Speaker 1: Let's go back to my family room floor in the
Speaker 1: suburbs of southern Ontario. It's a weekday in the mid eighties,
Speaker 1: four twenty six pm. My sister and I have just
Speaker 1: returned home from school. The first half hour of Oprah
Speaker 1: is coming to a close. It's time to switch the channel.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a choice. It just was mon Pa pulling
Speaker 1: up in a wagon, Ma primly tucking a wayward strand
Speaker 1: of hair and her bonnet, Pau's infectious laugh, and the
Speaker 1: girls Laura, Mary and little Carrie joyfully running down a
Speaker 1: grassy hill. Oops, down, goes Carrie. I believe I've seen
Speaker 1: every Little House episode at least once. There are two
Speaker 1: hundred and four in total. In fact, I can still
Speaker 1: id any episode based on the first five seconds. And
Speaker 1: if this sounds impressive or alarming, rest assured, I'm not
Speaker 1: the only one. I think. It's just the reality of
Speaker 1: a nineteen eighty's childhood, when there were limited options and
Speaker 1: you watched what you were given, and a lot of
Speaker 1: us were given Little House like a lot. Let me
Speaker 1: put it in context for you. Remember the Game of
Speaker 1: Thrones finale, the one that had more viewers than the
Speaker 1: finale of the Sopranos, or Sex in the City or
Speaker 1: actually anything else on HBO. Ever, thirteen million people tuned
Speaker 1: in to watch that Game of Thrones finale. Well, as
Speaker 1: they might say, on the Prairie, hold my tin cup
Speaker 1: to Narris. On any given Monday night from nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: four to nineteen eighty three, Little House in the Prairie
Speaker 1: averaged sixteen million viewers. Little House was a huge hit,
Speaker 1: but lots of shows were in the seventies.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of things on TV actually in
Speaker 2: the nineteen.
Speaker 3: Seventies that were really huge.
Speaker 2: Aren't you in reruns or out on DVD and people
Speaker 2: are not watching it?
Speaker 4: But Little House in the Prairie is what in the heck?
Speaker 1: Little House went into reruns while it was still on
Speaker 1: in prime time. The show ended in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: but it's never actually gone off the air, So you
Speaker 1: can add millions and millions of viewers to those original
Speaker 1: numbers we just told you about.
Speaker 5: The show stayed on the air for fifty years and
Speaker 5: is actually better known now than it was when it
Speaker 5: was originally on NBC.
Speaker 1: We're talking a half century of television. It's on Hallmark,
Speaker 1: it's on VHS, it's on DVD, It's on Amazon Prime,
Speaker 1: it's on Peacock, and an entire new generation of kids
Speaker 1: discovered it. During COVID there was a.
Speaker 6: Little House in the Prairie, the videos on the phone
Speaker 6: that you watched on the way here, Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 5: In March of twenty twenty two, we saw the number
Speaker 5: of Google searches for a Little House on the Prairie
Speaker 5: double from the month before.
Speaker 1: Some of you might have it on another screen right
Speaker 1: this second.
Speaker 2: I literally wake up in the middle of the bit
Speaker 2: and go, somebody somewhere is watching Loves the Worry right now.
Speaker 2: It's literally because it's in every country on Earth.
Speaker 4: It's been dubbed into every language.
Speaker 1: There's beds in every language.
Speaker 4: It's bananas.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of reasons Little House never quits, but
Speaker 1: without question, one of the biggest is Michael Landon, the
Speaker 1: show's producer, writer, director, and most importantly, the star, better
Speaker 1: known to many as Charles Ingalls Laura's paw.
Speaker 7: Sorry about what I guess.
Speaker 8: I just couldn't find the words to say.
Speaker 1: It was in my heart, for better or worse. Michael
Speaker 1: Landon made the show all his own.
Speaker 9: This is a magnetic individual.
Speaker 10: He glowed you know.
Speaker 4: He just he had it.
Speaker 1: In the books, Paw was charming and steadfast, and Laura
Speaker 1: was the star. And the television show, Michael Landon had
Speaker 1: lovely hair and was always crying. He had a well
Speaker 1: oiled bear chest, and as I got a bit older,
Speaker 1: I enjoyed how nice he looked in tight pants and suspenders.
Speaker 1: He was the star. Laura is our adoring proxy. If
Speaker 1: you're a person devoted to Little House book series, the
Speaker 1: one's written by the real life Laura Ingleswilder. The TV
Speaker 1: version might not always make sense, the stories don't always
Speaker 1: match up with what's in the books, and at times
Speaker 1: they're downright strange. But Michael Lannon had a vision for
Speaker 1: the show, and it was a vision he believed would
Speaker 1: stand the test of time.
Speaker 4: He said, you know, everyone's going to be watching these
Speaker 4: shows long after we're all gone, he said, long after
Speaker 4: I'm dead. It was like this prophetic thing, and every
Speaker 4: win he said it to it, yeah right, oh by it,
Speaker 4: And Blake didn't believe him.
Speaker 11: And here we all are.
Speaker 1: We didn't get it. Michael got the My motivation to
Speaker 1: create these two versions of Little House was essentially the same.
Speaker 1: If the books were the result of Laura wanting to
Speaker 1: memorialize her father's stories. The television show is in many
Speaker 1: ways the result of Michael Landon using Laura's writing to
Speaker 1: tap into his own traumatic childhood. Still, at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, Michael Lannon made Laura's prairie all his own,
Speaker 1: and we all liked it there, even if it was
Speaker 1: a very strange place to be. Sometimes, in some ways
Speaker 1: the TV show feels like a Venn diagram. Laura Ingalls Wilder,
Speaker 1: her devotion to her paw, her daughter Rose's vision, and
Speaker 1: then Michael Landon's brain, and the TV series exists at
Speaker 1: the center of all this, And that's where twenty million
Speaker 1: people spent an hour each week and then an hour
Speaker 1: after school every day for nearly five decades. Michael Landon
Speaker 1: was able to tap into some essential Little House truths
Speaker 1: in ways that are sometimes hard to believe. And we're
Speaker 1: sometimes just as problematic as the books. This week, instead
Speaker 1: of going through the pages to the prairie, we're going
Speaker 1: through the screen to sunny southern California, Come home to
Speaker 1: a simpler time, Come home to Hollywood in the seventies.
Speaker 1: I'm Glennys McNichol, and this is Wilder. It took a
Speaker 1: long time for The Little House Books to reach Michael Landon.
Speaker 1: More than three decades went by from the publication of
Speaker 1: the last book to the premiere of the show in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four. It's not because people didn't want it.
Speaker 1: It's because Laura and her daughter Rose wouldn't let anyone
Speaker 1: have the rights to the books. By the time Laura
Speaker 1: died in nineteen fifty seven, the Little House Books were
Speaker 1: huge success. At some point, the Canadian Broadcasting Company approached
Speaker 1: Laura about adapting the books for radio, but she turned
Speaker 1: the offer down. Neither she nor her daughter Rose wanted
Speaker 1: to see the books quote unquote distorted by someone else's vision.
Speaker 8: There were a number of radio adaptations, both small scale
Speaker 8: and also hallmarked in adapting The Little House Books.
Speaker 1: That's Bill Anderson again. He's been researching and writing about
Speaker 1: Laura since he was a kid, and has written many
Speaker 1: books on her life.
Speaker 8: But Laura Ingleswilder was very, very skeptical and wanted approval
Speaker 8: of the scripts, and she wasn't altogether happy with the
Speaker 8: radio versions. Rose Wilder Lane felt the same way when
Speaker 8: her books Let the Hurricane Law and Freeland were adapted
Speaker 8: to radio. So I don't think they were fans of media.
Speaker 1: After Laura's death, Rose continued to spurn offers. But when
Speaker 1: Rose died in nineteen sixty eight, things changed pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: Enter Roger Lee McBride. You remember McBride. He's a complicated
Speaker 1: figure who had a unique relationship with Rose. He referred
Speaker 1: to himself as her adopted grandson and even called her grandma.
