If you're unfamiliar, Red has had a crush on Marcia Brady since he first saw The Brady Bunch in the October 9, 2000 strip. Red & Rover nominally hovers in an ill-defined period around the late 1960s/early 1970s, but given the number of Brady references over the years, most of the strip takes place in the 1970s. The show debuted in September 1969 and ran through March 1974.
Not surprisingly, very few details about specific episodes are ever mentioned. Presumably to keep the comic from getting too specific in being dated. However, as you can see above, Red explicitly calls out one of the episodes by name. "Brace Yourself" debuted in the show's first season, originally airing on February 13, 1970. This means that everything in the strip between October 9, 2000 and this past Saturday -- virtually the entire quarter century run -- takes place over a little less than five months.
"But, Sean," you protest, "couldn't Red have been watching the show in re-runs?"
That's a fair point. But when you look more closely, it doesn't offer much more time. The show ended it's first season on March 20, 1970 and was re-run over the summer until the new season began in September 1970. But that was then the pattern for the course of the show: a new season would start in September, new episodes would run through through March, and then the season would repeat over the summer. Syndication of the show didn't begin until after the show ended in 1975. Now, there were also daytime reruns beginning in 1973, but at 11:30am on weekdays, it seems highly unlikely that Red would be able to catch those since he'd be in school. So if Red happened to miss the original airing of the episode, his next chance would've been (assuming the reruns were broadcast in the same order) July 3, 1970.
Meaning that only adds about four, maybe five months to the overall timline of the strip. Still noticeably less than a year since that 2000 strip when Red first saw Marcia.
Of course, a Red & Rover strip from 2003 references A Very Brady Christmas which didn't air until 1988, so then the real question becomes: what is time anyway? 🤷
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