Disowned Adaptation: Ira Levin's website very tactfully describes the various made-for-TV sequels to The Stepford Wives as "loosely based on Levin's characters".
Mid-Development Genre Shift: The story was originally written as a stage play but Ira Levin realised there were too many characters, and chose to write it as a novel instead.
The 1975 film:
Ability over Appearance: The wives in the original screenplay were written to be dressed provocatively - presumably this counted for Carol too. Nanette Newman was thought to not have the right look to match this idea. However her "I'll just die if I don't get this recipe" scene is one of the more iconic parts of the film.
Covers Always Lie: the famous poster and book cover depicts Katherine Ross transformed into a porcelain statue which has then been shattered. Nothing like it actually happens in the story, it is implied in the penultimate scene Joanna allows herself to be strangled by her robot double in a bizarre suicide/erotic asphyxiation and the robot then replaces her. The cover is therefore largely symbolic of her fate, transformed into a beautiful object but actually destroyed.
Levin and screenwriter William Goldman were upset that instead of the sexy women of the novel, they were replaced by homemakers (see Real Life Writes the Plot on the YMMV page). Goldman raged, "If you're going to fuck a toaster, it'd better be a sexy toaster." Goldman in particular was unhappy with the changes director Bryan Forbes made to his script, saying the film "could have been very strong, but it was rewritten and altered, and I don't think happily."
While proud of the film, Katharine Ross admitted that she would have preferred for Joanna to put up more of a fight in the climax.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: In 2004, Paramount, which financed that year's remake, released the film for the last time on DVD. However, due to rights issues, the film went out of circulation and has never been released on Blu-ray. The pharmaceutical conglomerate Bristol Myers Squibb currently owns the film. They were stakeholders in the film's production company, Palomar Pictures, which went defunct after the movie's release.
The Other Marty: Joanna Cassidy was cast as Bobbi and shot a few scenes before being fired and replaced with Paula Prentiss.
Real-Life Relative: For the 1975 film, Mary Stuart Masterson and her father Peter play father and daughter Walter and Kim Eberhart.
Reality Subtext: Joanna's anxiety at having to stab the robot Bobbi was genuine - as Katherine Ross and Paula Prentiss had become good friends.
Similarly Named Works: In 1996, when The Stepford Husbands sequel came out, Jane Gordon wrote a novel of the same name. It had the same concept but was unrelated to the movie.
Throw It In!: In the original, the black contacts that Robot Joanna wears were meant to give the impression that she has no eyes at all, the implication being that she wasn't "finished" yet. Yet no one could find a way to light the scene that didn't cause the supposedly empty sockets to catch the light, and in the end the Black Eyes of Evil were so effective that they didn't bother to correct it.
Troubled Production: The 1975 film underwent constant rewrites by Bryan Forbes, much to writer William Goldman and original author Ira Levin's chagrin. Forbes' decision to cast his wife meant that Goldman and Levin's original intended characterizations for the Wives had to be entirely scrapped and re-tooled. The original actress portraying Joanna was fired and was recast twice. To add to Goldman's stresses, actor Peter Masterson was unhappy with Forbes' changes, and would secretly call his friend Goldman to do additional rewrites.
The wives in the original film were meant to be dressed in pretty Stripperiffic clothes, demonstrating how perverted the whole thing was. However when Nanette Newman was castnote She was the director's wife her appearance didn't quite match that idea. So the wives were put in the familiar 1950s housewife get-up.
Brian De Palma was courted to direct the 1975 version, and was interested in the prospect, since the mix of suspense and satire meshed well with his sensibility, and he'd been a big fan of Roman Polański's work on the film adaptation of Levin's Rosemary's Baby. But William Goldman didn't want to work with De Palma, to the point that he threatened to quit if De Palma was hired.
William Goldman claims that Bryan Forbes toned down his original, far more horrific ending.
Early drafts of Goldman's script had a number of significant changes from both the novel and the final product. Among them were that the Wives were not robot duplicates, but rather brainwashed by drugs and heavy psychoactive conditioning.
"I fucked up... I played it safe. For the first time, I didn't follow my instincts. And what happened was, I had too much money, and I was too responsible and concerned for Paramount. I was too concerned for the producers. And I didn't follow my instincts, which I hold as sacred usually. I love being subversive and dangerous, and I wasn't. I was safe, and as a result my decisions were all over the place, and it was my fault totally."
Creator Killer: The critical mauling and underwhelming box-office of the 2004 remake essentially ended the career of writer Paul Rudnick, along with Frank Oz's directorial career. Since then Rudnick hasn't had any actual credits on a film (though has supposedly done some uncredited script work on a few), while Oz has mostly retreated back to acting, with his other only directorial outing to date being the indie flick Death at a Funeral.
The Danza: Roger Bart as Roger Bannister in the remake.
Deleted Scene: In the remake, some deleted scenes (and, confusingly, some scenes that remain in the movie) show that the wives were supposed to actually be robots like the original and this was changed late in production.
Fake American: The Australian Nicole Kidman of course does an American accent as usual.
Franchise Killer: After the failure of the 2004 remake, no director has attempted to try their hand at making their own adaptation of Levin's book as of this writing. The fact that the original book is an Unintentional Period Piece may be a major reason for the lack of any recent adaptations.
The film was supposed to be a big comeback for Glenn Close. Yeah... However, she fortunately bounced back with Damages.
Matthew Broderick was already fading away and the failure of this film proved to be fatal for what was left of his career.
All the momentum Nicole Kidman built during the 90s and early 00s came to a screeching halt, also thanks to the failures of Bewitched and The Golden Compass. She would eventually rebound with an Oscar nomination for Lion and producing the HBO series Big Little Lies.
Troubled Production: The remake underwent massive reshoots, script rewrites that created gaping plot holes, John and Joan Cusack pulling out of the film (and Nicole Kidman, who played the main character, considering it after she saw the changes to the script), and fighting on set between director Frank Oz and his stars. It all built to an utterly incoherent final product that bombed at the box office and was savaged by critics.
As said multiple times, the remake would have kept the original robotic wives ending. However test audiences didn't like it. So the wives were retconned into merely having computer chips in their brains.
John Cusack was cast as Walter originally, and Joan Cusack as Bobbie, but they dropped out to care for their dying father.