Speaker 1: Having no children, Rose designated him or heir, and after
Speaker 1: her death he acquired all the rights to Little House
Speaker 1: on the Prairie. He now owned everything. Despite Rose's wishes,
Speaker 1: McBride i'd entered into discussions with Disney almost immediately after
Speaker 1: her death. Disney was very interested in adapting the Little
Speaker 1: House books. However, on the way to a meeting at
Speaker 1: their offices, fate intervened in the form of a young girl.
Speaker 12: Naturally circa nineteen seventy one. My sister's at home ill
Speaker 12: with a cold from school. She's a teenager, and my
Speaker 12: father goes in and to say goodbye to her in
Speaker 12: the morning and discovers her reading one of the Little
Speaker 12: House Books. And he can't understand why his teenage daughter's
Speaker 12: rereading a children's book that her mother had read to
Speaker 12: her when she was a child.
Speaker 1: That's Trip Friendly. His father is Ed Friendly, and Ed
Speaker 1: is the first reason Little House landed on television screens.
Speaker 1: At the time. Ed was a highly regarded television producer,
Speaker 1: best known for creating the program Roan and Martin's Laughing.
Speaker 12: He went back and talked about it with my mother,
Speaker 12: and my mother said, I've been telling you for years
Speaker 12: what great books they are and that you should make
Speaker 12: a teeny series based on them. So he borrowed one
Speaker 12: of my sister's books. He took it on a business trip.
Speaker 12: A couple of days later, stopped at the magazine racket
Speaker 12: at the airport and bought a Time magazine and hid
Speaker 12: it inside the Time magazine. I'm the airplane so no
Speaker 12: one would see who was reading a children's book.
Speaker 9: And when he landed, he.
Speaker 12: Immediately realized what he had in his hands, and so
Speaker 12: he called his attorney and asked him to find out
Speaker 12: if the rights were available. And my father invited Roger
Speaker 12: to come and meet with him, and they spent a
Speaker 12: weekend together in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: That weekend resulted in Friendly obtaining the rights to turn
Speaker 1: the books into a television show.
Speaker 12: He thought the books were a national treasure. His goal
Speaker 12: was to try to bring the magic of those books
Speaker 12: to the screen.
Speaker 1: At least that was the plan. This was the mid seventies,
Speaker 1: and the concept of setting a wholesome family show on
Speaker 1: the American frontier did not exactly speak to the times
Speaker 1: Father who.
Speaker 12: Was turned down by virtually every studio and network because
Speaker 12: at the time they all told him Westerns are dead,
Speaker 12: this material is too soft. It's nice, they're great books.
Speaker 10: But but but.
Speaker 1: In March nineteen seventy four, America was at the height
Speaker 1: of Watergate, Vietnam was still raging, the country was experiencing
Speaker 1: extreme inflation. There was a lot of sharp, timely social
Speaker 1: commentary on primetime TV, and a lot of people watching.
Speaker 1: The most popular show was All in the Family, average
Speaker 1: viewership twenty million. In fact, the average weekly viewership of
Speaker 1: the top ten shows in nineteen seventy four was around
Speaker 1: sixteen million. I'm telling you all these numbers just to
Speaker 1: remind you that even basic television was a common cultural language.
Speaker 1: When you showed up at work, or at school or
Speaker 1: at the grocery store the next day, everyone knew what
Speaker 1: you were talking about. You'd all been watching it together,
Speaker 1: you know. And I often talk about what it was
Speaker 1: like to grow up with this sort of shared culture.
Speaker 6: I mean, I try to explain this to Charlie all
Speaker 6: the time, that he lives in a content utopia where
Speaker 6: he can just dial up magically any episode of any
Speaker 6: show ever created and watch it as many times as
Speaker 6: he wanted, Whereas if we saw a show, especially when
Speaker 6: we were much younger, we may never see it again.
Speaker 1: I remember one of my favorite Little House episodes came
Speaker 1: on and I skipped swim practice because I was like,
Speaker 1: I've been waiting for this episode for years to see.
Speaker 1: And the thing too, is like when we talk about
Speaker 1: how wholesome Little House was, The Waltons was also on
Speaker 1: TV in the seventies at the same time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, in my head, they're the same thing. Even though
Speaker 6: I grew up in the eighties and I know that
Speaker 6: my mom watched both Little House and The Waltons, and
Speaker 6: to me it just seemed really cheesy. I wasn't paying
Speaker 6: enough attention to either of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if I was to differentiate them for listeners and
Speaker 1: for you, I would say the Waltons was sort of
Speaker 1: like the Depression, and Little House in the Prairie was
Speaker 1: like sex appeal. Hollywood Michael Landon with you know, his
Speaker 1: muscles and his hair and a smile, and clearly had
Speaker 1: shaved his chest, although I didn't understand that as a kid.
Speaker 1: Like there was so much sex appealed a little house
Speaker 1: in the prairie. It was like a Western. It was
Speaker 1: like Hollywood.
Speaker 6: Hold on, I'm googling pictures of Michael Landon and his hair.
Speaker 6: Is that's some nice hair. That's some real nice hair.
Speaker 6: Oh my gosh, look at his chest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was always finding reasons to take his shirt off.
Speaker 1: He was always breaking his ribs somehow so that they
Speaker 1: had to take a shirt off and wrap them up
Speaker 1: in like some sort of like prairie tensor bandage. He glistens,
Speaker 1: He really listens. Nobody looked like that on the Waltons.
Speaker 6: Let me tell you, all right, just make me a
Speaker 6: list of your top ten episodes. I'll dive into some
Speaker 6: Michael Landon when I'm alone later this evening.
Speaker 1: Being a sex symbol was not a new experience for
Speaker 1: Michael Landon. In the early seventies, Landon was known to
Speaker 1: the world as Little Joe, the youngest son of the
Speaker 1: wealthy ranch owning Cartwright family on the television western Bonanza
Speaker 1: At the height of its run, it was the number
Speaker 1: one rated show in the country, clocking nineteen million viewers weekly. Landon,
Speaker 1: who was in his mid twenties, was a teen idol
Speaker 1: think Elvis Goes West. When Bonanza ended in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: Michael Landon was primed for his next project.
Speaker 12: My father knew Michael because he was very close friends
Speaker 12: with Lauren Green, who was the patriarch on Bonanza.
Speaker 1: Here's Trip Friendly again.
Speaker 12: And so he called Michael and he said, I have
Speaker 12: a project that I'm very interested in having you direct.
Speaker 12: So he sent my sister with a script up to
Speaker 12: Michael's house and a few hours later he got a
Speaker 12: call from Michael saying, I not only want to direct,
Speaker 12: but I want a stars paw. And so with Michael attached,
Speaker 12: he went back to NBC, with whom he had a
Speaker 12: very strong relationship, and he presented him with the package
Speaker 12: with Michael a directing and Michael starring, and they agreed,
Speaker 12: if I had.
Speaker 4: Her alevelance book, I would mark down how it was
Speaker 4: when we left our little house in the Big Woods
Speaker 4: to go west to Remian Territory.
Speaker 1: The two hour Little House Pilot aired on March thirtieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four. Ed Friendley spent his own money to
Speaker 1: hire Blanche Handalists to adapt it, and she stuck faithfully
Speaker 1: to the book Little House on the Prairie.
Speaker 13: All right, here, ess here we Come.
Speaker 1: The pilot was a huge hit. It was the highest
Speaker 1: rated television movie of the year. NBC immediately ordered the series,
Speaker 1: and Little House on the Prairie premiered on September eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, seven weeks after Nixon's resignation and one
Speaker 1: week after I was born. The series starts with an
Speaker 1: episode called a Harvest of Friends, and it introduced a
Speaker 1: very different Ingalls family from the one readers knew from
Speaker 1: the books. The episode is about how Walnut Grove comes
Speaker 1: together to help Charles when an injury keeps him from
Speaker 1: fulfilling a contract that will allow him to save his
Speaker 1: brand new farm. It's a tear jerker, and it has
Speaker 1: no correlation whatsoever to any storyline in any of the books.
Speaker 1: This set the template for what was to come on
Speaker 1: Little House Family.
Speaker 4: First home is the nicest word.
Speaker 1: There is strength and community.
Speaker 4: I think you're a welcome edition, dark community.
