8. Little Landon on the Prairie

This week, Little House goes to Hollywood. In the 1970s, the TV show Little House on the Prairie gave Laura’s books a whole new life. Tens of millions of people tuned in every week to spend time with the Ingalls family. And then, a decade later, every Gen X latchkey kid came home to Laura and Nellie and Ma and Pa. Thanks to endless reruns and streaming platforms, Little House is still airing somewhere right now. Perhaps you, yourself are watching it while you read this. There are a lot of reasons Little House doesn’t quit, but one of the main ones is Michael Landon, the show’s producer, writer, director, and most importantly, Laura’s Pa, Charles Ingalls. As Pa, Landon’s charm and charisma (and hair, and abs, and bare, glowing chest) often eclipsed Laura as the star of the show. And also turned hardcore book fans off. To say the TV show deviated from Laura’s books is an understatement. This was Landon’s prairie. And yet, he still managed to tap into some essential Little House truths, and replicate some of its many problems. But how did this affect Laura Ingalls Wilder’s legacy? What did it mean to put these characters in the hands of a man who would craft their stories into something dramatic and compelling enough to keep people tuning in a half century later? Come home to a simpler time. Come home to Michael Landon crying. 

Go deeper:
Alison Arngrim’s Confessions of a Prairie Bitch
Melissa Gilbert’s Prairie Tale and Back to the Prairie
Karen Grassle’s Bright Lights and Prairie Dust
Charlotte Stewart’s Little House in the Hollywood Hills
Michael Landon on the Tonight Show promoting Little House’s first season
Michael Landon on the Tonight Show addressing cancer diagnosis 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Let's go back to my family room floor in the
suburbs of southern Ontario. It's a weekday in the mid eighties,
four twenty six pm. My sister and I have just
returned home from school. The first half hour of Oprah
is coming to a close. It's time to switch the channel.

(00:25):
This wasn't a choice. It just was mon Pa pulling
up in a wagon, Ma primly tucking a wayward strand
of hair and her bonnet, Pau's infectious laugh, and the
girls Laura, Mary and little Carrie joyfully running down a
grassy hill. Oops, down, goes Carrie. I believe I've seen

(00:48):
every Little House episode at least once. There are two
hundred and four in total. In fact, I can still
id any episode based on the first five seconds. And
if this sounds impressive or alarming, rest assured, I'm not
the only one. I think. It's just the reality of
a nineteen eighty's childhood, when there were limited options and

(01:10):
you watched what you were given, and a lot of
us were given Little House like a lot. Let me
put it in context for you. Remember the Game of
Thrones finale, the one that had more viewers than the
finale of the Sopranos, or Sex in the City or
actually anything else on HBO. Ever, thirteen million people tuned

(01:31):
in to watch that Game of Thrones finale. Well, as
they might say, on the Prairie, hold my tin cup
to Narris. On any given Monday night from nineteen seventy
four to nineteen eighty three, Little House in the Prairie
averaged sixteen million viewers. Little House was a huge hit,

(01:52):
but lots of shows were in the seventies.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
There was a lot of things on TV actually in
the nineteen.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
Seventies that were really huge.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Aren't you in reruns or out on DVD and people
are not watching it?

Speaker 4 (02:05):
But Little House in the Prairie is what in the heck?

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Little House went into reruns while it was still on
in prime time. The show ended in nineteen eighty three,
but it's never actually gone off the air, So you
can add millions and millions of viewers to those original
numbers we just told you about.

Speaker 5 (02:23):
The show stayed on the air for fifty years and
is actually better known now than it was when it
was originally on NBC.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
We're talking a half century of television. It's on Hallmark,
it's on VHS, it's on DVD, It's on Amazon Prime,
it's on Peacock, and an entire new generation of kids
discovered it. During COVID there was a.

Speaker 6 (02:46):
Little House in the Prairie, the videos on the phone
that you watched on the way here, Yeah, a little bit.

Speaker 5 (02:53):
In March of twenty twenty two, we saw the number
of Google searches for a Little House on the Prairie
double from the month before.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Some of you might have it on another screen right
this second.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
I literally wake up in the middle of the bit
and go, somebody somewhere is watching Loves the Worry right now.
It's literally because it's in every country on Earth.

Speaker 4 (03:13):
It's been dubbed into every language.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
There's beds in every language.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
It's bananas.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
There's a lot of reasons Little House never quits, but
without question, one of the biggest is Michael Landon, the
show's producer, writer, director, and most importantly, the star, better
known to many as Charles Ingalls Laura's paw.

Speaker 7 (03:37):
Sorry about what I guess.

Speaker 8 (03:39):
I just couldn't find the words to say.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
It was in my heart, for better or worse. Michael
Landon made the show all his own.

Speaker 9 (03:47):
This is a magnetic individual.

Speaker 10 (03:50):
He glowed you know.

Speaker 4 (03:51):
He just he had it.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
In the books, Paw was charming and steadfast, and Laura
was the star. And the television show, Michael Landon had
lovely hair and was always crying. He had a well
oiled bear chest, and as I got a bit older,
I enjoyed how nice he looked in tight pants and suspenders.

(04:15):
He was the star. Laura is our adoring proxy. If
you're a person devoted to Little House book series, the
one's written by the real life Laura Ingleswilder. The TV
version might not always make sense, the stories don't always
match up with what's in the books, and at times
they're downright strange. But Michael Lannon had a vision for

(04:37):
the show, and it was a vision he believed would
stand the test of time.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
He said, you know, everyone's going to be watching these
shows long after we're all gone, he said, long after
I'm dead. It was like this prophetic thing, and every
win he said it to it, yeah right, oh by it,
And Blake didn't believe him.

