Mother’s Day Fun: Can You Guess These Popular TV Moms?
Some of these are real throwbacks!
Mother's Day is this Sunday, May 9, and the River Morning Show thought it would be fun to test their knowledge by trying to guess some popular television moms on-air. Can you name all of them? (Answers are at bottom)
TV Mom #1 -- This TV mom is best known for her large family. In the show’s pilot episode, her last name is Martin; we never do find out what happened to her previous husband with whom she has three daughters, but when we meet her she’s married to a widower named Mike who has three sons. Together, she’s mom to Marcia, Jan, Cindy, Greg, Peter and Bobby. In the show’s original season, she’s a stay-at-home mom; in sequels, she becomes a real estate agent. She enjoys singing in the church choir and with her daughter Marcia in the high school Family Frolic Talent Show.
TV Mom #2 -- This TV mom is the critical matriarch of a highly dysfunctional family. Husband to George Sr. she’s the mother of five children, some had legitimately with her husband, one had illigimately with her husband’s twin brother Oscar and one adopted from Korea. They are GOB, Michael, Lindsay, Buster and Annyong. Her ruthlessly manipulative, materialistic and hypercritical personality makes her mostly unlikeable by just about everyone, and -- an alcoholic -- she’s rarely seen without a drink in her hand.
TV Mom #3 -- This TV mom is a “Self Appointed Matriarch,” believing that because she’s the oldest woman of the family and the grandma she has full authority. Husband to Frank, she has two sons, the older Robert who calls her “Queen Marie” and younger Ray, who she tends to favor and over-indulge. A great cook and homekeeper, she has a passive-aggressive personality, often bossing people around and making others feel guilty when she doesn’t get her way; her daughter-in-law Debra once called her a “Guilt Bomb.”
TV Mom #4 -- This TV mother is matriarch to a most unusual family. A witch, she’s the stern and slightly aloof wife to Gomez and mother of Wednesday, Pugsley and Pubert. Musically gifted, she enjoys playing a Japanese shamisen, as well as cutting the buds off roses to leave only the stems, cutting out paper dolls with three heads, making sweaters with three arms, cooking up concoctions for her husband and feeding meat to her pet carnivorous plant.
TV Mom #5 -- This sci-fi TV matriarch is husband to George and mother to Judy and Elroy. In the first episode of the series, she’s 33 years old and head of Skypad Apartment’s recycling company. Her favorite pastime is shopping for new house gadgets and considered the ultimate space age housewife – knowing just how to make the home run smoothly.
TV Mom #6 -- This TV mother is best known to some as, simply, “Ma.” Wife of Charles, was a schoolteacher before marrying. Together, the two lived in the big woods of Wisconsin and the prairies of Kansas before settling in Plum Creek of Walnut Grove, MN. The biological mother of Laura, Mary, Carrie, Charles Jr. and Grace and adoptive mother of three children Albert Quinn, James and Cassandra Cooper, she’s known for being kind, gentle, generous and faithful.
TV Mom #7 -- This beloved television mother is the widowed wife of the late Earl of Grantham and mother of Robert and Rosamund. Quick-witted, she symbolises the “Old World,” and order of the pre-WWI days. During and after the war, she remains a strong influence but finds her influence under threat as social norms change.
Answers:
1. Carol Brady, Brady Bunch
2. Lucille Bluth, Arrested Development
3. Marie Barone, Everybody Loves Raymond
4. Morticia Addams, The Addams Family
5. Jane Jetson, The Jetsons
6. Caroline Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie
7. Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, Downton Abbey