Speaker 7: I thank you hard work work for you in the
Speaker 7: morning work for Hanson. In the afternoon, you're biting off
Speaker 7: a big piece God.
Speaker 1: Charles Lord's day is set aside for worship and for
Speaker 1: wrist Michael Landon's thick, flowing curls, Michael Landon's smile, Michael
Speaker 1: Landon's shirtless and glistening. Michael Landon crying or for't exactly
Speaker 1: crying in this episode, frequently hobbling his lip. Laura was
Speaker 1: still there, and Melissa Gilbert was charming and could hold
Speaker 1: her own in a scene. But there was no doubt
Speaker 1: who the star of this prairie was. The spotlight had
Speaker 1: clearly been shifted to Paw and his perfectly lit pecks.
Speaker 1: This was not the Charles Ingles of the books.
Speaker 9: Michael showed himself to be anything but Charles Ingalls.
Speaker 1: That's actor Dean Butler. He played heart throb while Mon's
Speaker 1: a wilder on the show.
Speaker 9: Hey, this is a guy who's sitting there with a
Speaker 9: cigarette and his teeth. He's got his Carrera sunglasses on,
Speaker 9: his demim shirt opened down halfway down. His chest is
Speaker 9: sprayed on with the gun jeans, the snakeskin boots, the
Speaker 9: hair obviously with the ash brown dyed number two in.
Speaker 1: It unlike Paw, Michael landed On the Prairie didn't have
Speaker 1: the iconic beard Laura write so lovingly about in the books.
Speaker 1: NBC was so concerned Little House book fans would be
Speaker 1: alarmed by the lack of a beard, they felt it
Speaker 1: necessary to put out a press release explaining its absence.
Speaker 14: Great pains were put into fitting Michael Landon with a beard,
Speaker 14: both of natural growth and by makeup artis, but it
Speaker 14: was decided that he just did not look good with
Speaker 14: any kind of facial hair.
Speaker 1: And if Michael Landon did not look good with facial hair,
Speaker 1: and gosh darn it, he would not have facial hair.
Speaker 1: He was the star, and the producer and the writer.
Speaker 1: It was, in short, Michael Landon's Prairie. Millions of people
Speaker 1: wanted to live there with the ingles for at least
Speaker 1: one hour a week. Everyone loved Paul, well, almost everyone.
Speaker 1: His Little House was hitting the airwaves in the fall
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy four. A Friendly, the person who initially
Speaker 1: had brought the books to the screen, was increasingly unhappy.
Speaker 1: Michael Landon was wreaking havoc on Friendly's plan to faithfully
Speaker 1: adapt the books. Friendly flat out told people magazine. He
Speaker 1: thought this prairie was too flashy.
Speaker 9: I've renamed the series, how affluent is my Prairie?
Speaker 7: They have everything but a Cadillac.
Speaker 12: My father decided he and Michael had creative differences, and
Speaker 12: I think he recognized that Michael, as the star of
Speaker 12: the show, woulout work if Michael left the show, and
Speaker 12: I think eventually he decided that he did not want
Speaker 12: to continue with Michael's vision. He had his own vision,
Speaker 12: so he left the show. But still, you'll see in
Speaker 12: the credits it's still in an NDC production association within
Speaker 12: Friendly Production, so he was still very involved without being
Speaker 12: the producer on the show.
Speaker 1: So very quickly into season one, Michael Landon was fully
Speaker 1: completely in charge well at Friendly's departure from the day
Speaker 1: to day signaled a major shift behind the scenes. Viewers
Speaker 1: did not seem to deterred by the fact the show
Speaker 1: deviated from the books, or by Landon's central role, or
Speaker 1: by criticism that it was too sacharin a sweet and
Speaker 1: low Walton said People Magazine the show was sacrin but
Speaker 1: Landon certainly didn't care. He embraced the simplicity of a
Speaker 1: family show, as he told Bobby Wygant in an interview
Speaker 1: right before the first season aired.
Speaker 7: But anyway, when this came along, it was fresh for
Speaker 7: me because it was honest, and it was simple and
Speaker 7: very basic, and I liked the people. I thought the
Speaker 7: people were nice, and I kind of thought my family
Speaker 7: would like to watch that. I got a lot of kids,
Speaker 7: and it's kind of fun to think you're going to
Speaker 7: do a show that you would be happy to sit
Speaker 7: in the living room with the whole family and watch.
Speaker 1: Landon's idea a family friendly fair was a combination of adventure,
Speaker 1: wholesomeness and hard times, and while the books provided some
Speaker 1: of this, Landon often went with what he knew, and
Speaker 1: he had definitely known his own hard times as a child.
Speaker 1: Or Eugene Horowitz in nineteen thirty six, Landon claimed to
Speaker 1: have been ostracized as a child because he was Jewish.
Speaker 1: He'd also had a painful relationship with his mother. This
Speaker 1: is what he told People magazine in nineteen eighty five
Speaker 1: about her. An actor is reading his statement.
Speaker 15: I always wanted to get away from my family. Mother
Speaker 15: was a childish person who was always attempting suicide. She
Speaker 15: would stick her head in the oven, but she always
Speaker 15: had knee pads on the floor, or one window open.
Speaker 15: In a family like that, you get to thinking, Gee,
Speaker 15: if it's Tuesday, it must be suicide.
Speaker 1: Landon was famously a bedwetter as a child. I say
Speaker 1: famously because he talks about it freely. He even made
Speaker 1: a TV movie about this in nineteen seventy six called
Speaker 1: The Loneliest Runner. Well, I don't recall any bed wedding
Speaker 1: episodes in Little House, though presumably there was bed wedding
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies. It was these traumas from his
Speaker 1: own childhood land And was drawing on when he stepped
Speaker 1: into the Little House Writer's room, and.
Speaker 9: He could do in a really an intensely real way.
Speaker 1: This is Rick Okie. In the nineteen seventies, he was
Speaker 1: an NBC exec in charge of a host of iconic programs,
Speaker 1: The Wonderful World of Disney, Chips, Night Rider, and of
Speaker 1: course Little House on the Prairie, where he witnessed Michael
Speaker 1: Landon's creative process firsthand. In the writer's room.
Speaker 9: I would watch him.
Speaker 16: Sometimes we'd be sitting talking about a plotter, about an episode,
Speaker 16: and he would lean back and he would close his eyes,
Speaker 16: and you know, it's hard to sit in a room
Speaker 16: that's silent when you're supposed to be making a contribution.
Speaker 16: I would open my mouth to say something and the
Speaker 16: other one of the writers in the room would sort
Speaker 16: of put his hand on my chest and say wait.
Speaker 1: Much like real life Laura, who reworked the hard times
Speaker 1: of her childhood into magical stories, Landon in many ways
Speaker 1: did the same.
Speaker 16: And it could go on for minutes where he would
Speaker 16: just sit there, and when he would sit back up
Speaker 16: and open his eyes, he'd say, when I was a kid,
Speaker 16: And he would tell a story out of his own life,
Speaker 16: and you just have you glued because he was a
Speaker 16: great yarn spinner, and you're asking yourself, how does this
Speaker 16: relate to what we're working on right now. By the
Speaker 16: end of his story, he would have tied it back
Speaker 16: into where the conversation started and use it as a
Speaker 16: way to bring an authenticity to the stories that made
Speaker 16: them superhuman.
Speaker 1: Some of those storylines were loosely connected to actual events
Speaker 1: in the book, some less so, and some were Landon's
Speaker 1: attempt to stay current.
Speaker 16: You know, Mike was always interested in taking issues that
Speaker 16: were current and putting them in that frame of a
Speaker 16: period piece that allowed you to explore them without being offensive,
Speaker 16: kind of the way that Mash was able to explore
Speaker 16: the Vietnam War because it wasn't Vietnam, it was the Korea,
Speaker 16: but it was Vietnam when we all knew it. That's
Speaker 16: what they were talking about it.
Speaker 1: He proved to audiences that even if the show was
Speaker 1: sentimental and melodramatic, it could speak to what was happening
Speaker 1: in their world. A Little House did speak to Vietnam
Speaker 1: and a host of other contemporary issues.
