Trivia and Quotes
Quotes
 . Blair Warner: Turn Blue!
Jo Polniaczek: There are people who in this world get shoved around and there are people who do the shoving!
Blair Warner: I just had another one of my brilliant ideas!
Tootie Ramsey: There`s going to be trouble...
Tootie Ramsey: There`s going to be trouuubbbllleee!
Natalie Green: Make that douuubbbblllleeee!
Natalie Green: Who wants to be a skinny pencil? I`m happy being a magic marker!
Blair: Whoever said it was lonely at the top was looking from the bottom
Blair Warner: I don`t go to wing-dings, I go to cotillions!
Jo Polniaczek: Well if that is a dance at the Hillcrest Country Club, then your cotillion and my wing-ding are the same thing.
Blair Warner: Do you know what Jo`s real name is? Joanna Marie!
Jo Polniaczek: Only my mother calls me Joanna Marie.
Blair: Y-you mean H-harrison asked you out on a d-d-d-d...
Tootie Ramsey: DATE, Blair; we call it a DATE!
Jo Polniaczek: Yeah, to some wing-ding Friday night.
Natalie Green: Could that be YOUR wing-ding, Blair?
[after Blair goes crashing through the bedroom wall]
Tootie Ramsey: Excuse me, Mrs. Garrett, did Blair come crashing through here?
Tootie Ramsey: There`s gonna be trouble!
Natalie Green: Make that double.
[Tootie is a teen model and is ready for her photo shoot]
Tootie Ramsey: Am I a fox or what?
Mrs. Edna Ann Garrett: [Mrs. Garrett is giving the girls their mail] And the rest is for Natalie.
Tootie Ramsey: *All* of those?
Blair Warner: Natalie... have you been writing to prisoners again?
Jo Polniaczek: [to Blair] You`re so spoiled that if you were milk the date on the carton would be B.C.!
Blair: [Trying to remember all of her family members across the nation] Well, there`s the Manhattan Warners, there`s the South Beach Warners, there`s the Palm Beach Warners...
Natalie Green: [Interrupting] What about the ones in Hollywood?
Blair: Who?
Natalie Green: The Warner Brothers.
Trivia
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Longest running show to feature an all female lead cast (although there were several recurring male characters, and John Lawlor was a regular during the first season).
The role of Tootie was not specifically written for a black actress. Kim Fields was simply the only African-American to audition.
For the second season, the entire concept and plot of the show was changed from a large boarding house of several young girls, to a tighter knit group of older adolescent women. This was done since the producers felt that a plot change from comic relief to serious adult issues would help boost ratings. The cast of girls was reduced to only four, including the new character of "Jo".
The opening theme song was performed by Charlotte Rae during the first season.
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# Originally, the premise of the series was that Edna Garrett, the housekeeper on "Diff`rent Strokes" (1978), became the headmistress at the school that Kimberly Drummond (Dana Plato) attended. But after the pilot episode, the producers decided to keep Plato on "Diff`rent Strokes" (1978) and there was never any mention of Kimberly being a student at Eastland again.
In the first season, there were seven students in the main cast. After the first season, the producers decided to drop four characters from the main cast: Molly Parker (Molly Ringwald), Cindy Webster (Julie Anne Haddock), Sue Ann Weaver (Julie Piekarski) and Nancy Olson (Felice Schachter). But Haddock, Piekarski, and Schacter continued to appear occasionally until the third season.
# Mindy Cohn wasn`t an auditionee for the show. When the producers visited a girls` school to see how the girls interacted, she was a social magnet just being herself, and they created Natalie based on Cohn. She was then tested in the role.
Nancy McKeon joined the cast in the second season by proving that she could not only act tough enough to play Jo - but also cry on cue.
Kim Fields was only nine years old when she started playing Tootie, who was supposed to be twelve. In an effort to make her appear taller (and older) her character was always in roller skates for the first year of the show.
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# There was an episode written where Blair was suppose to lose her virginity, but Lisa Whelchel refused to do it because of her strong religious beliefs. The episode was rewritten with Natalie (Mindy Cohn) losing her virginity instead. It also was the only episode in the series history that Whelchel did not appear in.
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# During the last season, David Spade was in an episode that was supposed to be turned into a spin-off series called "Big Apple Blues" about college roommates living in New York City, but it never materialized.
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# Even though Kim Drummond never ended up at Eastland like the original plot of the series had planned, the show still was connected to the "Different Strokes" universe with Mr. Drummond and Arnold making a few guest appearances.
The character Jo was inspired by then NBC Chief Fred Silverman after he had seen the film Little Darlings. He felt a streetwise scholarship student would contrast well, and add conflict, against the rich, spoiled Blair character.
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# Eastland was located in the Westchester County town of Peekskill, New York, which is located roughly forty miles north of Manhattan. With a commute of less than forty five minutes to Manhattan, this explains the relative ease in which Manhattanite Blair and Bronx-born Jo are able to go home as often as they do, and also helps to explain the continuous interaction between the Drummond family and Mrs. Garrett after her departure from their household.
If the show had returned for a tenth season, the producers had planned for Blair to buy Eastland to save it from being closed down. However, those plans never came to fruition due to the series` cancellation.
Mrs. Garrett is from Wisconsin, which is Charlotte Rae`s native state in real life.
The character of Blair was originally conceived as a down-home charming Texas girl. However, during her audition for the role Lisa Whelchel read several of Blair`s lines sarcastically. Producers were so impressed by Whelchel`s audition that the rewrote the character to be that of a self involved New York blue blooded socialite.
During the course of the show it was revealed that Mrs. Garrett and Beverly Ann hailed from Appleton, Wisconsin; Blair and Natalie hailed from Manhattan; Jo hailed from the Bronx, and Tootie from Washington D.C.
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Cloris Leachman
(as Beverly Ann Stickle)
with Dick Patten
(as Frank Stickle)
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