when the show runners agreed to a number of changes she demanded.