Speaker 4: The Civil War soldier who comes back and he has
Speaker 4: PTSD or shell shocks.
Speaker 2: To be there and he's addicted to morphy. This is
Speaker 2: the same year when Vietnam veterans were coming.
Speaker 1: Home addicted to heroin.
Speaker 4: Hello, how many people were living that episode.
Speaker 1: That's Alison Arngrahm, who played Nellie Olsen on the show.
Speaker 2: So we were doing these episodes where the women are
Speaker 2: want the right to own property.
Speaker 4: We had episodes about alcoholism, about drugs, We had child abuse,
Speaker 4: we had spousal abuse.
Speaker 2: We did work all those things out, and a lot
Speaker 2: of things were covered on nineteen seventy shows like All
Speaker 2: in the Family or Maude. We were sneaking them into
Speaker 2: but everybody was in bonnets, so it was somehow safe
Speaker 2: and okay, and of course Paul and Mau were there
Speaker 2: to help you deal with it.
Speaker 1: So Little House could be current and comforting. But this
Speaker 1: was primetime TV after all, and just like today, the
Speaker 1: networks needed to draw eyeballs, and just like today, viewers
Speaker 1: love drama. Rick Oakie's job was to deliver the studio
Speaker 1: execs dramatic demands to Michael Landon.
Speaker 16: It was always Who's going to have a baby? Is
Speaker 16: there going to be a wedding? Is there going to
Speaker 16: be a funeral? Is somebody going to die? What event
Speaker 16: can you create for us? And I was the unfortunate
Speaker 16: messenger who had to go over to Michael Landon and
Speaker 16: go hate to say this, but what have you got
Speaker 16: planned for November? Because that's when the ratings sweeps happened,
Speaker 16: and that's when advertisers make their buys.
Speaker 1: If you grew up in the heyday of primetime television,
Speaker 1: you knew the sweeps shows. Even if you didn't know
Speaker 1: what sweeps was. They were often the two parters. They
Speaker 1: were unmissible. Think of the time they had to remove
Speaker 1: the bomb on Grey's Anatomy. That was a sweeps show
Speaker 1: once again, it was Rick Oki who had to deliver
Speaker 1: this task to Michael.
Speaker 16: And he would say, let me think about it. And
Speaker 16: then by the time I drove back to my office
Speaker 16: in Burbank, my boss would come in and go, what
Speaker 16: did you say to Michael. He's like, he's you know,
Speaker 16: we're going to do the show where Merlin Olsen's wife
Speaker 16: dies in a fire. And you know, he would always
Speaker 16: come through with, you know, without being untrue to the
Speaker 16: spirit of the books. He was wise enough and smart
Speaker 16: enough in the ways of broadcasting that he got it
Speaker 16: and he knew what they needed, and he would always
Speaker 16: deliver it.
Speaker 1: What Landon delivered was a mix of sentimentality, Western romance,
Speaker 1: and cultural relevance, which was rating's gold but could also
Speaker 1: result in some serious weirdness. Even now, when you're out
Speaker 1: in the world having conversations with people about Little House,
Speaker 1: the episodes they remember best always seemed to be the
Speaker 1: strangest I watched the TV show.
Speaker 5: I've tried to explain some of the episodes to other
Speaker 5: tour guides now and they're like, they did what the
Speaker 5: TV show?
Speaker 12: Really?
Speaker 1: There's some they.
Speaker 4: Locked she locks someone in the ice house.
Speaker 1: That's that's me and Emily at lunch and just met
Speaker 1: South Dakota with Diane, Cheryl, and Marie, the women who
Speaker 1: run the Laura Ingles Wilder Memorial Society. I didn't think
Speaker 1: they'd be into Michael Landon's antics, but when I brought
Speaker 1: up the TV show, we immediately launched right into our
Speaker 1: favorite episodes, which also happened to be the strangest ones.
Speaker 1: She pushes Nellie down the hill in the wheelchair, even
Speaker 1: the wind that I just watched where Laura the baby
Speaker 1: brother dies and Laura runs away thinking it's her fault.
Speaker 1: And then Laura climbs up a mountain to be closer
Speaker 1: to God, and she meets an angel. Name is John
Speaker 1: Jonathan the Angel And I just when you start saying
Speaker 1: it out loud. But it worked, not just worked, but
Speaker 1: made for some classic TV moments that live permanently in
Speaker 1: the brains of an entire generation of children, So classic
Speaker 1: that Colin Farrell name checked Little House that the writers
Speaker 1: strike picket line, and I even more was.
Speaker 12: An actor, right, we convince lots to me, I'm going
Speaker 12: back to TJ. Look her in the middle House on
Speaker 12: the prairie.
Speaker 2: We can go there.
Speaker 1: When the Little House actors get approached by fans, The
Speaker 1: fans immediately tell them about their favorite episodes.
Speaker 17: People always want to talk about a matter and me
Speaker 17: cutting off my leg.
Speaker 9: The Back to School one with the Cinnamon Chicken.
Speaker 2: And the mud Fight Bunny where I go down the
Speaker 2: hill in the wheelchair. But I did pretend to be
Speaker 2: paralyzed to ruin everyone's life.
Speaker 11: I send the children home early because there was going
Speaker 11: to be a blizzard. Michael called it. Miss Beetle kills
Speaker 11: the kids again.
Speaker 1: I hear a bet.
Speaker 4: The Lord is My Shepherd a lot. It's my favorite too.
Speaker 1: That, of course is Melissa Gilbert. She played Laura on
Speaker 1: the show, and The Lord Is My Shepherd is my
Speaker 1: favorite episode two. It's also the perfect example of how
Speaker 1: Michael Landon spun the real stories of the Ingles family
Speaker 1: into something utterly wild and memorable and perfectly crafted for
Speaker 1: primetime TV. The episode The Lord Is My Shepherd is
Speaker 1: based on something that actually happened to the Ingles, which
Speaker 1: we've talked about in an earlier episode. When Laura was eight,
Speaker 1: Ma gave birth to a baby boy, Charles Frederick Ingles Junior,
Speaker 1: known to the family as Freddy. Baby Freddie died at
Speaker 1: nine months Laura never mentioned him in the books. It
Speaker 1: was too painful.
Speaker 2: In the books, the English don't have a son, and
Speaker 2: there's no baby who dies, never spoke of it. And
Speaker 2: then in the TV show, of course, Michael said, what
Speaker 2: that's like the greatest episode ever. Of course we're going
Speaker 2: to do that.
Speaker 1: The TV episode adheres to these basic facts and then embellishes.
Speaker 1: Here's what happens in the episode, Ma has a new
Speaker 1: baby boy. Laura gets jealous of all the attention the
Speaker 1: new baby boy is getting, and when he gets sick,
Speaker 1: she refuses to pray for him. When the baby dies,
Speaker 1: she concludes it's her fault and she decides to get
Speaker 1: as close to God as possible literally.
Speaker 4: And then, of course Laura runs away to a mountain.
Speaker 4: How she found a mountain in Minnesota?
Speaker 2: I always say she ran across four states to like
Speaker 2: Colorado or something.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It finds a big mountain at that and then at
Speaker 4: the top of.
Speaker 2: The mountain, Easier in his bourg dying, who is apparently galled,
Speaker 2: and yet it is genius and it totally works. It
Speaker 2: is one of the best episodes ever of like anything.
Speaker 1: It did work. Everyone we spoke to remembered this episode,
Speaker 1: and they also remembered another one. You know it, even
Speaker 1: if you don't think you know it. Perhaps no episode
Speaker 1: has given so many children nightmares than the episode called Sylvia.
Speaker 4: And of course the Sylvia episode, or as people do
Speaker 4: refer to it, clown rape.
Speaker 1: But I'm not laughing because it's funny, but that is
Speaker 1: the way people refer to it.
Speaker 4: It's a very very disturbing episode. And they had that
Speaker 4: clown who was molesting everybody and raping everybody. There was
Speaker 4: a period in my childhood where every time I saw
Speaker 4: it was the same episode, which is the one that
Speaker 4: featured us sexual assault. Oh my god, it was a lot.
