Actor-Shared Background: Winnie Cooper is presented as a Brainy Brunette, who scored higher on the SATs than Kevin and knows a fair bit about physics as applied to baseball. Danica McKellar graduated summa cum laude from UCLA, has a new math theorem named after her, and has written several books demystifying mathematics for young adult readers.
Channel Hop: Technically averted; ABC aired both the original series and the reboot. However, the original series was produced by New World Television, while the latter is an in-house production via 20th Television (which acquired the New World library in 1997—taking The Wonder Years with it—when then-20th Century Fox parent News Corporation acquired its parent company, and was eventually bought out by ABC parent Disney).
Dawson Casting: Largely averted for the main cast, with almost every teen actor being around the same age as their character and aging in real time. This had the effect of making one notable exception all the more noticeable, when Julie Condra guest-starred as a high school freshman at age 20. This made the story arc where Condra's obviously older, sexually mature character comes on to innocent young Kevin Arnold rather jarring.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series was pretty popular in Mexico and Central America during (and after) its broadcasting tenure, to the degree that many of their voice actors had become celebrities (especially Kevin's younger and adult versions and Winnie's Mexican voice actors).
The European Spanish dub is also popular in El Salvador (a Central America country) due to channel 8 in that country (AgapeTV) airing the series with a different dub.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: Was this for a long time, due to the large amount of hit songs featured in the show, and the corresponding legal and financial snags involved with licensing the rights to all of that music.. Netflix and Amazon eventually secured streaming rights, but these still have edits to the soundtrack that include soundalikes and even an alternate version of the theme, this was all changed in 2018 when the show moved to Hulu and everything was averted, thanks to FOX. In October 2014, Time Life/StarVista Entertainment released the complete series (on behalf of Fox) with the vast majority of the licensed music intact, and individually-released seasons have followed.
Missing Episode: The first of the show's two clip shows is not available for viewing on Netflix.
Adverted, when FOX made the show available on Hulu in 2018.
Romance on the Set: In the Mexican Spanish dub, adult Kevin and Winnie's voice actors were married.
The Other Darrin: Arye Gross narrated the pilot; Daniel Stern narrated the series. The pilot with Gross' narration aired only once (following Super Bowl XXII); all airings after the original broadcast replaced Gross' voice with Stern's.
Throw It In!: Dan Lauria revealed in an interview that Fred Savage improvised the bit in "My Father's Office" where Kevin mimics Jack's grumpy behavior upon returning home from work.
For the band The Wonder Years:
Creator Backlash: Soupy really doesn't like "Get Stoked On It" and feels that it created a very bad first impression of the band to many. No one else in the band really likes it either but they don't quite share the same level of disdain Soupy has for it.