Speaker 11 (04:55):
And here we all are.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
We didn't get it. Michael got the My motivation to
create these two versions of Little House was essentially the same.
If the books were the result of Laura wanting to
memorialize her father's stories. The television show is in many
ways the result of Michael Landon using Laura's writing to
tap into his own traumatic childhood. Still, at the end
of the day, Michael Lannon made Laura's prairie all his own,

(05:21):
and we all liked it there, even if it was
a very strange place to be. Sometimes, in some ways
the TV show feels like a Venn diagram. Laura Ingalls Wilder,
her devotion to her paw, her daughter Rose's vision, and
then Michael Landon's brain, and the TV series exists at
the center of all this, And that's where twenty million

(05:43):
people spent an hour each week and then an hour
after school every day for nearly five decades. Michael Landon
was able to tap into some essential Little House truths
in ways that are sometimes hard to believe. And we're
sometimes just as problematic as the books. This week, instead

(06:06):
of going through the pages to the prairie, we're going
through the screen to sunny southern California, Come home to
a simpler time, Come home to Hollywood in the seventies.
I'm Glennys McNichol, and this is Wilder. It took a

(07:10):
long time for The Little House Books to reach Michael Landon.
More than three decades went by from the publication of
the last book to the premiere of the show in
nineteen seventy four. It's not because people didn't want it.
It's because Laura and her daughter Rose wouldn't let anyone
have the rights to the books. By the time Laura
died in nineteen fifty seven, the Little House Books were

(07:30):
huge success. At some point, the Canadian Broadcasting Company approached
Laura about adapting the books for radio, but she turned
the offer down. Neither she nor her daughter Rose wanted
to see the books quote unquote distorted by someone else's vision.

Speaker 8 (07:45):
There were a number of radio adaptations, both small scale
and also hallmarked in adapting The Little House Books.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
That's Bill Anderson again. He's been researching and writing about
Laura since he was a kid, and has written many
books on her life.

Speaker 8 (08:01):
But Laura Ingleswilder was very, very skeptical and wanted approval
of the scripts, and she wasn't altogether happy with the
radio versions. Rose Wilder Lane felt the same way when
her books Let the Hurricane Law and Freeland were adapted
to radio. So I don't think they were fans of media.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
After Laura's death, Rose continued to spurn offers. But when
Rose died in nineteen sixty eight, things changed pretty quickly.
Enter Roger Lee McBride. You remember McBride. He's a complicated
figure who had a unique relationship with Rose. He referred
to himself as her adopted grandson and even called her grandma.

(08:48):
Having no children, Rose designated him or heir, and after
her death he acquired all the rights to Little House
on the Prairie. He now owned everything. Despite Rose's wishes,
McBride i'd entered into discussions with Disney almost immediately after
her death. Disney was very interested in adapting the Little
House books. However, on the way to a meeting at

(09:10):
their offices, fate intervened in the form of a young girl.

Speaker 12 (09:15):
Naturally circa nineteen seventy one. My sister's at home ill
with a cold from school. She's a teenager, and my
father goes in and to say goodbye to her in
the morning and discovers her reading one of the Little
House Books. And he can't understand why his teenage daughter's
rereading a children's book that her mother had read to

(09:37):
her when she was a child.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
That's Trip Friendly. His father is Ed Friendly, and Ed
is the first reason Little House landed on television screens.
At the time. Ed was a highly regarded television producer,
best known for creating the program Roan and Martin's Laughing.

Speaker 12 (09:54):
He went back and talked about it with my mother,
and my mother said, I've been telling you for years
what great books they are and that you should make
a teeny series based on them. So he borrowed one
of my sister's books. He took it on a business trip.
A couple of days later, stopped at the magazine racket
at the airport and bought a Time magazine and hid

(10:15):
it inside the Time magazine. I'm the airplane so no
one would see who was reading a children's book.

Speaker 9 (10:21):
And when he landed, he.

Speaker 12 (10:24):
Immediately realized what he had in his hands, and so
he called his attorney and asked him to find out
if the rights were available. And my father invited Roger
to come and meet with him, and they spent a
weekend together in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
That weekend resulted in Friendly obtaining the rights to turn
the books into a television show.

Speaker 12 (10:41):
He thought the books were a national treasure. His goal
was to try to bring the magic of those books
to the screen.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
At least that was the plan. This was the mid seventies,
and the concept of setting a wholesome family show on
the American frontier did not exactly speak to the times
Father who.

Speaker 12 (11:00):
Was turned down by virtually every studio and network because
at the time they all told him Westerns are dead,
this material is too soft. It's nice, they're great books.

Speaker 10 (11:13):
But but but.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
In March nineteen seventy four, America was at the height
of Watergate, Vietnam was still raging, the country was experiencing
extreme inflation. There was a lot of sharp, timely social
commentary on primetime TV, and a lot of people watching.
The most popular show was All in the Family, average
viewership twenty million. In fact, the average weekly viewership of

(11:39):
the top ten shows in nineteen seventy four was around
sixteen million. I'm telling you all these numbers just to
remind you that even basic television was a common cultural language.
When you showed up at work, or at school or
at the grocery store the next day, everyone knew what
you were talking about. You'd all been watching it together,

(12:00):
you know. And I often talk about what it was
like to grow up with this sort of shared culture.

Speaker 6 (12:05):
I mean, I try to explain this to Charlie all
the time, that he lives in a content utopia where
he can just dial up magically any episode of any
show ever created and watch it as many times as
he wanted, Whereas if we saw a show, especially when

(12:26):
we were much younger, we may never see it again.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
I remember one of my favorite Little House episodes came
on and I skipped swim practice because I was like,
I've been waiting for this episode for years to see.
And the thing too, is like when we talk about
how wholesome Little House was, The Waltons was also on
TV in the seventies at the same time.

