Little House on the Prairie (aka "LHOP")

I recently discovered a treasure trove of "Little House on the Prairie" DVDs on Netflix.  The kids and I are currently working our way through season one.  I LOVED this show when I was a kid; however, I don't think I started watching it until season three or four.  The show started in 1974 when I was 4 years old and I probably started watching it when I was about 7 or 8 years old, so these episodes we're watching now are new to me too. 

When I was a little girl, I like the show because I wanted to be Laura Ingalls.  I loved her long braids, her flouncy dresses, her buttoned up boots, bonnets, buck teeth, etc.  I really only cared about the parts of the show that had to do with her adventures.  As I'm watching these episodes with the kids, however, I'm realizing how serious some of the topics were.  A lot of the episodes from season one center on the adults in the show and not so much on the kids.  The last DVD that we watched had some pretty hard-core episodes, for example . . .

1.  Older man tries to marry younger woman:  Now, in modern times this is no big deal.  Older men marry younger women all the times and no one bats an eye.  But I guess in pioneer times this was frowned upon.  The first episode on the DVD was about the town doctor falling in love with a much younger woman who comes to stay with her relatives in town.  He realizes how much younger she is when he sees her playing with the Ingalls kids and Charles Ingalls says "Look at your fiancee!  She's just like a kid out there!"  Way to beat a man down, Charles.  Charles (aka "Pa") of course always looks young and handsome, with pearly white teeth (now you KNOW no one had teeth that looked that good back then) and clean shaven.  The clean shaven part always bothered me as a kid, because in the Little House on the Prairie books Pa always had a full dark beard.  But I guess that's Hollywood for you.

2. Plague hits Walnut Grove:  A man in Walnut Grove (town the show takes place in) is selling cornmeal at a lower price than his competitors, but the cornmeal has been infested by rats infected with the plague so people suddenly start to fall ill for no apparent reason.  Charles Ingalls (Pa!)  comes to the rescue of course (he always does) and figures out where the disease is coming from.  By now half the town is lying in the church/schoolhouse sweating profusely and dying from this disease.  At one point Pa is holding the hand of a young girl who tells him "I'm not afraid to die."  Wow - powerful stuff!!  I don't remember the show being so intense, but then again, I was too busy wishing I was Laura Ingalls with braids and a bonnet to pay attention to the life and death situations.  Of course no one who is important to the show ends up dying and they end up burning down the building where the rats are crawling all over the cornmeal (ugh).

3.  Alcoholic father beats his son:  Talk about a teaching moment.  The title of the episode was "Child of Pain" - that should have been a warning.  At first I was a little worried that it would be too much for the kids, but it turned out to be a great way to teach them about the dangers of alcoholism and what can happen to people if they go down that path.  The episode is about a man whose wife died in childbirth, so he blames his son for her death and beats him every time he goes on one of his drinking binges.  Now, this is a family show, so they don't really show any violence, but it's definitely implied.  Pa saves the day (again!!!!!) by allowing the boy to stay at the Ingalls house while he (Pa, that is) stays with the alcoholic dad and helps him to detox. 

Michael Landon wrote, directed and produced the show and of course, plays the role of Charles Ingalls (Pa!) so I'm thinking that perhaps this is why his character is constantly saving the day.  It used to annoy me a little when I watched the show that it centered around him more than it centered around Laura.  But now as an adult I'm really enjoying his character and I have a whole new appreciation for the way they covered a wide variety of issues that people in that time had to deal with.  They didn't have detox centers back then, so getting a guy to stop drinking pretty much took the whole town's effort.  They didn't have quality control for dry goods like cornmeal, so anyone could sell cornmeal and no one would know where it came from or whether it was infested or not.  Women died in childbirth all the time and doctors didn't have the cures or answers for many diseases like they do now.

My kids LOVE watching this show.  This is our new thing that we enjoy doing together.  In fact, as soon as I finish writing this, we're going to pop in the DVD that just came in the mail and finish up season one.  I only wish I still had that bonnet that my mother sewed for me for Halloween one year when I was about nine years old.  I'll bet Ella would be wearing it every day if I still had it!