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Little House on the Prairie
1974 · TV series · 9 seasons
Created by Ed Friendly, Laura Ingalls Wilder
When the big woods of Wisconsin becomes a difficult spot for hunting, Charles Ingalls reluctantly decides to move his family, pioneering west. Their life on the farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in the 1870s and 1880s is full of adventure, tragedy, and triumph. Based on the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
2 negative5 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
No, this discussion doesn't have to be qualitative. You dismiss Little House on the Prairie, which is ironic because Laura Wilder quite literally wrote an exact biography that had some details (like the death of her brother) that were left out in the child-friendly books. I'm so thankful that she wrote both kinds of books so that folks can't honestly dismiss the "bad old days" as objectively worse than the present.
Your chronological snobbery reminds me of a similar blindness that modernity has for the "women and children first" policy when the Titanic was sinking. When they made the movie, the director deliberately altered the story because he believed nobody would believe the truth. Yet the truth is, women and children were a whole lot more likely to survive than men, indicating that policy must have taken place[1].
The reality is, if you read first-hand accounts of the west, you see an incredible optimism, an incredible amount of sacrifice and an incredible amount of shared community on the west. That is so alien to our modern culture, where most people know a prophet of doom and gloom, people think that "community" is something you can purchase with a membership or find online, and conspiracy theories (real and imagined!) are a constant hot topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first#20th_century
That's a funny coincidence: my partner recently watched an old episode of "Little House on the Prairie" in which one of the characters mentioned "salt-rising bread". I have coincidentally been baking a lot of bread lately, so I felt curious about how that might work, and looked the process up. After reading this article, I think I understand it a little better still! I'm not sure I want to try it, though.
Ah, yeah, SG-1 is a good example. The 100 is another (post-apocalyptic earth). And Battlestar Galatica.
In retrospect I realized I grew up with a few major styles, including "shot in a back lot in LA" (Back to the Future), "shot on a ranch outside LA" (Little House on the Prairie), "movie set in city actually shot in city by director who loved the city" (the Conversation), and "shot at Elmstree" (Star Wars interiors).
Ultimately I want to watch a movie where I can't tell what forest it was shot it, especially if it's off-planet.
I hadn’t thought about Little House on the Prairie since I was about 7 or 8 years old, but noticed it was being run on some over-the-air local station recently. I don’t know why, but those stories were very popular in the mid to late 1970s. In addition to Little House, we had The Waltons, Grizzly Adams, and movies like Across The Great Divide. I don’t know what the attraction was, but even living in the rural suburbs, it seemed like the shows took place a million years ago to my young mind.
I recently rewatched the Little House on the Prairie tv series. In the later seasons, Walnut Grove got an ice house that was built into the side of a hill that also doubled as sort of a holding cell/jail. People would get a huge cube of ice (looked roughly a cubic foot) and take it home. I had also heard of Jail being referred to as the "ice house" (and "big house" and "jail house") and was wondering if this is where it came from.
> from the Frenchmen who cut up the river ice
That answers another question I always had in the back of my mind on how they got the ice, so thank you!
It was also interesting to see the Typhus outbreak on the show and how it was handled, while I was sitting at home in the middle of a pandemic. I think the episode was even named "Quarantine."
It's great to see so many reading parents here. I read The Hobbit and LoTR to my daughter starting when she was around 9. It must've been almost a year per book because we finished last year when she was 13. I had to explain some of the subtler passages and backstories, but she got much of it. We watched the movies together this year and she picked up most of the differences (though even I didn't pick up on the deep changes in Eowyn's character, as linked in another comment here).
I had read the books as a teenager in the 80's, 20 years before the movies existed, the same paperback books from my father that we re-read together. I was happy to re-read them, because I had missed much of the poetry (as noted in other comments here) and forgotten some of the story. I had seen the movies in between, but I'm referring to the deeper stories and in-book legendaria that the movies didn't cover. Despite the changes and omissions (and Hollywood effects), I still think the movies did a good job, as good as could be expected.
BTW, we started reading Little House on the Prairie when my daughter was 4, and also read all of Narnia and a few others before Tolkein. Reading with your kids is a great way to re-discover the books of your childhood (or discover, because I'd never read LHotP).
On the other hand, government rating systems can get hilarious.
Here in Finland, VHS and DVD distribution of program materials were rated for audiences (does it suit children or not, etc) by a government agency. They wanted to raise money for the government. So, even if a program was rated for VHS, distributors couldn't use the same rating for DVD distribution; they had to pay another fee to get the DVD rating. Without government inspection, movies had to be distributed with K-18 (X-rated) label.
Eventually, one of the distributors got fed up when they were told to pay yet again for the new rating of "Little House on the Prairie", the nostalgic 1970's family series classic. The distributor simply said no, and decided to sell Little House as an X-rated DVD release. Supermarkets had to verify that buyers had photo ID and were over 18 years old. Parents were told it's forbidden to show the series to their children (it had been on air in prime time in 1970's and many remembered it fondly).
Everyone started to laugh at the government rating agency, and they gave up and changed the regulation.
Talking about disconnects in movie ratings, the DVD releases of "Little House on the Prairie" were rated 18+ in Finland.
This was because the State Motion Picture Inspection Agency got greedy, and wanted to collect a new fee from the distributor who had already paid for the VHS releases.
Distributors had to pay to get a rating, but were allowed to release stuff as 18+ without paying. So the distributor of Little House just told the agency to go climb a tree and released this horrible nightmarish series with a 18+ rating, and since everyone now realised how the inspection agency had made itself completely ridiculous, they gave up and changed the rules.