Speaker 6 (12:46):
Yeah, in my head, they're the same thing. Even though
I grew up in the eighties and I know that
my mom watched both Little House and The Waltons, and
to me it just seemed really cheesy. I wasn't paying
enough attention to either of them.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, if I was to differentiate them for listeners and
for you, I would say the Waltons was sort of
like the Depression, and Little House in the Prairie was
like sex appeal. Hollywood Michael Landon with you know, his
muscles and his hair and a smile, and clearly had
shaved his chest, although I didn't understand that as a kid.

(13:22):
Like there was so much sex appealed a little house
in the prairie. It was like a Western. It was
like Hollywood.

Speaker 6 (13:26):
Hold on, I'm googling pictures of Michael Landon and his hair.
Is that's some nice hair. That's some real nice hair.
Oh my gosh, look at his chest.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, he was always finding reasons to take his shirt off.
He was always breaking his ribs somehow so that they
had to take a shirt off and wrap them up
in like some sort of like prairie tensor bandage. He glistens,
He really listens. Nobody looked like that on the Waltons.

Speaker 6 (13:53):
Let me tell you, all right, just make me a
list of your top ten episodes. I'll dive into some
Michael Landon when I'm alone later this evening.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
Being a sex symbol was not a new experience for
Michael Landon. In the early seventies, Landon was known to
the world as Little Joe, the youngest son of the
wealthy ranch owning Cartwright family on the television western Bonanza
At the height of its run, it was the number
one rated show in the country, clocking nineteen million viewers weekly. Landon,

(14:24):
who was in his mid twenties, was a teen idol
think Elvis Goes West. When Bonanza ended in nineteen seventy three,
Michael Landon was primed for his next project.

Speaker 12 (14:35):
My father knew Michael because he was very close friends
with Lauren Green, who was the patriarch on Bonanza.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
Here's Trip Friendly again.

Speaker 12 (14:43):
And so he called Michael and he said, I have
a project that I'm very interested in having you direct.
So he sent my sister with a script up to
Michael's house and a few hours later he got a
call from Michael saying, I not only want to direct,
but I want a stars paw. And so with Michael attached,

(15:04):
he went back to NBC, with whom he had a
very strong relationship, and he presented him with the package
with Michael a directing and Michael starring, and they agreed,
if I had.

Speaker 4 (15:19):
Her alevelance book, I would mark down how it was
when we left our little house in the Big Woods
to go west to Remian Territory.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
The two hour Little House Pilot aired on March thirtieth,
nineteen seventy four. Ed Friendley spent his own money to
hire Blanche Handalists to adapt it, and she stuck faithfully
to the book Little House on the Prairie.

Speaker 13 (15:41):
All right, here, ess here we Come.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
The pilot was a huge hit. It was the highest
rated television movie of the year. NBC immediately ordered the series,
and Little House on the Prairie premiered on September eleventh,
nineteen seventy four, seven weeks after Nixon's resignation and one
week after I was born. The series starts with an
episode called a Harvest of Friends, and it introduced a

(16:07):
very different Ingalls family from the one readers knew from
the books. The episode is about how Walnut Grove comes
together to help Charles when an injury keeps him from
fulfilling a contract that will allow him to save his
brand new farm. It's a tear jerker, and it has
no correlation whatsoever to any storyline in any of the books.

(16:28):
This set the template for what was to come on
Little House Family.

Speaker 4 (16:31):
First home is the nicest word.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
There is strength and community.

Speaker 4 (16:35):
I think you're a welcome edition, dark community.

Speaker 7 (16:37):
I thank you hard work work for you in the
morning work for Hanson. In the afternoon, you're biting off
a big piece God.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
Charles Lord's day is set aside for worship and for
wrist Michael Landon's thick, flowing curls, Michael Landon's smile, Michael
Landon's shirtless and glistening. Michael Landon crying or for't exactly
crying in this episode, frequently hobbling his lip. Laura was
still there, and Melissa Gilbert was charming and could hold

(17:05):
her own in a scene. But there was no doubt
who the star of this prairie was. The spotlight had
clearly been shifted to Paw and his perfectly lit pecks.
This was not the Charles Ingles of the books.

Speaker 9 (17:17):
Michael showed himself to be anything but Charles Ingalls.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
That's actor Dean Butler. He played heart throb while Mon's
a wilder on the show.

Speaker 9 (17:25):
Hey, this is a guy who's sitting there with a
cigarette and his teeth. He's got his Carrera sunglasses on,
his demim shirt opened down halfway down. His chest is
sprayed on with the gun jeans, the snakeskin boots, the
hair obviously with the ash brown dyed number two in.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
It unlike Paw, Michael landed On the Prairie didn't have
the iconic beard Laura write so lovingly about in the books.
NBC was so concerned Little House book fans would be
alarmed by the lack of a beard, they felt it
necessary to put out a press release explaining its absence.

Speaker 14 (18:00):
Great pains were put into fitting Michael Landon with a beard,
both of natural growth and by makeup artis, but it
was decided that he just did not look good with
any kind of facial hair.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
And if Michael Landon did not look good with facial hair,
and gosh darn it, he would not have facial hair.
He was the star, and the producer and the writer.
It was, in short, Michael Landon's Prairie. Millions of people
wanted to live there with the ingles for at least
one hour a week. Everyone loved Paul, well, almost everyone.

(18:45):
His Little House was hitting the airwaves in the fall
of nineteen seventy four. A Friendly, the person who initially
had brought the books to the screen, was increasingly unhappy.
Michael Landon was wreaking havoc on Friendly's plan to faithfully
adapt the books. Friendly flat out told people magazine. He
thought this prairie was too flashy.

Speaker 9 (19:04):
I've renamed the series, how affluent is my Prairie?

Speaker 7 (19:08):
They have everything but a Cadillac.

