"I hope you're happy, Laura Ingalls, now that you've made my little girl a cripple! You get out of my house, and don't you EVER come back!" - Katherine MacGregor as mercantile owner Harriet Oleson
Little House on the Prairie: Season 3 DVD Review
By Christopher W. Czajka
Little House on the Prairie returned to NBC for its third season on September 27, 1976. While the show still hadn't cracked the Nielsen Top Ten, as it would in later years, it was building a vigorously dedicated audience that tuned in each week for gripping drama, steadfast love, and floods of tears from the show's star and Executive Producer, Michael Landon. Season 3 broaches new ground, as Landon and Co. take everything up a notch. The sweet simplicity and wholesome goodness of seasons one and two are superseded by staggering melodrama, relentless hardships, and the truly diabolical machinations of Nellie Oleson. And boy, is it a lot of fun.
Reportedly, critics who deemed the show "saccharine" and "sickly sweet" drove Michael Landon batty. In response to these critics (and perhaps because his young stars were growing older, and able to handle more challenging material), the third season pulls out all the stops, and sends the Ingalls family and their supporting cast on a non-stop roller-coaster of tremendous calamity and heart-stopping adventure. In the first two seasons, storylines largely focus on such simple conflicts as peer pressure, sibling rivalry, and schoolyard teasing. In contrast, season three wrestles with plots that include children perishing in a Christmas Eve blizzard, the near-death illness of a major character, the gang assault of a teenage Indian, violent bullying, and not one but two suicide attempts (both by self-incineration, mind you). However, no matter how jaw-dropping or disastrous life gets in Walnut Grove, each episode also manages to serve up a poignant message or two about family, friendship, faith, or community.
A major storyline of the third season focuses on the ownership of Bunny, the long-eared colt, shifting between Laura (Melissa Gilbert) and Nellie Oleson (Alison Arngrim). Diehard Little House fans will remember that Laura sold the horse to Mr. Oleson (Richard Bull) to pay for Ma's Christmas present in season one. In the classic episode "Bunny," Nellie whips the horse until it bolts, and she is rewarded for her cruelty by taking a nasty spill out of the saddle. Upon regaining consciousness, Nellie feigns paralysis and is "confined" to a wheelchair. Wracked with overwhelming guilt, and shamed by a wicked tirade from Mrs. Oleson (Katherine MacGregor), Laura agree to visit Nellie daily and "assist" her with schoolwork. Nellie's abuse of the situation grows monstrous, until Laura catches her waltzing around the mercantile and decides to wreak her own brand of prairie justice. In one of the most frequently-remembered scenes of the series, Laura pushes Nellie's wheelchair down one of the highest hills in town, and the screeching, screaming Nellie is flung headlong into the millpond before her mother's horrified eyes. It's a truly classic moment in the series. Bunny the much-disputed horse also provides conflict for "The Race," in which Mrs. Oleson buys Nellie a thoroughbred in order to compete against Laura and Bunny in the annual Hero Township horserace. Unfortunately, Bunny bites the dust in a later episode of the season after having a close encounter with a barbed-wire fence. As per usual, tears flow and life lessons ensue.
Nellie Oleson's false paraplegia is just a smidgen of the horrors she exacts on Laura in season three. The flouncing, pouty, and haughty Nellie of the earlier seasons is replaced with a truly psychotic child villainess. In "The Monster of Walnut Grove," Nellie tortures Laura with lies and scary practical jokes when Laura mistakenly believes she saw Mr. Oleson chop off his wife's head on Halloween night (who knew they were celebrating Halloween in 1870s Minnesota?!). In "The Music Box," Nellie blackmails Laura into deeply hurting a stuttering friend's feelings after Laura "borrows" Nellie's music box and accidentally breaks it. In "Little Women," Nellie convinces her mother to buy her a ridiculous black wig for a school play, and then proceeds to upstage all of her fellow actors with some of the most horrendous "acting" imaginable. Alison Arngrim's tantrum at the end of "Bunny" - which includes battering a dollhouse to bits with a hairbrush, decapitating figurines, smashing crockery, and screaming "I hate you, Laura Ingalls! I hate you! I hate you!" - is not to be missed. Viewers who grew up with the series will undoubtedly be shocked - and decidedly amused - by Nellie's antics.
