It's been 37 years since The Golden Girls first debuted on NBC. Viewers were immediately enthralled with the fabulous ensemble cast. Betty White played the sweet, but peculiar, Rose Nylund, alongside Rue McClanahan's fabulous Blanche Devereaux, and the hilarious mother-daughter duo of Dorothy and Sophia, played by Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty.

But the runaway success of The Golden Girls surprised even the creators. "We first debuted as a new show at No. 3," executive producer Tony Thomas told Vulture. "I was quite surprised, especially with us being on Saturday night. We could have been a flash in the pan." Luckily for everyone, the show had staying power. Even today, viewers continue to fall in love with the charming cast thanks to reruns.

Read on to learn everything you ever wanted to know about what happened behind-the-scenes on the set of The Golden Girls.

When The Golden Girls debuted in 1985, Betty White (who played Rose Nylund) was 63 years old. Today, she's 98 years old.

Bea Arthur, who played Dorothy Zbornak on the show, was 63 when The Golden Girls premiered in 1985.

Estelle Getty (who played Sophia Petrillo) was 62 years old when the show premiered — that means Estelle was actually a year younger than Bea Arthur, who played her daughter.

Rue McClanahan, who played Blanche Devereaux, was the youngest member of the main cast when the show began. She was born in 1934, making her 51 when the show started in 1985.

They were both on Mama's Family, a sitcom based on a sketch from The Carol Burnett Show, which debuted a couple of years before The Golden Girls. When the show went on hiatus after two seasons, Betty and Rue booked their roles on The Golden Girls.

Bea was the lead on Maude, while Rue played her next-door neighbor. It was actually Rue who convinced Bea to take the role on The Golden Girls. "I called her and said, 'Why are you going to turn down the best script that’s ever going to come across your desk as long as you live?'" Rue told the Archive of American Television.

Initially, producers wanted to use Bette Midler's song, "Friends," but it was too expensive. Instead, they went with Andrew Gold’s "Thank You for Being a Friend,” recorded by a singer named Cynthia Fee.

In 2011, Betty spoke candidly about her tense relationship with Bea. "She was not that fond of me," White said at a 2011 talk, according to the Village Voice. "She found me a pain in the neck sometimes. It was my positive attitude — and that made Bea mad sometimes. Sometimes if I was happy, she'd be furious!"

Bea apparently hated wearing shoes so much, she had it written into her contract that she could walk around set barefoot, as long as she promised not to sue the producers if she was injured as a result. She also reportedly hated chewing gum and birds.

Speaking of crazy contracts, Rue reportedly had a clause in her contract that said she got to keep all of the fabulous outfits she wore as Blanche. Consider us jealous.

Bea Arthur's son, Matthew Saks, recalled that Betty used to come and chat with the audience — much to Bea's annoyance. "When they shot the sitcom, sometimes they had to stop," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "My mom would stay concentrated, maybe stay backstage, stand in her place there. And sometimes Betty would go out and smile and chat with the audience and literally go and make friends with the audience. Which is a nice thing — a lot of them have come from all over the country and are fans. I think my mom didn't dig that."

The actress reportedly didn't get the job. because one of the show's writers didn't like her. And, to hear her tell it, she also might have dropped an F-bomb during the audition.

Not Rose. Shocking, we know. She had just wrapped up playing "neighborhood nyphomaniac" Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The director worried that the Blanche role was too similar to the Sue Ann role, and decided to cast Betty as Rose instead.

Dorothy's mother, Sophia, wasn't meant to be part of the primary cast, but when Estelle Getty tested extraordinarily well with preview audiences, producers decided to make Sophia a series regular.

In an interview with the Archive of American Television, Rue McClanahan said that Estelle would regularly be so nervous she would forget her lines. "She'd panic," Rue said. "By tape day, she was unreachable. She was just as uptight as a human being could get. When your brain is frozen like that, you can't remember lines."

They passed time with word games. It's no secret that Betty loved games. After all, she appeared on and hosted several game shows beginning in the 1960s.

Fans of The Golden Girls are well-acquainted with the straw purse Sophia carries throughout the series. Estelle reportedly found the purse while shopping in Los Angeles' Fairfax District for props before her audition.

She requested that the cast and crew put on a live version as part of the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in 1988. And they did! In a Reddit AMA, Betty White wrote that, "It was very exciting. The Queen was lovely. We were told not to address her unless we were addressed. She was up in a box and she came down on stage after with Princess Anne."

Princess Diana reportedly spent an afternoon with Freddy Mercury, "drinking champagne in front of reruns of The Golden Girls with the sound turned down" and improvising show dialogue with "a much naughtier storyline," according to a book written by British comedy actress Cleo Rocos.

That's how she spent her time during the show's summer hiatus. The makeup team wasn't thrilled — they already had to spend about an hour a day working to make Estelle look old enough to play Sophia.