Speaker 12 (19:10):
My father decided he and Michael had creative differences, and
I think he recognized that Michael, as the star of
the show, woulout work if Michael left the show, and
I think eventually he decided that he did not want
to continue with Michael's vision. He had his own vision,
so he left the show. But still, you'll see in

(19:31):
the credits it's still in an NDC production association within
Friendly Production, so he was still very involved without being
the producer on the show.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
So very quickly into season one, Michael Landon was fully
completely in charge well at Friendly's departure from the day
to day signaled a major shift behind the scenes. Viewers
did not seem to deterred by the fact the show
deviated from the books, or by Landon's central role, or

(20:04):
by criticism that it was too sacharin a sweet and
low Walton said People Magazine the show was sacrin but
Landon certainly didn't care. He embraced the simplicity of a
family show, as he told Bobby Wygant in an interview
right before the first season aired.

Speaker 7 (20:22):
But anyway, when this came along, it was fresh for
me because it was honest, and it was simple and
very basic, and I liked the people. I thought the
people were nice, and I kind of thought my family
would like to watch that. I got a lot of kids,
and it's kind of fun to think you're going to
do a show that you would be happy to sit

(20:42):
in the living room with the whole family and watch.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
Landon's idea a family friendly fair was a combination of adventure,
wholesomeness and hard times, and while the books provided some
of this, Landon often went with what he knew, and
he had definitely known his own hard times as a child.
Or Eugene Horowitz in nineteen thirty six, Landon claimed to

(21:07):
have been ostracized as a child because he was Jewish.
He'd also had a painful relationship with his mother. This
is what he told People magazine in nineteen eighty five
about her. An actor is reading his statement.

Speaker 15 (21:19):
I always wanted to get away from my family. Mother
was a childish person who was always attempting suicide. She
would stick her head in the oven, but she always
had knee pads on the floor, or one window open.
In a family like that, you get to thinking, Gee,
if it's Tuesday, it must be suicide.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Landon was famously a bedwetter as a child. I say
famously because he talks about it freely. He even made
a TV movie about this in nineteen seventy six called
The Loneliest Runner. Well, I don't recall any bed wedding
episodes in Little House, though presumably there was bed wedding
in the eighteen seventies. It was these traumas from his
own childhood land And was drawing on when he stepped

(21:57):
into the Little House Writer's room, and.

Speaker 9 (21:59):
He could do in a really an intensely real way.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
This is Rick Okie. In the nineteen seventies, he was
an NBC exec in charge of a host of iconic programs,
The Wonderful World of Disney, Chips, Night Rider, and of
course Little House on the Prairie, where he witnessed Michael
Landon's creative process firsthand. In the writer's room.

Speaker 9 (22:20):
I would watch him.

Speaker 16 (22:21):
Sometimes we'd be sitting talking about a plotter, about an episode,
and he would lean back and he would close his eyes,
and you know, it's hard to sit in a room
that's silent when you're supposed to be making a contribution.
I would open my mouth to say something and the
other one of the writers in the room would sort
of put his hand on my chest and say wait.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
Much like real life Laura, who reworked the hard times
of her childhood into magical stories, Landon in many ways
did the same.

Speaker 16 (22:51):
And it could go on for minutes where he would
just sit there, and when he would sit back up
and open his eyes, he'd say, when I was a kid,
And he would tell a story out of his own life,
and you just have you glued because he was a
great yarn spinner, and you're asking yourself, how does this
relate to what we're working on right now. By the
end of his story, he would have tied it back

(23:12):
into where the conversation started and use it as a
way to bring an authenticity to the stories that made
them superhuman.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
Some of those storylines were loosely connected to actual events
in the book, some less so, and some were Landon's
attempt to stay current.

Speaker 16 (23:33):
You know, Mike was always interested in taking issues that
were current and putting them in that frame of a
period piece that allowed you to explore them without being offensive,
kind of the way that Mash was able to explore
the Vietnam War because it wasn't Vietnam, it was the Korea,
but it was Vietnam when we all knew it. That's
what they were talking about it.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
He proved to audiences that even if the show was
sentimental and melodramatic, it could speak to what was happening
in their world. A Little House did speak to Vietnam
and a host of other contemporary issues.

Speaker 4 (24:05):
The Civil War soldier who comes back and he has
PTSD or shell shocks.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
To be there and he's addicted to morphy. This is
the same year when Vietnam veterans were coming.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Home addicted to heroin.

Speaker 4 (24:18):
Hello, how many people were living that episode.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
That's Alison Arngrahm, who played Nellie Olsen on the show.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
So we were doing these episodes where the women are
want the right to own property.

Speaker 4 (24:29):
We had episodes about alcoholism, about drugs, We had child abuse,
we had spousal abuse.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
We did work all those things out, and a lot
of things were covered on nineteen seventy shows like All
in the Family or Maude. We were sneaking them into
but everybody was in bonnets, so it was somehow safe
and okay, and of course Paul and Mau were there
to help you deal with it.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
So Little House could be current and comforting. But this
was primetime TV after all, and just like today, the
networks needed to draw eyeballs, and just like today, viewers
love drama. Rick Oakie's job was to deliver the studio
execs dramatic demands to Michael Landon.

Speaker 16 (25:09):
It was always Who's going to have a baby? Is
there going to be a wedding? Is there going to
be a funeral? Is somebody going to die? What event
can you create for us? And I was the unfortunate
messenger who had to go over to Michael Landon and
go hate to say this, but what have you got
planned for November? Because that's when the ratings sweeps happened,

(25:29):
and that's when advertisers make their buys.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
If you grew up in the heyday of primetime television,
you knew the sweeps shows. Even if you didn't know
what sweeps was. They were often the two parters. They
were unmissible. Think of the time they had to remove
the bomb on Grey's Anatomy. That was a sweeps show
once again, it was Rick Oki who had to deliver
this task to Michael.