The third season also firmly establishes another recurring theme of Little House: the fact that it sucks to be Mary Ingalls. Mary (Melissa Sue Anderson), like The Brady Bunch's Jan, is plagued by nonstop disaster and trauma (which will only grow worse in the ensuing seasons). In the two-part nailbiter "To Live With Fear," Mary is kicked in the head by a new horse, which activates a severe "intestinal infection" (?). To care for their ailing daughter, Ma (Karen Grassle) and Pa (Landon) take her to the hospital in far-off Rochester, where she suffers through two emergency surgeries. To pay the mounting doctor's bills, Pa and Mr. Edwards (Victor French) are forced to take a dangerous job blasting a railroad tunnel through a mountain. In "I'll Ride The Wind," Mary's simmering romance with John Sanderson, Jr. (Radames Pera) is put on indefinite hold after he proposes to her (it's not for the squeamish. . . she's only thirteen), and then receives a four-year scholarship to a Chicago university. In "Little Girl Lost," Mary scolds Carrie (played by twins Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush) while the sisters are collecting bugs for one of Miss Beadle's ubiquitous hands-on learning projects; Carrie promptly falls down an abandoned mine shaft, and it takes the entire population of Walnut Grove to rescue her. In "The Election," Mary tearfully drops out of the school presidential race when she realizes one of the other candidates, an unpopular boy with (surprise!) a heart of gold is better suited for the job. Melissa Sue Anderson's quivering-lipped sobs, and the real tears that pour from her enormous blue eyes, are showcased with increasing regularity in season three. Again, Landon and the writers seem to have her in training for her upcoming signature moment ("Pa! Pa! I can't SEEEEEEEEEEEEE!")
Mary is not the only character to suffer wretchedly in season three. Practically everyone gets a turn. In "The Hunters," Charles is seriously wounded during a hunting trip, and Laura sets off to find help. The only person she can find, natch, is a blind hermit. In "Blizzard," Miss Beadle (Charlotte Stewart) graciously lets her students out of school early on Christmas Eve, just in time for a horrendous snowstorm, causing several of Walnut Grove's finest to freeze to death. In "Quarantine," Mr. Edwards infects his adopted daughter Alicia (Kyle Richards) with deadly mountain fever, which killed his first wife and daughter. When Charles' mother dies in "Journey in the Spring," grief-stricken Grandpa Ingalls attempts to kill himself by burning up his little house in the Big Woods. And critics called this show "sickly sweet"?
The two-parter "Journey in the Spring" is also notable because it introduces some future Little House cast members. In a flashback, Matthew Laborteaux, who will later portray the Ingalls' adopted son Albert, plays a young Charles Ingalls. The role of Eliza Quiner Ingalls, Ma's sister, is played by Hersha Paraday, who will turn up soon as Alice Garvey. Star Trek fans will undoubtedly notice that Pa's brother Peter is Mark Lenard, who played Spock's father at the movies and gorilla army leader General Urko in the Planet of the Apes television series. Other guest stars in season three include the late, great Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash as a pair of would-be swindlers in "The Collection," a pre-Eight is Enough Willie Aames as a racist bully in "Injun Kid," and Diff'rent Strokes' Todd Bridges in "The Wisdom of Solomon" (see below).
Season three tackles social issues (actually, one social issue) in two episodes. "Injun Kid" and "The Wisdom of Solomon" both deal frankly and honestly with racism. While 21st century viewers may cringe when Melissa Gilbert refers to Todd Bridges as "a real live Negro person," the episodes are interesting in that they reveal more about the 1970s than the 1870s.
The third season concludes with the two-parter "Gold Country," in which the Ingalls and Edwards families briefly move to the outskirts of Deadwood, South Dakota to try their luck at prospecting. After learning some hard lessons about greed (and after Laura meets yet another crazy old hermit, who actually does succeed in incinerating himself. . .it's a long story), the families turn their wagons east, back towards Walnut Grove. . .and season four.
The nineteen episodes that comprise the third season are divided onto six DVDs. The DVDs are housed in a foldout digipak case, which fits into a cardboard slipcover. Keeping with their strong tradition of crappy packaging, the distributor, Imavision, has emblazoned the slipcover with a terrible composite shot of the beaming Ingalls family, where Melissa Sue Anderson's eyes are totally closed. Perhaps those wacky folks at Imavision are providing some dark foreshadowing of their own.
Opening the digipak, each panel features photographs of characters in scenes largely drawn from the third 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). Each disc also features the prairie backdrop, and individual photographs of cast members: Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and. . .drumroll, please. . .Todd Bridges! Apparently, Mr. Bridges' star power eclipses fellow one-shot guest star Johnny Cash, as well as all of the other regulars who appeared on the show for a decade. The design choices made for these box sets has officially moved from sloppy to goofy. 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 window, accompanied by the show's theme music. Imavision actually has improved on the Season 1 and Season 2 box sets: Season 3's episodes are divided into chapters. There is a play all feature.