Speaker 1: Here's what happens. Sylvia is about a young girl in
Speaker 1: Walnut Grove named Sylvia who is sexually assaulted one day
Speaker 1: on the way home from school in the woods by
Speaker 1: a man who is wearing a creepy clownish mask. She
Speaker 1: gets pregnant, and her angry father threatens to throw her out.
Speaker 1: The angles adopted son, Albert, offers to marry Sylvia so
Speaker 1: they can run away together. On their way out of town,
Speaker 1: the clown reappears, but before he can assault Sylvia again,
Speaker 1: he's shot by Sylvia's dad, but Sylvia, who's climbed up
Speaker 1: a ladder to get away from him, falls and dies too.
Speaker 1: Watching Sylvia today is nothing short of bizarre, and, like
Speaker 1: most shows fifty years old, deeply problematic, but also maybe
Speaker 1: weirdly a bit ahead of its time. Little House producer
Speaker 1: Rick Okie told me Michael Landon, who wrote and directed
Speaker 1: the episode, was simply trying to speak to the issues
Speaker 1: of the day.
Speaker 16: And I remember when he called me aside and he said,
Speaker 16: I want to do a show or one of the
Speaker 16: girls in town gets raped, and it was really controversial
Speaker 16: and the network you had a hard time, but he
Speaker 16: dug his heels in and said, nope, We're doing this show.
Speaker 16: I'm going to write it myself, I'll direct it myself.
Speaker 16: It'll be well done, don't worry.
Speaker 10: And it was.
Speaker 1: What was the response to that show mixed? Mixed reviews
Speaker 1: are still mixed. On the one hand, Sylvia provided a
Speaker 1: narrative for an issue not often talked about on mainstream television.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the ridiculous framing around it makes
Speaker 1: it a joke among fans to understand how this lands now.
Speaker 1: I told Joe to watch Sylvia.
Speaker 6: Oh, I watched Sylvia that is some messed up shit
Speaker 6: that happens in Sylvia, and you and Emily both prepared
Speaker 6: me that this was the quote unquote clown rape episode,
Speaker 6: but I still think that there was a part of
Speaker 6: me that didn't believe you, that didn't really think that
Speaker 6: that was a thing that was going to exist in
Speaker 6: the Little House on the Prairie TV show. And I
Speaker 6: have to say I found the episode problematic in so
Speaker 6: many different ways, starting with the boys from the town,
Speaker 6: the like teenage boys who go and spy on Sylvia
Speaker 6: while she's getting dressed and hoping to see her in
Speaker 6: her bra and underwear. And in the background, the music
Speaker 6: that's playing it was like this happy circusy kind of
Speaker 6: music that makes it all seem like a farce when
Speaker 6: these boys are invading Sylvia's privacy and then this terrible
Speaker 6: sexual assault happens to her later, and then from there
Speaker 6: it just got more bizarre and more problematic and completely
Speaker 6: went off the rails.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so much of it is so dated. Inevitably,
Speaker 1: it's like a fifty year old episode, and it's so weird,
Speaker 1: Like the clown aspect of it is so weird to
Speaker 1: the mime.
Speaker 6: A clown mime I mean, I think mime is worse
Speaker 6: than clown, to be honest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I think to be clear, this is not
Speaker 1: a defense of Sylvia, but I think sometimes if you
Speaker 1: think of Sylvia like that episode aired in like nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: I think, and I feel like can be viewed from
Speaker 1: our vantage point as a sort of early version of
Speaker 1: an ABC after school special if you remember the ones
Speaker 1: we grow up on. And I think it had the
Speaker 1: ability to give children experiencing, you know, sexual trauma or abuse,
Speaker 1: some sort of language or something to point to and say,
Speaker 1: this is what's happening to me, you know. And I
Speaker 1: think if we think about it in that context, it
Speaker 1: becomes slightly less weird. Although again the mime slash clown
Speaker 1: in the woods is just it's it's like the stuff
Speaker 1: of horror movies before they turned into the scream horror movie.
Speaker 6: I hear you that in this episode. In the Sylvia episode,
Speaker 6: it tackled sexual assault and rape, and Sylvia gets pregnant
Speaker 6: in the episode in a place where families could talk
Speaker 6: about it afterwards, right, Families could watch together and then
Speaker 6: maybe give language to something that they didn't know how
Speaker 6: to talk about before, much like the Very Special episodes
Speaker 6: of the sitcoms that came a few years later in
Speaker 6: the eighties, And there was the Mister Belvedere episode where
Speaker 6: Wesley's classmate had aides. There was the Different Shokes where
Speaker 6: the bicycle shop owner tries to molest Arnold and his
Speaker 6: friend Dudley.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that one?
Speaker 17: Yeah?
Speaker 1: There is also that Punky Brewster episode. There was a
Speaker 1: bunch of weird Punky Brewster episodes like that really stick
Speaker 1: out in your head. The Challenger episode, I think she
Speaker 1: was also.
Speaker 6: Where the space Shuttle explodes. The Space Shuttle actually actually
Speaker 6: explodes on Punky Brister.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think like Sylvia is before all of this.
Speaker 1: So in the eighties, by the time we were watching
Speaker 1: all these shows in primetime, this felt much less strange.
Speaker 1: But when Sylvia aired on a family show in primetime
Speaker 1: and this was the storyline, I just feel like probably
Speaker 1: some of the weirdness of the plotting fell away and
Speaker 1: it was maybe helpful and also probably like a lot
Speaker 1: of people were, you know, couldn't take their eyes off
Speaker 1: of it. And then when we encountered it after school,
Speaker 1: like what a strange episode to come home to you
Speaker 1: after school with your cookies and milk and you're like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: there's a clown in the woods attacking this girl. So bizarre.
Speaker 6: It's a disturbing, bizarro strange episode, is what it is.
Speaker 1: And also Michael Landen knew what he was doing. Like,
Speaker 1: both things are true at the same time. It's so weird,
Speaker 1: it's also relevant. And also it's forty three years ago
Speaker 1: and we're still talking about it, so I clearly the
Speaker 1: man knew something. In the same way, Sylvia tackled what
Speaker 1: in hindsight feels like a progressive subject for primetime television
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty and also depicted progressive attitudes around sex.
Speaker 1: Little House of TV series could occupy both extremes too.
Speaker 1: It could be incredibly open minded and at the same
Speaker 1: time outdated and problematic. That's after the break. The Little
Speaker 1: House in the Prairie television show, for all its sentimentality
Speaker 1: and outdated tropes, still resonates with fans today. Similar to
Speaker 1: what we've said about The Little House Books, certain episodes
Speaker 1: seem to pop back up from time to time and
Speaker 1: are newly relevant. In the spring of twenty twenty, the
Speaker 1: height of the pandemic, a lot of people turn to
Speaker 1: an episode called Quarantine. This is the one where miss
Speaker 1: Edward's daughter, played by none other than Kyle Richards of
Speaker 1: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Fame gets sick with a
Speaker 1: mysterious virus and she and Laura have to quarantine. And
Speaker 1: then and the wake of George Floyd's murder and the
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter protests, another episode went viral.
Speaker 4: That summer of twenty twenty, when the country was going
Speaker 4: through what the country, the world was going through, that
Speaker 4: massive social upheaval and unrest all around George Floyd and
Speaker 4: Breonna Taylor and all of the horrible injustices that were
Speaker 4: going on, the Wisdom of Solomon came up a lot.
Speaker 1: That's TV Laura Melissa Gilbert again and she's talking about
Speaker 1: an episode from season three called The Wisdom of Solomon,
Speaker 1: guest starring then kid actor Todd Bridges, who would go
Speaker 1: on to star in the eighty sitcom Different Strokes. In
Speaker 1: the episode, Bridges plays a young black boy named Solomon
Speaker 1: who runs away from his family because he wants an education.
Speaker 17: I want to go to school like all the mother children.
Speaker 12: That's the white man's school.
Speaker 1: With honey, you can't go there.
Speaker 17: Why if we're free?