Speaker 16 (25:52):
And he would say, let me think about it. And
then by the time I drove back to my office
in Burbank, my boss would come in and go, what
did you say to Michael. He's like, he's you know,
we're going to do the show where Merlin Olsen's wife
dies in a fire. And you know, he would always
come through with, you know, without being untrue to the
spirit of the books. He was wise enough and smart

(26:12):
enough in the ways of broadcasting that he got it
and he knew what they needed, and he would always
deliver it.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
What Landon delivered was a mix of sentimentality, Western romance,
and cultural relevance, which was rating's gold but could also
result in some serious weirdness. Even now, when you're out
in the world having conversations with people about Little House,
the episodes they remember best always seemed to be the
strangest I watched the TV show.

Speaker 5 (26:42):
I've tried to explain some of the episodes to other
tour guides now and they're like, they did what the
TV show?

Speaker 12 (26:50):
Really?

Speaker 1 (26:50):
There's some they.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
Locked she locks someone in the ice house.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
That's that's me and Emily at lunch and just met
South Dakota with Diane, Cheryl, and Marie, the women who
run the Laura Ingles Wilder Memorial Society. I didn't think
they'd be into Michael Landon's antics, but when I brought
up the TV show, we immediately launched right into our
favorite episodes, which also happened to be the strangest ones.

(27:18):
She pushes Nellie down the hill in the wheelchair, even
the wind that I just watched where Laura the baby
brother dies and Laura runs away thinking it's her fault.
And then Laura climbs up a mountain to be closer
to God, and she meets an angel. Name is John
Jonathan the Angel And I just when you start saying
it out loud. But it worked, not just worked, but

(27:38):
made for some classic TV moments that live permanently in
the brains of an entire generation of children, So classic
that Colin Farrell name checked Little House that the writers
strike picket line, and I even more was.

Speaker 12 (27:50):
An actor, right, we convince lots to me, I'm going
back to TJ. Look her in the middle House on
the prairie.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
We can go there.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
When the Little House actors get approached by fans, The
fans immediately tell them about their favorite episodes.

Speaker 17 (28:03):
People always want to talk about a matter and me
cutting off my leg.

Speaker 9 (28:11):
The Back to School one with the Cinnamon Chicken.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
And the mud Fight Bunny where I go down the
hill in the wheelchair. But I did pretend to be
paralyzed to ruin everyone's life.

Speaker 11 (28:20):
I send the children home early because there was going
to be a blizzard. Michael called it. Miss Beetle kills
the kids again.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
I hear a bet.

Speaker 4 (28:26):
The Lord is My Shepherd a lot. It's my favorite too.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
That, of course is Melissa Gilbert. She played Laura on
the show, and The Lord Is My Shepherd is my
favorite episode two. It's also the perfect example of how
Michael Landon spun the real stories of the Ingles family
into something utterly wild and memorable and perfectly crafted for
primetime TV. The episode The Lord Is My Shepherd is
based on something that actually happened to the Ingles, which

(28:52):
we've talked about in an earlier episode. When Laura was eight,
Ma gave birth to a baby boy, Charles Frederick Ingles Junior,
known to the family as Freddy. Baby Freddie died at
nine months Laura never mentioned him in the books. It
was too painful.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
In the books, the English don't have a son, and
there's no baby who dies, never spoke of it. And
then in the TV show, of course, Michael said, what
that's like the greatest episode ever. Of course we're going
to do that.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
The TV episode adheres to these basic facts and then embellishes.
Here's what happens in the episode, Ma has a new
baby boy. Laura gets jealous of all the attention the
new baby boy is getting, and when he gets sick,
she refuses to pray for him. When the baby dies,
she concludes it's her fault and she decides to get

(29:44):
as close to God as possible literally.

Speaker 4 (29:49):
And then, of course Laura runs away to a mountain.
How she found a mountain in Minnesota?

Speaker 2 (29:55):
I always say she ran across four states to like
Colorado or something.

Speaker 3 (29:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
It finds a big mountain at that and then at
the top of.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
The mountain, Easier in his bourg dying, who is apparently galled,
and yet it is genius and it totally works. It
is one of the best episodes ever of like anything.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
It did work. Everyone we spoke to remembered this episode,
and they also remembered another one. You know it, even
if you don't think you know it. Perhaps no episode
has given so many children nightmares than the episode called Sylvia.

Speaker 4 (30:37):
And of course the Sylvia episode, or as people do
refer to it, clown rape.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
But I'm not laughing because it's funny, but that is
the way people refer to it.

Speaker 4 (30:48):
It's a very very disturbing episode. And they had that
clown who was molesting everybody and raping everybody. There was
a period in my childhood where every time I saw
it was the same episode, which is the one that
featured us sexual assault. Oh my god, it was a lot.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Here's what happens. Sylvia is about a young girl in
Walnut Grove named Sylvia who is sexually assaulted one day
on the way home from school in the woods by
a man who is wearing a creepy clownish mask. She
gets pregnant, and her angry father threatens to throw her out.
The angles adopted son, Albert, offers to marry Sylvia so

(31:24):
they can run away together. On their way out of town,
the clown reappears, but before he can assault Sylvia again,
he's shot by Sylvia's dad, but Sylvia, who's climbed up
a ladder to get away from him, falls and dies too.
Watching Sylvia today is nothing short of bizarre, and, like

(31:46):
most shows fifty years old, deeply problematic, but also maybe
weirdly a bit ahead of its time. Little House producer
Rick Okie told me Michael Landon, who wrote and directed
the episode, was simply trying to speak to the issues
of the day.

