Cinnamon chicken & babies as battering rams: Or the LHOTP thread

[my little pony]

in one season, at the end of the show in voiceover, laura said that eventually albert was the town doctor. but the next season, they implied that he died at the end and was never shown again or spoken about as if he had lived.

[escaflowne9282]

Good Grief, this show was a little bit before my time (it went off the air a year after I was born) but this sounds like a catastrophic trainwreck. An adopted child who is a pyromanic and subsequently a killer . Another adopted child tries to freeze someone to death in her first episode. And this was wholesome family fun?
I need to watch this show now.

[Kruss]

I must have had blinders on when I watched this show. I never thought about all the stuff you're all talking about, but....you're right! Holy cow, this is hilarious as I think back.

[lulu]

Good Grief, this show was a little bit before my time (it went off the air a year after I was born) but this sounds like a catastrophic trainwreck. An adopted child who is a pyromanic and subsequently a killer . Another adopted child tries to freeze someone to death in her first episode. And this was wholesome family fun?
I need to watch this show now.

Don't forget the orphan (played by Shannen Doherty) who tried to commit suicide by drowning herself.


Didn't Dr. Baker also have an addiction problem at one point?

[escaflowne9282]

This thread has peaked my curiosity and I'm watching youtube clips now. OMFG Laura Ingalls was an Anti-Semite? I don't remember that being in any of the books

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnojFS4mj8U

[Alex Forrest]

This thread has peaked my curiosity and I'm watching youtube clips now. OMFG Laura Ingalls was an Anti-Semite? I don't remember that being in any of the books

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnojFS4mj8U

Well, the writers made the adult LIW to be a harpy, a racist, and narcissist, and an opportunist. She was despisable. Frankly, when Almanzo had his gay affair with John Carter in SanFran I felt that Laura deserved it.

[Alex Forrest]

Mrs. Terhune was her name.

Are you referring to Hester Sue? God, what another annoying character. I found this funny clip of Hester Sue from the 70s blaxploitation flick "Blacula". I guess we see that 100 years later Hester Sue is driving a cab and has a salty mouth on her. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FX5IdlBX6w

But seriously, Hester Sue (responsible for leaving the cellar door open and spreading the fire) was a dolt. She is the ONLY other person with sight beside Alice, and finally she realizes that Alice and Adam JR are not out there. When she says "Oh my god, the baby" that is finally when either Adam or Mary decides to ask about their child. "Hester Sue, where is Alice and the baby?". Too little too late there. I liked Alice. She married that alcoholic for about five minutes, then laid it down with Jonathan Garvey who was quite a hottie. When Jonathan came back from a two month outing with Charles, Jonathan says "I've really been missing your cooking". And her retort is "Is that the only thing you've been missing?". Alice was fun and had an edge. No wonder Caroline was best friends with her, they were basically partners in crime. When Pa went away and hottie Chris the Handyman moved in, you knew Alice was going "Just DO IT Caroline, he's scrumptious!" Of course baby Grace was born nine months later and looked nothing like Charles, to no one's surprise.

[Karina1974]

@ Alex - for someone who clearly can't stand the show, you sure know an awful lot about it.

[Alex Forrest]

@ Alex - for someone who clearly can't stand the show, you sure know an awful lot about it.

Haha. Yeah, I was born in 72 and it was the first show I really watched, so I know alot about it. It's not that I don't like the show, I do, it's that Landon made it a nightmare for the kids viewers and I now understand the smirk on my Mom's face when we watched it together. I felt better and safer living on the east coast than compared to living in a tiny town like Walnut Grove. I certainly was much safer and wasn't exposed to as many alcoholics, drug addicts, thieves, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, etc. Remember in the 70s "I Love New York"? They were trying to turn the image around that it was not all Taxi Driver and drugs and pimps, but I thought Walnut Grove was much scarier than New York.

[judiz]

Anyone else think it was strange that there was a bank in Walnut Grove but no sheriff or marshall or whatever the equivalent of the police was back then? Oh no, that's right, Walnut Grove didn't need them, they had the Olsen's ice house.

[Alex Forrest]

Anyone else think it was strange that there was a bank in Walnut Grove but no sheriff or marshall or whatever the equivalent of the police was back then? Oh no, that's right, Walnut Grove didn't need them, they had the Olsen's ice house.

Yeah, the town used the Oleson's ice house as the pseudo jail and left criminals overnight in it. Poor Belinda is down there for an hour and she's near death.

And who needs a sheriff or judge when Charles is around? He acted like both his entire stay in WG.

Also, I hope SOMEONE will help me with this, but the opening credit sequence shows Pa and Ma at the top of a hill looking down the hill. So are their kids running AWAY from them?? Please discuss.