Speaker 1: Why canna he eventually comes across the Ingles, who are
Speaker 1: kind to him and give him food and shelter and
Speaker 1: take him to school. Laura, who has never met a
Speaker 1: black person before, wipes Solomon's face to see if the
Speaker 1: black will come off his skin. Melissa Gilbert acknowledges that
Speaker 1: this scene felt cringey even when she was filming it.
Speaker 4: I asked not to do it. I said to Michael,
Speaker 4: I can't do that. That's horrible. He said, yeah, but
Speaker 4: we're trying to show people how wrong it is to
Speaker 4: be ignorant and how open Laura is to learning something new.
Speaker 4: And I said, okay, well then I'll do it, but
Speaker 4: you're I mean, I had to say, you're a real
Speaker 4: Negro person and wipe the black guff with his face.
Speaker 17: What you're doing, you are a real one.
Speaker 4: As a fact I've never a real ego person before
Speaker 4: was absurd to me. But once it was explained that
Speaker 4: this is what we were doing and the lessons we
Speaker 4: were teaching, that was impactful to me because I realized
Speaker 4: that our show was more than just Laura's story.
Speaker 1: The truth Little House was trying to get at in
Speaker 1: this episode was not one many primetime TV shows would
Speaker 1: have explored the climax arrives when Solomon stuns Charles Ingalls
Speaker 1: with a profound question.
Speaker 17: Would you rather be black and live to be one hundred?
Speaker 8: Well?
Speaker 7: Why I live to be fifty?
Speaker 1: This clip routinely makes the rounds on Twitter and TikTok.
Speaker 4: I was hearing on Twitter from people like Jamie Fox
Speaker 4: and Biola Davis who knew Little House of the Prairie
Speaker 4: was so woke and I'm sitting and hungry.
Speaker 17: I did, I did?
Speaker 12: I knew.
Speaker 1: Here's writer and children's literature professor Lizzie Skurnik, describing watching
Speaker 1: this episode as a child in the eighties.
Speaker 18: Actually peaked suring myself watching it in my parents' bedroom
Speaker 18: after school, like sitting on the floor in front of
Speaker 18: their bed, probably with my brother.
Speaker 1: You know, my mother is black, my.
Speaker 10: Father is Jewish.
Speaker 1: It didn't make me mad.
Speaker 19: But then there's the idea of like, this is always
Speaker 19: how black people show up on shows.
Speaker 10: We're always on one show.
Speaker 19: They just have to have a thing for white people
Speaker 19: to connect with those White people refuse to connect with
Speaker 19: black people as human beings.
Speaker 10: White people were interested in black people insofar as they
Speaker 10: were able to give black people a chance to say
Speaker 10: racism was bad, thereby featuring themselves as people who thought.
Speaker 19: Racism was bad, but thence we all know, not particularly
Speaker 19: interested in the actual story of any black people.
Speaker 1: This is especially notable when you consider there is a
Speaker 1: character in this episode, doctor Taine, who's based on a
Speaker 1: real life black doctor named doctor Tan. Doctor Tan appears
Speaker 1: in the book Little House on the In the TV show,
Speaker 1: doctor Tayane is jaded and angry because white townspeople won't
Speaker 1: let him practice medicine. This is a far cry from
Speaker 1: doctor Tan's real story.
Speaker 19: In that episode is like life is hard, and then
Speaker 19: it's like the real Doctan was doing great. You know,
Speaker 19: the real Doctan was the only doctor on the prairie
Speaker 19: and a true doctor in that he saw everybody and
Speaker 19: everybody saw him, and he was a terrific businessman.
Speaker 4: So in that sense, it was kind of annoying. But
Speaker 4: then on the other hand, Todd Bridges is famous.
Speaker 1: Lizzie and I are the same age and grew up
Speaker 1: with Little House reruns after school. By the time we
Speaker 1: encountered The Wisdom of Solomon, its guest star, Todd Bridges
Speaker 1: was very famous from different strokes.
Speaker 10: So you know, you're feeling like Oh, this is Chid Bridges.
Speaker 1: This is cool today. Clips from the Wisdom of Solomon
Speaker 1: can feel shockingly ahead of their time, but the truth
Speaker 1: is the episode was very much of its moment. The
Speaker 1: Wisdom of Solomon originally aired in nineteen seventy seven, just
Speaker 1: weeks after the final episode of the mini series Roots.
Speaker 1: Roots was based on Alex Haley's best selling novel about slavery,
Speaker 1: and its final episode remains the second most watched overall
Speaker 1: series finale in US television history. So the decision to
Speaker 1: do the Wisdom of Solomon may have been partly a
Speaker 1: matter of land in recognizing what audiences wanted and trying
Speaker 1: to benefit from the ratings juggernaut.
Speaker 4: Whenever I look at these shows as it grown up,
Speaker 4: I always just see a group of people around a
Speaker 4: table trying to think of ideas, Like I think you.
Speaker 19: Can, like see this spitballing coming from a mile away.
Speaker 1: Does that mean these stories can't have a positive effect,
Speaker 1: Lizzie thinks, oftentimes they actually underscore a larger problem, the
Speaker 1: same problem that's in the Little House Books.
Speaker 18: The show then creates the reality that people think existed.
Speaker 13: If you talk about the Frontier, people think the frontier
Speaker 13: was white, but I do think the dangerous propaganda being like, oh, well,
Speaker 13: you know, you're just telling an ancillary story when you
Speaker 13: talk about black people on the prairie, tech about the
Speaker 13: Native Americans, because people have absorbed this idea that white
Speaker 13: people are central, and it's like, hey, like I'm not
Speaker 13: being an activist, I'm being accurate. White people are not
Speaker 13: central to American culture.
Speaker 1: Native American scholar Gwen Westerman also remembers watching Little House
Speaker 1: as a kid.
Speaker 3: I love the TV show, but I never thought that
Speaker 3: much about it. Coming to it as an adult has
Speaker 3: been a much different experience. We were on a trip
Speaker 3: somewhere and watching TV in the hotel room when the
Speaker 3: episode of Little House on the came on, and it
Speaker 3: was in the winter and a Dakota man helped save
Speaker 3: Paw from the blizzard. And once we got past the
Speaker 3: terrible makeup the clothes that the man was wearing, they
Speaker 3: made him look like the typical Hollywood stereotype of Indian.
Speaker 3: He never spoke a word, He just helped Paw and
Speaker 3: they helped him, and then he walked off into the snow.
Speaker 1: Similar to Lizzie saying she was excited to see Todd Bridges,
Speaker 1: this conversation feels complicated by the fact that even insulting
Speaker 1: descriptions on screen were sometimes better than not seeing yourself
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 3: So to see Native people on TV, even in the caricature,
Speaker 3: was during that period of validation that we existed. So
Speaker 3: those were representations, but they.
Speaker 1: Were not the.
Speaker 3: Reality that I knew growing up in a very strong
Speaker 3: and vibrant intertribal community. So we always kind of had
Speaker 3: to balance that, but at least there was validation there
Speaker 3: that people knew that we existed.
Speaker 1: Despite Landon's desire to make Little House relevant when it
Speaker 1: came to depictions of Native Americans, he was unable or
Speaker 1: unwilling to translate events right outside his door onto his
Speaker 1: fictional prairie. Another one one that even as a kid,
Speaker 1: I was aware of, are the women on the prairie.
Speaker 1: The girls were fine, but the grown women not so much.
Speaker 4: We're reflecting the eighteen hundred to one women had zero
Speaker 4: rights and a reflection of the nineteen seventies, where women
Speaker 4: had maybe a half a point of rights.
Speaker 1: The issue of women's rights seems like it could be
Speaker 1: good to copy now, especially since the second wave feminist
Speaker 1: movement was raging and Landon was surrounded by self avowed feminists.
Speaker 1: Here's Lizzie again.
Speaker 19: The first show the livitations of their creator.
Speaker 18: You know, you might not learn a lot about the
Speaker 18: prairie from Little House on the Prairie, but you learn
Speaker 18: a lot about Michael Landon and the seventies and television,
Speaker 18: and you know, male ideals and feminine ideals.
Speaker 1: Sometimes more modern storylines came through, but those feminine ideals
Speaker 1: were ever present.