Speaker 16 (32:00):
And I remember when he called me aside and he said,
I want to do a show or one of the
girls in town gets raped, and it was really controversial
and the network you had a hard time, but he
dug his heels in and said, nope, We're doing this show.
I'm going to write it myself, I'll direct it myself.
It'll be well done, don't worry.

Speaker 10 (32:16):
And it was.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
What was the response to that show mixed? Mixed reviews
are still mixed. On the one hand, Sylvia provided a
narrative for an issue not often talked about on mainstream television.
On the other hand, the ridiculous framing around it makes
it a joke among fans to understand how this lands now.

(32:37):
I told Joe to watch Sylvia.

Speaker 6 (32:39):
Oh, I watched Sylvia that is some messed up shit
that happens in Sylvia, and you and Emily both prepared
me that this was the quote unquote clown rape episode,
but I still think that there was a part of
me that didn't believe you, that didn't really think that
that was a thing that was going to exist in

(33:02):
the Little House on the Prairie TV show. And I
have to say I found the episode problematic in so
many different ways, starting with the boys from the town,
the like teenage boys who go and spy on Sylvia
while she's getting dressed and hoping to see her in

(33:22):
her bra and underwear. And in the background, the music
that's playing it was like this happy circusy kind of
music that makes it all seem like a farce when
these boys are invading Sylvia's privacy and then this terrible
sexual assault happens to her later, and then from there
it just got more bizarre and more problematic and completely

(33:48):
went off the rails.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, I mean, so much of it is so dated. Inevitably,
it's like a fifty year old episode, and it's so weird,
Like the clown aspect of it is so weird to
the mime.

Speaker 6 (34:03):
A clown mime I mean, I think mime is worse
than clown, to be honest.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Yeah, but I think to be clear, this is not
a defense of Sylvia, but I think sometimes if you
think of Sylvia like that episode aired in like nineteen eighty,
I think, and I feel like can be viewed from
our vantage point as a sort of early version of
an ABC after school special if you remember the ones
we grow up on. And I think it had the

(34:33):
ability to give children experiencing, you know, sexual trauma or abuse,
some sort of language or something to point to and say,
this is what's happening to me, you know. And I
think if we think about it in that context, it
becomes slightly less weird. Although again the mime slash clown

(34:57):
in the woods is just it's it's like the stuff
of horror movies before they turned into the scream horror movie.

Speaker 6 (35:03):
I hear you that in this episode. In the Sylvia episode,
it tackled sexual assault and rape, and Sylvia gets pregnant
in the episode in a place where families could talk
about it afterwards, right, Families could watch together and then
maybe give language to something that they didn't know how

(35:27):
to talk about before, much like the Very Special episodes
of the sitcoms that came a few years later in
the eighties, And there was the Mister Belvedere episode where
Wesley's classmate had aides. There was the Different Shokes where
the bicycle shop owner tries to molest Arnold and his
friend Dudley.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Do you remember that one?

Speaker 17 (35:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (35:48):
There is also that Punky Brewster episode. There was a
bunch of weird Punky Brewster episodes like that really stick
out in your head. The Challenger episode, I think she
was also.

Speaker 6 (35:57):
Where the space Shuttle explodes. The Space Shuttle actually actually
explodes on Punky Brister.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, so I think like Sylvia is before all of this.
So in the eighties, by the time we were watching
all these shows in primetime, this felt much less strange.
But when Sylvia aired on a family show in primetime
and this was the storyline, I just feel like probably
some of the weirdness of the plotting fell away and

(36:26):
it was maybe helpful and also probably like a lot
of people were, you know, couldn't take their eyes off
of it. And then when we encountered it after school,
like what a strange episode to come home to you
after school with your cookies and milk and you're like, oh, well,
there's a clown in the woods attacking this girl. So bizarre.

Speaker 6 (36:45):
It's a disturbing, bizarro strange episode, is what it is.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
And also Michael Landen knew what he was doing. Like,
both things are true at the same time. It's so weird,
it's also relevant. And also it's forty three years ago
and we're still talking about it, so I clearly the
man knew something. In the same way, Sylvia tackled what
in hindsight feels like a progressive subject for primetime television

(37:14):
in nineteen eighty and also depicted progressive attitudes around sex.
Little House of TV series could occupy both extremes too.
It could be incredibly open minded and at the same
time outdated and problematic. That's after the break. The Little

(37:37):
House in the Prairie television show, for all its sentimentality
and outdated tropes, still resonates with fans today. Similar to
what we've said about The Little House Books, certain episodes
seem to pop back up from time to time and
are newly relevant. In the spring of twenty twenty, the
height of the pandemic, a lot of people turn to
an episode called Quarantine. This is the one where miss

(38:00):
Edward's daughter, played by none other than Kyle Richards of
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Fame gets sick with a
mysterious virus and she and Laura have to quarantine. And
then and the wake of George Floyd's murder and the
Black Lives Matter protests, another episode went viral.

Speaker 4 (38:19):
That summer of twenty twenty, when the country was going
through what the country, the world was going through, that
massive social upheaval and unrest all around George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor and all of the horrible injustices that were
going on, the Wisdom of Solomon came up a lot.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
That's TV Laura Melissa Gilbert again and she's talking about
an episode from season three called The Wisdom of Solomon,
guest starring then kid actor Todd Bridges, who would go
on to star in the eighty sitcom Different Strokes. In
the episode, Bridges plays a young black boy named Solomon
who runs away from his family because he wants an education.

Speaker 17 (38:56):
I want to go to school like all the mother children.

Speaker 12 (39:00):
That's the white man's school.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
With honey, you can't go there.

Speaker 17 (39:05):
Why if we're free?

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Why canna he eventually comes across the Ingles, who are
kind to him and give him food and shelter and
take him to school. Laura, who has never met a
black person before, wipes Solomon's face to see if the
black will come off his skin. Melissa Gilbert acknowledges that
this scene felt cringey even when she was filming it.

