"If I had a remembrance book, I would surely write about the day we came to Plum Creek, and first saw the house in the ground." - Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls
Little House on the Prairie: Season 1 DVD Review
By Christopher W. Czajka
In the spring of 1931, a relatively unknown Missouri farm woman named Laura Ingalls Wilder catapulted to fame with the publication of her first novel, Little House in the Big Woods. The novel, billed by its publisher as "the book no Depression could stop," recounted Wilder's childhood sixty years earlier in the frontier forests of western Wisconsin, and launched the nine-volume Little House series. The Little House books, which follow the pioneer wanderings of the Ingalls clan from Wisconsin to Kansas to Minnesota, and ultimately, to South Dakota, were immediate bestsellers, and hailed by critics as "one of the most phenomenal achievements in the history of literature for young people." By the time of her death in 1957, Wilder's stories of her frontier girlhood had achieved lasting critical acclaim and thousands of devoted fans around the world. Forty years later, Wilder's publisher acknowledged that over 60 million Little House books have been sold, due, in part, to reader interest sparked by NBC's beloved 1974-1984 series Little House on the Prairie.
As early as the 1940s, studios approached Wilder about adapting her novels for the big screen. Wilder, however, was fearful that producers would radically stray from her autobiographical source material. She flatly refused all offers, with the exception of a short radio drama based on her seventh novel, The Long Winter. Upon Wilder's death, the rights to the Little House books passed to her daughter, novelist Rose Wilder Lane. Lane spent the next eleven years vigorously defending the sanctity of her mother's work, and also refused Hollywood's offers. When Lane died in 1968, she willed her interests in Little House - including television and movie rights - to Roger Lea MacBride, her confidante, attorney, and self-proclaimed "adopted grandson." MacBride, who ran as the Libertarian presidential candidate in 1976, and later built himself a multimillion dollar cottage industry around his inheritance, promptly began shopping the novels around in Hollywood. MacBride sold the Little House name to producer Ed Friendly and executive producer Michael Landon, who would also star in the series as patriarch Charles Ingalls.
In March 1974, NBC broadcast a two hour pilot movie (not included in this box set) largely based on Wilder's second novel, Little House on the Prairie. The film focuses on the Ingalls family's departure from the Big Woods of Wisconsin and their settling in the "Indian Territory" of southern Kansas. After spending a tumultuous year fending off prairie fires and blizzards, the Ingalls are forced to give up their farm when the government cedes their land to the Indians. The whole brood climbs into their covered wagon and heads off for destinations unknown.
While the pilot was a ratings hit, Wilder purists reeled at the numerous liberties producers had taken with the story and casting. The cherubic Landon was a far cry from Wilder's grizzled, Manson-esque Pa. NBC's version of the family dog, Jack, was a floppy-eared, Benji-type mutt, rather than Laura's beloved brindled bulldog. An angry "letter to the editor" of a leading children's literature journal complained that the pilot's "pressured Pa, resentful Ma, and bratty children" were all too familiar in contemporary television drama. The letter's writer must have been in a padded cell by the spring of 1984, when Landon and Co. - after tackling issues such as alcoholism, racism, drug addiction, anti-Semitism, rape, and teen pregnancy during the previous ten years - capped off the series in grand fashion by dynamiting the prairie hamlet of Walnut Grove into oblivion to save it from a ruthless land baron. Despite underwhelmed critics, relentless melodrama, and possibly the longest string of "let's bring in some more kids" adoptions in television history, Little House on the Prairie proved to be one of NBC's most durable - and adored - hits of the 1970s.
Little House on the Prairie's first season, which began on September 11, 1974, is refreshingly a long way from the plague of twentieth-century issues which would find their way into the show's later years. The series begins as the Ingalls family, recently arrived from Kansas, starts a new life near Walnut Grove, Minnesota in the mid-1870s. The family is comprised of hardworking, optimistic father Charles (Michael Landon), gentle mother Caroline (Karen Grassle), and their three young daughters: well-behaved, sweet Mary (Melissa Sue Anderson), feisty spitfire Laura (Melissa Gilbert), and baby Carrie (played alternately by twins "Lindsay" Robin and "Sidney" Rachel Greenbush). Laura functions as a narrator for much of the first season, subtly foreshadowing Wilder's later-life writing career.
At first, the Ingalls live in a sod dugout, until Pa builds them a new house on the banks of Plum Creek. The Ingalls soon find friends (and enemies) in nearby Walnut Grove, including mill owner Lars Hansen (Karl Swenson), kind-hearted Reverend Alden (Dabbs Greer), country medic Dr. Baker (Kevin Hagen), lemon verbena-wearing schoolteacher Miss Beadle (Charlotte Stewart), and henpecked mercantile owner Nels Oleson (Richard Bull). Mr. Oleson's shrewish wife Harriet (Katherine MacGregor), his spoiled-rotten daughter Nellie (Alison Arngrim) and her dimwitted brother Willie (Melissa Gilbert's real-life brother, Jonathan), function as the Ingalls' perennial critics, tormentors, and teasers.