Speaker 4: And we even touched on women's rights and chauvinism and
Speaker 4: the mistreatment of women at the same time, while marginalizing
Speaker 4: women to do nothing but poor coffee, sometimes for many
Speaker 4: episodes at a time. One of the most staunch feminists
Speaker 4: I know was Karen Gresley, who was one of the
Speaker 4: great coffee pourers of all time.
Speaker 17: I felt myself to be a polar opposite of Carolyn Ingoes.
Speaker 1: That's Karen Grassley, the actor who played Laura's beloved ma.
Speaker 17: I wasn't married, I didn't have children. I was, you know,
Speaker 17: from the sexual revolution. I mean, the little woman had
Speaker 17: never been my goal, and so there were times when
Speaker 17: the choices offered to Carolyn in the script wrinkled.
Speaker 1: But Karen is quick to acknowledge that Michael knew what
Speaker 1: he was doing. He was directing the most crowd pleasing
Speaker 1: version of events, creating the wholesome family center that would
Speaker 1: make the show a hit.
Speaker 17: And this is not at all a criticism. This is
Speaker 17: just an example of how Michael knew his vision, and
Speaker 17: he knew what he wanted and in fact was well
Speaker 17: connected to his audience. He knew what they wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And what every audience in all of history is wanted
Speaker 1: is romance. And there's very little of it in the
Speaker 1: Little House Books. Even Laura Almonso's courting is chased, but
Speaker 1: naturally there's plenty of romance on Landon's prairie. Mister Edwards
Speaker 1: goes according Mary, falls in love, gets jilted, falls in
Speaker 1: love again. But nothing compares to what happens to Laura
Speaker 1: the second she hits puberty. Like the second from girl
Speaker 1: in Braids to boy obsessed teen will obsessed with one
Speaker 1: boy who's actually not a boy at all. We don't
Speaker 1: mean that in the progressive way, which brings us to
Speaker 1: the episode Sweet sixteen.
Speaker 9: So my name is Dean Butler, and I played al
Speaker 9: Manzil Wilder from nineteen seventy nine through nineteen eighty three
Speaker 9: on the Little House television series.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of season six, Dean Butler was cast
Speaker 1: as Laura's love interest and future husband, al Manzo Wilder.
Speaker 1: At the time, Dean was twenty three and Melissa so
Speaker 1: Gilbert was fifteen.
Speaker 4: I mean, I can't even tell you what a girl
Speaker 4: I was. I mean, I was a gidget fourteen, fifteen
Speaker 4: years old, not need bucktooth, still had braces on.
Speaker 9: I towered over her. You know, I'm six one and
Speaker 9: a half. Melissa was what five ' five something like that.
Speaker 9: She always commented the fact that you know that I
Speaker 9: drove my own car the set, that I.
Speaker 4: Shaved, I'd been on a date and kissed a boy.
Speaker 9: I was just so much bigger than she was.
Speaker 4: Well, I can tell you from the lens of today,
Speaker 4: you can't do that. There's no way they could shoot it.
Speaker 4: There's no way they would cast it that way, and
Speaker 4: there's certainly no way it would be handled the way
Speaker 4: it was handled.
Speaker 1: Sweet sixteen is the second to last episode of season six.
Speaker 1: Laura has had a crush and all Monso for the
Speaker 1: entire season, but her affection has not been returned, and
Speaker 1: she's given up hope taking a teaching job out of town.
Speaker 1: Her hair has gone up into a bun, so we
Speaker 1: know she's a grown up now. Almanza sees a lot
Speaker 1: of day and at the end of this episode, they kiss.
Speaker 1: According to IMDb, it's one of the highest rated episodes
Speaker 1: of the series. Melissa Gilbert was fifteen when they filmed it.
Speaker 4: Now we have intimacy coordinators and we have all this
Speaker 4: dialogue around being comfortable and feeling safe, which is amazing.
Speaker 4: Nobody talked to me about it. It was just it
Speaker 4: was nobody said, are you uncomfortable? Are you okay? Is
Speaker 4: this all right? I remember being told that the al
Speaker 4: Manzo episodes were coming. Fortunately we had a little run
Speaker 4: up to the actual marriage and stuff. But by the
Speaker 4: time we got to the sweet sixteen episode and the
Speaker 4: first kiss and all of that, it was you know,
Speaker 4: I knew Dean, and I liked Dean, and I got
Speaker 4: along with Dean, but I still felt like I was
Speaker 4: out of my element. To put it mildly, there certainly.
Speaker 9: Would be nothing like that today. That would never happen today.
Speaker 9: But again, Michael's numbers were huge. NBC was not going
Speaker 9: to screw around with this. You know, it was working.
Speaker 9: The audience was tuning in, they were watching, they were
Speaker 9: coming to see this, and they came to see this
Speaker 9: romance in enormous numbers.
Speaker 1: Three episodes later, at the beginning of season seven, Lauren Almonzo, Mary,
Speaker 1: I must tell you that even as a kid, this
Speaker 1: did not stand out to me as a problem at all,
Speaker 1: which I told Dean in our conversation. No, as a
Speaker 1: kid watching, I was just like, oh, this makes complete sense,
Speaker 1: and now her hair isn't embraids anymore. But I'm quite
Speaker 1: sure I thought fifteen was ancient. And I was also
Speaker 1: devoted to the I mean devoted to the books too,
Speaker 1: And in the books there is a ten year age
Speaker 1: gap between the two of them, and she does meet
Speaker 1: him at age fifteen in the books, so I'm not.
Speaker 9: Sure you had married Jel eighteen.
Speaker 12: Oh right.
Speaker 1: But I also think, like we have a different Our
Speaker 1: understanding of age and age differences has shifted dramatically even
Speaker 1: since the eighties, in good ways. But it's a different
Speaker 1: conversation than I just.
Speaker 4: Thought this was real life too, So just to be clear, there.
Speaker 1: Was no like, would this actress have had a problem.
Speaker 1: I was like, well, it's Lauren Almonzo. These contradictions within
Speaker 1: the Little House series were one week you'd see something
Speaker 1: that felt boundary breaking, and the next week something that
Speaker 1: felt sort of like a strange cultural throwback. In many ways,
Speaker 1: mirror the contradictions inherent to Michael Landon himself. On the
Speaker 1: one hand, he was a family man who ran his
Speaker 1: set as a tight ship so that his crew could
Speaker 1: go home on time. Charlotte Stewart, who played Miss Beatle,
Speaker 1: remembers this especially.
Speaker 11: Most of the television shows that we did in those days,
Speaker 11: they'd work you till ten eleven o'clock at night and
Speaker 11: he had to come back in at like six in
Speaker 11: the morning, and they didn't care. They would pay for it.
Speaker 11: But Michael was a family man and the guys, all
Speaker 11: the men and women that worked for him on the crew,
Speaker 11: being at families like every on the television show, but
Speaker 11: who cared. Michael made sure they got home for dinner
Speaker 11: at seven.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, he had a rather messy personal
Speaker 1: life at times, certainly not one Charles Ingalls would have
Speaker 1: led on the Prairie.
Speaker 4: This was a man who espoused family values and community values,
Speaker 4: and was married three times and had children, was three
Speaker 4: different women, and was deeply flawed and human. But who
Speaker 4: isn't doesn't mean he's a bad person. It just means
Speaker 4: he's a human person.
Speaker 1: Everyone we spoke with talks about Michael Landon's incredible work ethic,
Speaker 1: and his respect for his cast and crew. Alison Arngrim
Speaker 1: writes in her memoir that the child actors of Little
Speaker 1: House boast that there have been no arrests and no convictions.
Speaker 1: Michael was devoted to the show and protective over his
Speaker 1: creative vision, which is most visible, and how he decided
Speaker 1: to end the show. So, Joe, guess how the series ends?
Speaker 6: Alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, an invasion of a clown mime army.
Speaker 1: Close. But no, they blow up Walnut Grove.
Speaker 10: No they don't. They blow up the town.
Speaker 1: Yeah, A tycoon comes in and buys all of the
Speaker 1: land and all of the buildings in Walnut Grove and
Speaker 1: they can't get any of them back, so their only
Speaker 1: recourse is to blow up the entire town.
Speaker 6: As one does, as one does.