[Aimless]

Not perfectly on topic, but shortly after Landon died I was in Massachusetts at a July 4th parade and the most incredible float went by. It was makeshift little cardboard cabin entitled:
"Little House on the Trailer, a tribute to Michael Landon."

[Karina1974]

Remember in the 70s "I Love New York"? They were trying to turn the image around that it was not all Taxi Driver and drugs and pimps,

Seeing as how I am a native of upstate NY, and still living there, of course I remember it. FYI, the "I Love NY" campaign was centered on the entire state, not just on NYC.

[Alixana]

Also, I hope SOMEONE will help me with this, but the opening credit sequence shows Pa and Ma at the top of a hill looking down the hill. So are their kids running AWAY from them?? Please discuss.

Their house was at the bottom of the hill so they were running towards home. That's the story in my universe and I'm sticking to it.

[Jenny]

An unformed theory here so I could be way off, but I wonder if all those storylines that seem horrible now weren't really back when the show aired. (Like others here, I watched it as a kid and have little memory of rapists, drug addicts, suicides etc.)

Are kids more coddled today? Sure they are more exposed to sexual themes than ever before, but has what defines "family programming" and even "children's literature" changed?

I'm thinking of your typical old school children's stories, nursery rhymes and movies - big bad wolves, old men who bump their heads and die in the night, dogs and does dying, damsels getting locked in towers or tied to train tracks, and characters ridiculing someone with a red nose. Maybe by the time we watched LHOTP, especially in the context of all the old westerns with their gunfights and Indian wars, the storylines listed on this thread didn't stand out. And further, as kids we were more interested in the kids and the schoolroom and the candies in Nell's store and the Holly Hobbie outfits.

Watching them again now through overly sensitized PC-coloured eyes or sifting through the old memories, we're only shocked in the context of today's definitions of "family programming" and "children's literature."

[ilovesalchows]

Slightly OT, but has anyone else read Rose Wilder Lane's book "The Old Hometown?" I think that is what it was called. I LOVED it. Great shorts about women's lives at the turn of the 19th century. Lane was really an incredible person.

[jenniferlyon]

Anyone else think it was strange that there was a bank in Walnut Grove but no sheriff or marshall or whatever the equivalent of the police was back then? Oh no, that's right, Walnut Grove didn't need them, they had the Olsen's ice house.

What Walnut Grove really needed was a saloon.

[joeperryfan]

An unformed theory here so I could be way off, but I wonder if all those storylines that seem horrible now weren't really back when the show aired. (Like others here, I watched it as a kid and have little memory of rapists, drug addicts, suicides etc.)

I don't think kids are necessarily more coddled now, the difference IMHO is that as kids we didn't understand the emotional depth of the situations so they didn't bother us, a guy puking was a guy puking and not an addict going cold turkey,etc As kids our ability to have empathy with these situations is very limited, just as we don't laugh at jokes we aren't equipped to understand we can't be disturbed by situations that we can't fully understand either.

[Jenny]

Ah, good point joeperryfan. And I'm realizing now that when my niece was perhaps 8-10 years old, she was really into Friends. I asked her parents about it, because there are a lot of adult themes on the show, and they said she doesn't really notice them - she just liked the characters and funny stuff.

So maybe it's just that kids today like the kids we were focus on the stuff that interests them and that they understand, and it's only when we're older that we look back and at some of the stuff we see in shows/movies/etc now.

[Karina1974]

the difference IMHO is that as kids we didn't understand the emotional depth of the situations so they didn't bother us, a guy puking was a guy puking and not an addict going cold turkey,etc As kids our ability to have empathy with these situations is very limited, just as we don't laugh at jokes we aren't equipped to understand we can't be disturbed by situations that we can't fully understand either.

I agree with this. I didn't watch the show when it was originally on (I was born only 6 weeks after the show premiered in September 1974), and when I did get into the show when it was rerun on weekdays afternoons on a local station they didn't show some of the "darker" episodes, like the one where Mary's baby is killed, or the one where Mrs. Whipple's son also struggles with a morphine addiction (that ends up taking his life), or Albert's morphine episode, Sylvia's rape, or the one where Laura finds a baby that has been abandoned by her teenaged mother. Or how about the one where the tree falls on Mr. Edwards, and he tries to commit suicide while on a hunting trip with Charles?

There were a lot of episodes that I saw for the first very time when I got the DVD sets, and there were some moments that still make me cringe to watch them, even though I have gone through the entire series from the pilot movie from March 1974 to "The Last Farewell" TV movie at least 4 times.

There are other ones that make me cry every single time I watch them, like "If I Should Wake Before I Die" where an elderly woman stages her own funeral in order to get her "too busy with their own lives" children to come and see her, and she sneaks into the wake dressed as a guest in full mourning, throws off her veil and confronts them when she hears one of them say how it's funny that you never know what people mean to you until after they are gone.