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THE GOLDEN GIRLS
*Rue McClanahan was to play Rose and Betty White was to play Blanche but they switched roles because they didn't want to be typecast.
*Estelle Getty (Sophia) is 73 days younger than Beatrice Arthur (Dorothy), even though Sophia is Dorothy's mother.
*Early on in the series, Beatrice Arthur carved a large exclamation point on the set's front door.It can still be seen anytime a character opens it. [I always wondered why that was there]
*The girls consumed over 100 cheesecakes during the show's 7-year run. And Beatrice Arthur hates cheesecake.
*It took 45 minutes in make-up for Estelle to be transformed into Sophia.
*Estelle Getty suffered from stage fright, every Friday night for 26 weeks during the show's taping.
*Two of the prop men on the show used to play practical jokes on the cast and once took nude and semi-nude pictures of themselves and put them into the Blanche's Boudoir calendar which was used on the episode "'Twas The Nightmare Before Christmas".
*Rue McClanahan was found asleep in all sorts of places on the set.
*When the original pilot script was submitted to Disney/Touchstone, Michael Eisner liked it but he felt something was missing. He thought a show about three old women living together might scare away younger viewers. He asked Susan Harris to keep working on it. Harris then added the character of Sophia. When she was added, Dorothy became just another woman dealing with her mother and Eisner loved it. After Sophia was added and a pilot was shot, a character named Coco, a gay male servant was cut from the series. [I wondered what ever happend to that character]
*The writers of the show always tried to give Sophia the raciest lines. They did this because her character had a stroke earlier in life, which made her unable to control the things she was able to say.
*The idea for the show came from NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff, who was visiting his elderly aunt one day and saw how she and her next-door neighbor, who was also her best friend, interacted with each other. Even though they would argue and bicker a lot, they were still best friends and loved each other. Tartikoff thought that would make a great show, and "The Golden Girls" was born.
*It was not originally scripted for Blanche to have a Southern accent. Instead, it was Rue McClanahan's idea to do so.
*Estelle Getty was the second youngest of the four women, yet she played the eldest.
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