Todd Bridges was a star on Diff’rent Strokes for eight seasons in the 1970s and 1980s, but it wasn’t until years later that he discovered a surprising fact about the hit sitcom.
During an August 2026 meetup with Growing Pains stars Tracey Gold and Jeremy Miller, Bridges, 61, revealed that it was more than a decade before he realized that their TV dad, the late Alan Thicke, wrote and performed the Diff’rent Strokes theme song.
“I have trivia,” Bridges said during the sitdown at Youngstown Studios in Ohio. “I’m sure you guys know… Alan Thicke, I didn’t know for 15 years that Alan Thicke did the theme song for our show. Yes, for Diff’rent Strokes. Yes. And I was like, ‘What?’ I never knew it until later on that I realized it was him.”
Gold noted that Thicke’s wife at the time, Days of Our Lives alum Gloria Loring, was also a singer and collaborated with him on many TV shows.
Thicke, who died in 2016 at 69, played doting dad and psychiatrist Dr. Jason Seaver on Growing Pains from 1985 to 1992. But the actor also wrote and co-wrote dozens of songs and TV themes, including the openers for Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Wheel of Fortune, The Joker’s Wild, and more, according to Billboard.
Thicke once told Reader’s Digest Canada how he became involved with the theme song for NBC sitcom that starred Bridges, Gary Coleman, Dana Plato, Conrad Bain and more.
“I produced two Norman Lear series. I worked with him on a screenplay that never got made, and I wrote the theme songs for his shows The Facts of Life and Diff’rent Strokes,” Thicke shared.
He also revealed that he received residuals when the TV episodes featuring his theme songs aired in reruns. “We get a little taste [of money] every time those things appear on Nick at Nite, yes,” he told Larry King Live.
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Thicke nostalgically looked back on his songwriting career in an interview several years before his death.
“The challenge was, you have 24 seconds to do something catchy and memorable and sum up the entire premise of the show in case somebody had never seen it before,” he told The AV Club in 2010. “Sometimes it would be brought in at the very last minute, when a show was already completely shot, and the pilot had been edited, and they’d say ‘Here, add your 24 seconds.’ However, there were other instances, and Diff’rent Strokes was one of them, where you got the information, you were included, from day one and page one.”
“Back then, theme songs were more important,” the Growing Pains star added. “They were a part of every show. Nowadays, they don’t aspire to have memorable themes for every show … and certainly theme songs with a lyric. They have no time for that, so I think that’s almost a lost art.”
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