Speaker 4 (39:28):
I asked not to do it. I said to Michael,
I can't do that. That's horrible. He said, yeah, but
we're trying to show people how wrong it is to
be ignorant and how open Laura is to learning something new.
And I said, okay, well then I'll do it, but
you're I mean, I had to say, you're a real
Negro person and wipe the black guff with his face.

Speaker 17 (39:53):
What you're doing, you are a real one.

Speaker 4 (39:58):
As a fact I've never a real ego person before
was absurd to me. But once it was explained that
this is what we were doing and the lessons we
were teaching, that was impactful to me because I realized
that our show was more than just Laura's story.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
The truth Little House was trying to get at in
this episode was not one many primetime TV shows would
have explored the climax arrives when Solomon stuns Charles Ingalls
with a profound question.

Speaker 17 (40:26):
Would you rather be black and live to be one hundred?

Speaker 8 (40:30):
Well?

Speaker 7 (40:30):
Why I live to be fifty?

Speaker 1 (40:35):
This clip routinely makes the rounds on Twitter and TikTok.

Speaker 4 (40:40):
I was hearing on Twitter from people like Jamie Fox
and Biola Davis who knew Little House of the Prairie
was so woke and I'm sitting and hungry.

Speaker 17 (40:49):
I did, I did?

Speaker 12 (40:50):
I knew.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Here's writer and children's literature professor Lizzie Skurnik, describing watching
this episode as a child in the eighties.

Speaker 18 (40:59):
Actually peaked suring myself watching it in my parents' bedroom
after school, like sitting on the floor in front of
their bed, probably with my brother.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
You know, my mother is black, my.

Speaker 10 (41:09):
Father is Jewish.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
It didn't make me mad.

Speaker 19 (41:12):
But then there's the idea of like, this is always
how black people show up on shows.

Speaker 10 (41:16):
We're always on one show.

Speaker 19 (41:19):
They just have to have a thing for white people
to connect with those White people refuse to connect with
black people as human beings.

Speaker 10 (41:26):
White people were interested in black people insofar as they
were able to give black people a chance to say
racism was bad, thereby featuring themselves as people who thought.

Speaker 19 (41:37):
Racism was bad, but thence we all know, not particularly
interested in the actual story of any black people.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
This is especially notable when you consider there is a
character in this episode, doctor Taine, who's based on a
real life black doctor named doctor Tan. Doctor Tan appears
in the book Little House on the In the TV show,
doctor Tayane is jaded and angry because white townspeople won't

(42:07):
let him practice medicine. This is a far cry from
doctor Tan's real story.

Speaker 19 (42:13):
In that episode is like life is hard, and then
it's like the real Doctan was doing great. You know,
the real Doctan was the only doctor on the prairie
and a true doctor in that he saw everybody and
everybody saw him, and he was a terrific businessman.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
So in that sense, it was kind of annoying. But
then on the other hand, Todd Bridges is famous.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Lizzie and I are the same age and grew up
with Little House reruns after school. By the time we
encountered The Wisdom of Solomon, its guest star, Todd Bridges
was very famous from different strokes.

Speaker 10 (42:51):
So you know, you're feeling like Oh, this is Chid Bridges.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
This is cool today. Clips from the Wisdom of Solomon
can feel shockingly ahead of their time, but the truth
is the episode was very much of its moment. The
Wisdom of Solomon originally aired in nineteen seventy seven, just
weeks after the final episode of the mini series Roots.
Roots was based on Alex Haley's best selling novel about slavery,

(43:16):
and its final episode remains the second most watched overall
series finale in US television history. So the decision to
do the Wisdom of Solomon may have been partly a
matter of land in recognizing what audiences wanted and trying
to benefit from the ratings juggernaut.

Speaker 4 (43:33):
Whenever I look at these shows as it grown up,
I always just see a group of people around a
table trying to think of ideas, Like I think you.

Speaker 19 (43:43):
Can, like see this spitballing coming from a mile away.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Does that mean these stories can't have a positive effect,
Lizzie thinks, oftentimes they actually underscore a larger problem, the
same problem that's in the Little House Books.

Speaker 18 (44:00):
The show then creates the reality that people think existed.

Speaker 13 (44:04):
If you talk about the Frontier, people think the frontier
was white, but I do think the dangerous propaganda being like, oh, well,
you know, you're just telling an ancillary story when you
talk about black people on the prairie, tech about the
Native Americans, because people have absorbed this idea that white
people are central, and it's like, hey, like I'm not

(44:27):
being an activist, I'm being accurate. White people are not
central to American culture.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Native American scholar Gwen Westerman also remembers watching Little House
as a kid.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
I love the TV show, but I never thought that
much about it. Coming to it as an adult has
been a much different experience. We were on a trip
somewhere and watching TV in the hotel room when the
episode of Little House on the came on, and it

(45:02):
was in the winter and a Dakota man helped save
Paw from the blizzard. And once we got past the
terrible makeup the clothes that the man was wearing, they
made him look like the typical Hollywood stereotype of Indian.

(45:23):
He never spoke a word, He just helped Paw and
they helped him, and then he walked off into the snow.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
Similar to Lizzie saying she was excited to see Todd Bridges,
this conversation feels complicated by the fact that even insulting
descriptions on screen were sometimes better than not seeing yourself
at all.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
So to see Native people on TV, even in the caricature,
was during that period of validation that we existed. So
those were representations, but they.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
Were not the.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
Reality that I knew growing up in a very strong
and vibrant intertribal community. So we always kind of had
to balance that, but at least there was validation there
that people knew that we existed.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Despite Landon's desire to make Little House relevant when it
came to depictions of Native Americans, he was unable or
unwilling to translate events right outside his door onto his
fictional prairie. Another one one that even as a kid,
I was aware of, are the women on the prairie.
The girls were fine, but the grown women not so much.