The Golden Girls had plenty of guest stars during its seven-season run, including Bob Hope, who played himself in an episode where Rose tries to find her real father.

This was a couple of years before he rose to fame as A.C. Slater on Saved by the Bell. He played an undocumented student named Mario, who writes a prize-winning essay on what it means to be an American.

He played a police officer investigating the girls' next-door neighbors in the episode called "To Catch a Neighbor." Apparently, George's agent requested the role in order to help the actor maintain his medical insurance.

Quentin had a small role as an Elvis impersonator in the episode "Sophia's Wedding" in 1988. "It became a two-part 'Golden Girls,' so I got paid residuals for both parts," Quentin revealed on an episode of The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. "It was so popular they put it on a 'Best of The Golden Girls,' and I got residuals every time that showed. So I got paid maybe, I don't know, $650 for the episode, but by the time the residuals were over, three years later, I made like $3,000. And that kept me going during our pre-production time trying to get Reservoir Dogs going."

The Golden Girls certainly loved their cheesecake. They ate over 100 cheesecakes during the series, which sounds like a dream — unless you're Bea Arthur, who allegedly hated cheesecake.

During its run, the show earned 68 Emmy nominations, and 11 wins. All four of the lead actresses won Emmys for their performances: Betty White won in 1986, Rue McClanahan won in 1987, and Estelle Getty and Bea Arthur won in 1988. The show also won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1986.

Bea didn't have pierced ears, so all of Dorothy's dramatic earrings from the show are clip-ons. Bea reportedly said that the weight of the earrings often made her ears numb by the end of the day.

The LGBTQ+ community wasn't well-represented on sitcoms during the '80s and early '90s. The Golden Girls was unique in that it featured gay and lesbian characters on several episodes. Coco, the cook from the pilot episode, was gay, as was Blanche's brother Clayton, and one of Dorothy's college friends named Jean.

Estelle Getty said in an interview that she wouldn't use humor to hurt someone and that jokes that made fun of someone for being fat, cross-eyed, bald, or gay were a no-go for her. She also said she refused a joke with a punchline about threatening domestic violence.

In the episode "Room Seven," Blanche handcuffs herself to a radiator to prevent her grandmother's home from being demolished. As the scene wrapped, the prop master's key broke, leaving Rue stuck in the handcuffs. Luckily, a director on set was able to rescue her with another handcuff key he happened to have. When the crew started to tease him, Rue reportedly stepped in and defended him.

Rue McClanahan said Blanche wasn't supposed to have her signature southern drawl. The director for the pilot, Jay Sandrich, stopped her when she put on a southern accent and encouraged her to use her native Oklahoma accent instead. But when the show got picked up with a different director, she was encouraged to pick up the southern accent again.

Before she rose to fame on Maude and The Golden Girls, Bea enlisted as one of the first members of the United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve in 1943. She initially served as a typist, before becoming a truck driver and dispatcher. She was honorably discharged at the rank of staff sergeant in September 1945.

Although the girls spent a lot of time in the kitchen, they never all sat at the table together. This was done intentionally, because the showrunners wanted to avoid awkward shots where one person would have their back to the camera.

In 2017, a cafe called Rue La Rue opened in New York City. The owner, Michael J. La Rue, was a friend of Rue McClanahan and inherited many of her belongings when she passed away. He decorated the cafe with some of Rue's belongings and other memorabilia and homages to the show. Unfortunately, the establishment has since closed.

The first episode of The Golden Girls reportedly topped the Nielsen rankings the week it premiered. In fact, it earned the highest ratings for any premiere program in two years.

The 1992 series finale, titled "One Flew Out of the Cuckoo's Nest," drew 27.2 million viewers. As of 2017, it was the 16th-most-watched TV series finale of all time.

"By the start of the 7th season, Bea made it very clear that she was done," Jim Colucci, author of Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Look Behind the Lanai, told Fox News. "She thought the quality was starting to slip. She wanted to go out while it was still a good show and she felt she was done with it."

The Golden Palace lasted one season, and followed Sophia, Blanche and Rose as they renovated an abandoned hotel with the help of Cheech Marin and Don Cheadle. Meanwhile, Empty Nest ran from 1988 to 1995 and followed the lives of a family who lived in the same neighborhood as the girls. All four main cast members guest-starred as their characters on Empty Nest.

She's currently 98 years old. Sadly, Estelle Getty died in 2008 at 84 from Lewy body dementia, Bea Arthur died of cancer at 86 in 2009, and Rue McClanahan died at 76 in 2010 from a stroke.

According to a Hulu spokesperson, many people are turning to The Golden Girls for comfort during quarantine. Hulu viewers watched nearly 11 million hours of the sitcom in April 2020.