Timmy's New Hobby

This episode was no doubt the one most thoroughly rewritten in the editing room. It's not so much that things were cut out. It's more an issue of pacing. In the edit room showrunner Tim Doyle and editor Mike Mayhew found that the A-story (Mike and Peggy misunderstanding Timmy's hobby) had a lot more beats than the B-story (Frank getting involved with Joey at the retirement home). Doyle wanted to break up these two stories into shorter bites and bring both stories to climax at the same time. This involved a massive restructuring of events in the story. If the you compare the final cut of the episode to the shooting draft of the script you can see that the scenes have been radically rearranged.

A repeated theme throughout the series is the frugality of the parents, exhibited in this episode by Mike exchanging magazines rather than donating them. At one point, Frank asks to borrow his father's camera. The camera seen is a Polaroid SX-70, which became available during 1972, the year in which the show is set. The SX-70, however, was the top of the line for Polaroid's instant camera market, commanding a price of $180 for the camera ( $1095 in 2019 dollars) and $6.90 for a 10-shot film pack ($42 in 2019 dollars, or approximately per $4 picture). Based on the characters as shown in the series, it's unlikely they would have had that camera, and even less so that Frank would be allowed to repeatedly run through film for it.

References The Brady Bunch (1969)