Speaker 1: I think I went back to this as a teenager
Speaker 1: to remember if I remembered this correctly. Because I watched this,
Speaker 1: I was old enough to watch this in primetime, and
Speaker 1: for years I wondered if I'd imagined it, they blow
Speaker 1: up the entire town. Yeah, And the thing is they
Speaker 1: blew They actually blew the set up in real life
Speaker 1: because Michael Landon did not want anyone else coming along
Speaker 1: and using his little House on the Prairie set, so
Speaker 1: he blew it up, and he wrote the episode around that.
Speaker 6: That's such a dude thing to do. It's like mine, mine, mine,
Speaker 6: no one else, no one else is going to be
Speaker 6: here after I'm gone.
Speaker 1: And then the crazy thing too is the last shot
Speaker 1: of the last episode is they don't blow up the
Speaker 1: Little House like they don't blow up the iconic Little House.
Speaker 1: That's the empty little House is the last shot. And
Speaker 1: in real life he also didn't blow up the Little House.
Speaker 1: It burnt down in a fire, like a random fire
Speaker 1: years later. So, I mean, the blurring of fact and
Speaker 1: fiction in the Little House world continues right to the
Speaker 1: very end of the television series.
Speaker 6: Michael Landon was a real special kind of trip, is
Speaker 6: is what I'm gotting from this episode?
Speaker 1: Go Landon was? I mean, cosmically speaking, it sort of
Speaker 1: feels like could there have been a more perfect person
Speaker 1: to continue the Little House legacy? Truly, He's sort of
Speaker 1: perfectly formed for it.
Speaker 6: Honestly, what do you think Laura would have thought of
Speaker 6: what became of her legacy on these TV shows?
Speaker 1: So, Like, in doing this episode, the funny thing I
Speaker 1: kept coming back to is the similarities between Rose and
Speaker 1: Michael Landon, Like two people who were amazing storytellers and
Speaker 1: you know, could take these simple tales and then fictionalize
Speaker 1: them in a way that we can't get enough of,
Speaker 1: and take these characters and turn them into sort of
Speaker 1: these like heroic male heroes. Rose, as we know, loved
Speaker 1: taking men and turning their biographies into these heroic story
Speaker 1: so I kind of feel like Rose would have loved
Speaker 1: Michael Landon. I don't know what Laura would have thought,
Speaker 1: because she was very you know, she was of her time.
Speaker 1: She was very conservative and didn't like talking about sex.
Speaker 1: But I think and would have gotten on great. Both
Speaker 1: Rose and Michael Landon saw these essential truths in Laura's
Speaker 1: story and tapped into them in such a deep way
Speaker 1: that it's so satisfying. We can't get enough of the
Speaker 1: simple tale of little House.
Speaker 6: They tapped into Laura's story in such a way to
Speaker 6: create some completely bonkers content.
Speaker 1: It completely bonkers.
Speaker 6: So look, Laura was clearly beloved. Her stories are clearly beloved.
Speaker 6: And what I'm taken away from this episode is that
Speaker 6: Michael Landon was very beloved.
Speaker 1: Even the people we talked to who talked about him
Speaker 1: being complicated or flawed, everybody loved him. Like literally everybody
Speaker 1: loved him. People followed him around. He was beloved. Michael
Speaker 1: Landon remained a beloved figure for the rest of his career,
Speaker 1: and then in nineteen ninety one, at the age of
Speaker 1: fifty four, he called a press conference at his home
Speaker 1: to announce a terminal cancer diagnosis. But Landon faced the
Speaker 1: diagnosis with his usual charm in humor, as he demonstrated
Speaker 1: in his final Tonight Show interview with Johnny Carson, You've.
Speaker 9: Got a pilot you made for this fall.
Speaker 7: That's right, called us, called us, made it for CBS.
Speaker 16: I don't get better.
Speaker 7: It's their second mistake since buying baseball.
Speaker 5: So you know, I was a.
Speaker 9: Little worried about this interview. Now you've made me feel
Speaker 9: much better.
Speaker 1: Whatever his complications, Michael Landon made everyone feel better, So
Speaker 1: it was even more shocking when he died just two
Speaker 1: months later. But as Landon predicted way back when he
Speaker 1: conceived of the show. Decades later, Little How lives on.
Speaker 4: He said, you know everyone's going to be watching these
Speaker 4: shows long after we're all gone, he said, long after
Speaker 4: I'm dead. It was like this prophetic thing and everyone
Speaker 4: he said it to it, Yeah right, oh by it,
Speaker 4: and like didn't believe him.
Speaker 1: We didn't get it, Michael got a half century later.
Speaker 1: The stars of the show continue to draw huge audiences
Speaker 1: in real life. People come to fan conventions, to events
Speaker 1: at the actual Laura Ingalls houses, to book signings.
Speaker 2: We get the people who come for autographs and sometimes
Speaker 2: they cry because it's so intense to meet the person
Speaker 2: that you've grown up watching. I know, Melissa Gilbert, obviously
Speaker 2: it's Laura shed People just go into a coma. A
Speaker 2: lot of people don't think they're gonna be emotional that
Speaker 2: they meet Maw and that voice and she sounds the
Speaker 2: same and she's so sweet you that's I see. People
Speaker 2: really lose it over. Charlotte Stewart, Missus Beadle.
Speaker 1: All the actors we spoke with, seems grateful to be
Speaker 1: part of the Little House legacy.
Speaker 17: Cute visit Wanna Grove is to relax and know that
Speaker 17: people are about to show up for each other.
Speaker 11: When I got Little House on the Prairie, people in
Speaker 11: Hollywood went, what Little House on the What?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: How boring?
Speaker 11: Well, guess what, We're still on the air.
Speaker 9: It's as big a gift as anything I've ever received
Speaker 9: in my life. To be associated with those books, with
Speaker 9: that woman, with those stories, with that television show is
Speaker 9: the gift of a lifetime.
Speaker 4: Not a day goes by that I don't think about
Speaker 4: Little House in the Prairie or mention something to do
Speaker 4: with Little House in the Prarie, or Laura or Rose
Speaker 4: or the Ingles relatives, or something that has something to
Speaker 4: do with them. And it's so infused in my being
Speaker 4: at this point.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it feels like Laura Ingles Wilder has had nine lives.
Speaker 1: She's been reimagined so many times, for better and for worse.
Speaker 1: When Laura and Rose sat down to write the books,
Speaker 1: Laura wanted to preserve her family's legacy. She had no
Speaker 1: idea she was creating such a lasting brand, but that's
Speaker 1: exactly what she did. Laura not only inspired a TV
Speaker 1: show we're still watching, she launched the careers of many
Speaker 1: stars we still know about. She spawned additional book series,
Speaker 1: Fashion brands, entire lifestyles, businesses that have made millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're going to talk about next week
Speaker 1: when we dig into the Business of Laura. Wilder is
Speaker 1: written and hosted by Me, Glennis McNichol. Our story editors
Speaker 1: our Joe Piazza and Emily Meronoff. Our senior producer is
Speaker 1: Emily Maroanoff. Our producers are Mary dou Sheina Ozaki and
Speaker 1: Jessica crime Chitch. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip. Sound
Speaker 1: design and mixing by Amanda ro Smith. Our scene in
Speaker 1: additional music was composed by Alise McCoy. We are executive
Speaker 1: produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki Tor, Ali Perry and Me.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot.
Speaker 1: Extra special thanks to Dean Butler for connecting us to
Speaker 1: so many Little House cast and crew members. Thank you
Speaker 1: to the Friendly Family for helping us navigate the Little
Speaker 1: House world. Thanks to NBC for allowing us to use
Speaker 1: Little House on the Prairie clips. Thanks to Michael Landon
Speaker 1: for letting an entire generation know it's all right. To cry.
Speaker 1: Thank you, as always to CDM Studios. We've listed extensive
Speaker 1: resources in our show notes on all the topics we've
Speaker 1: discussed in this episode. You can also find our contact
Speaker 1: and go there if you want to write us with
Speaker 1: your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram at
Speaker 1: Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast, where
Speaker 1: you can see behind the scenes footage from all our travels.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.