The first season firmly establishes the thematic bedrock of the series, with each episode focused on one of three dominant themes (we could call 'em the Little House Three F's): family, friends, and faith. Virtually every episode in the first season (and many of the subsequent seasons) can be traced back to these basic ideas.
A major recurring motif is the often nameless townspeople of Walnut Grove rallying around any benevolent cause presented to them. Quite regularly, the cause is coming to the aid of the Ingalls family, who teeter dangerously close to losing their farm several times. From piling grain at the Feed and Seed when Charles breaks a rib and can't repay a loan ("A Harvest of Friends") to harvesting crops with Caroline when Charles is forced to look elsewhere for work ("The 100 Mile Walk"), to melting down every bit of scrap metal in Hero Township for a new church bell ("The Voice of Tinker Jones"), the hardscrabble pioneers of Walnut Grove are depicted as a community built on friendship, respect, and mutual determination. It's no wonder the Ingalls family stayed for almost a decade (well, except for that one season. . .)
Amidst all the trial and travail, Landon and the writers also quickly establish - and beautifully portray - the deep love which binds the Ingalls family together. Landon, with his decidedly 1970s Beverly Hills 'fro, builds Charles into a veritable uberdad: kind, caring, compassionate, fair, just, forgiving, etc. In the second episode of the series, "Country Girls," Laura, who is just learning to read and write, must recite an essay on Parents' Day at school. Rather than reading the short and clumsily written sentences she has on paper, she recites what she would have written (if she could have) extolling the virtues of her mother. By the end of Laura's essay, Pa, Ma, and pretty much the whole darn town are blubbering. . .along with viewers. Saccharine? Yes. Manipulative? Yes. But you've got to be pretty hard-hearted not to be touched by it. The writers deftly balance character development, plot, and believable interfamilial relationships throughout the arc of the first season. Even cute-as-a-button, barely intelligible Baby Carrie, who in later years was reduced to a walking prop, is given face time in the first season, wrestling with a tremendous amount of emotionally revelatory dialogue (including, but not limited to, "Hi!," "Boo!," and "No!").
While the season briefly flirts with "issues," including an episode about the abuse of one of Laura's classmates by his alcoholic father ("Child of Pain") and adult illiteracy ("School Mom"), it also contains a fair amount of humor. Fans of the simmering ill-will between Laura and nasty Nellie Oleson will not be disappointed with the first season, though Nellie mostly glowers and flounces during these early episodes. Her truly evil and elaborate torments are yet to come.
Fans of the Wilder novels will be interested to see how the show clings to certain shreds of the original source material for the first few episodes, before abandoning all pretense and developing totally original storylines.
Other highlights of the first season include The Gift of the Magi-inspired "Christmas at Plum Creek," and Melissa Gilbert's reportedly favorite episode, the two-part, no-holds barred tearjerker "The Lord is My Shepherd," in which Laura runs away from home after the death of her infant brother.
The twenty-three episodes that comprise the first season are divided onto six DVDs. The DVDs are housed in a foldout digipak case, which fits into a cardboard slipcover. Opening the digipak, each panel features a handsome photograph of cast members: Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, and - inexplicably - Mr. Edwards, his wife Grace, and their adopted children (who don't even show up until the second season). The disc holder area of the digipak is adorned with a beautiful panoramic photograph of white clouds sailing over a golden, wheat-covered prairie (a real, honest-to-goodness prairie, which any longtime Little House viewer will recognize as a stock photograph, not the show's rugged, arid and semi-mountainous Southern California filming location). Each disc also features the prairie backdrop, and individual photographs of cast members. Pa, Ma, Laura, Mary, and Carrie each have their own disc. . .as does Ernest Borgnine(!) who appears as a special guest star in "The Lord is My Shepherd." This design choice is beyond puzzling - you've got to wonder if the DVD designers couldn't manage to dig up a suitable photograph of any of the other scores of cast members who had recurring roles on the series. Perhaps Todd Bridges, Johnny Cash, or Billy Barty will be emblazoned on a disc in one of the upcoming season sets. Also included in the packaging is a booklet containing brief summaries of each episode.
The menu designs on the DVDs are simple and functional. Episodes on each disc are listed, while a montage of memorable Little House moments plays in a widow, accompanied by the show's theme music. The episodes, unfortunately, are not divided into chapters. This forces the viewer to watch the entire episode in one sitting or to fast forward to their stopping point later on. There is a play all feature.