Speaker 4 (46:46):
We're reflecting the eighteen hundred to one women had zero
rights and a reflection of the nineteen seventies, where women
had maybe a half a point of rights.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
The issue of women's rights seems like it could be
good to copy now, especially since the second wave feminist
movement was raging and Landon was surrounded by self avowed feminists.
Here's Lizzie again.

Speaker 19 (47:11):
The first show the livitations of their creator.

Speaker 18 (47:15):
You know, you might not learn a lot about the
prairie from Little House on the Prairie, but you learn
a lot about Michael Landon and the seventies and television,
and you know, male ideals and feminine ideals.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
Sometimes more modern storylines came through, but those feminine ideals
were ever present.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
And we even touched on women's rights and chauvinism and
the mistreatment of women at the same time, while marginalizing
women to do nothing but poor coffee, sometimes for many
episodes at a time. One of the most staunch feminists
I know was Karen Gresley, who was one of the
great coffee pourers of all time.

Speaker 17 (48:00):
I felt myself to be a polar opposite of Carolyn Ingoes.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
That's Karen Grassley, the actor who played Laura's beloved ma.

Speaker 17 (48:10):
I wasn't married, I didn't have children. I was, you know,
from the sexual revolution. I mean, the little woman had
never been my goal, and so there were times when
the choices offered to Carolyn in the script wrinkled.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
But Karen is quick to acknowledge that Michael knew what
he was doing. He was directing the most crowd pleasing
version of events, creating the wholesome family center that would
make the show a hit.

Speaker 17 (48:42):
And this is not at all a criticism. This is
just an example of how Michael knew his vision, and
he knew what he wanted and in fact was well
connected to his audience. He knew what they wanted to do.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
And what every audience in all of history is wanted
is romance. And there's very little of it in the
Little House Books. Even Laura Almonso's courting is chased, but
naturally there's plenty of romance on Landon's prairie. Mister Edwards
goes according Mary, falls in love, gets jilted, falls in

(49:20):
love again. But nothing compares to what happens to Laura
the second she hits puberty. Like the second from girl
in Braids to boy obsessed teen will obsessed with one
boy who's actually not a boy at all. We don't
mean that in the progressive way, which brings us to
the episode Sweet sixteen.

Speaker 9 (49:41):
So my name is Dean Butler, and I played al
Manzil Wilder from nineteen seventy nine through nineteen eighty three
on the Little House television series.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
At the beginning of season six, Dean Butler was cast
as Laura's love interest and future husband, al Manzo Wilder.
At the time, Dean was twenty three and Melissa so
Gilbert was fifteen.

Speaker 4 (50:02):
I mean, I can't even tell you what a girl
I was. I mean, I was a gidget fourteen, fifteen
years old, not need bucktooth, still had braces on.

Speaker 9 (50:10):
I towered over her. You know, I'm six one and
a half. Melissa was what five ' five something like that.
She always commented the fact that you know that I
drove my own car the set, that I.

Speaker 4 (50:23):
Shaved, I'd been on a date and kissed a boy.

Speaker 9 (50:26):
I was just so much bigger than she was.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
Well, I can tell you from the lens of today,
you can't do that. There's no way they could shoot it.
There's no way they would cast it that way, and
there's certainly no way it would be handled the way
it was handled.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
Sweet sixteen is the second to last episode of season six.
Laura has had a crush and all Monso for the
entire season, but her affection has not been returned, and
she's given up hope taking a teaching job out of town.
Her hair has gone up into a bun, so we
know she's a grown up now. Almanza sees a lot
of day and at the end of this episode, they kiss.

(51:04):
According to IMDb, it's one of the highest rated episodes
of the series. Melissa Gilbert was fifteen when they filmed it.

Speaker 4 (51:13):
Now we have intimacy coordinators and we have all this
dialogue around being comfortable and feeling safe, which is amazing.
Nobody talked to me about it. It was just it
was nobody said, are you uncomfortable? Are you okay? Is
this all right? I remember being told that the al
Manzo episodes were coming. Fortunately we had a little run
up to the actual marriage and stuff. But by the

(51:34):
time we got to the sweet sixteen episode and the
first kiss and all of that, it was you know,
I knew Dean, and I liked Dean, and I got
along with Dean, but I still felt like I was
out of my element. To put it mildly, there certainly.

Speaker 9 (51:48):
Would be nothing like that today. That would never happen today.
But again, Michael's numbers were huge. NBC was not going
to screw around with this. You know, it was working.
The audience was tuning in, they were watching, they were
coming to see this, and they came to see this

(52:09):
romance in enormous numbers.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
Three episodes later, at the beginning of season seven, Lauren Almonzo, Mary,
I must tell you that even as a kid, this
did not stand out to me as a problem at all,
which I told Dean in our conversation. No, as a
kid watching, I was just like, oh, this makes complete sense,
and now her hair isn't embraids anymore. But I'm quite

(52:35):
sure I thought fifteen was ancient. And I was also
devoted to the I mean devoted to the books too,
And in the books there is a ten year age
gap between the two of them, and she does meet
him at age fifteen in the books, so I'm not.

Speaker 9 (52:48):
Sure you had married Jel eighteen.

Speaker 12 (52:50):
Oh right.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
But I also think, like we have a different Our
understanding of age and age differences has shifted dramatically even
since the eighties, in good ways. But it's a different
conversation than I just.

Speaker 4 (53:04):
Thought this was real life too, So just to be clear, there.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
Was no like, would this actress have had a problem.
I was like, well, it's Lauren Almonzo. These contradictions within
the Little House series were one week you'd see something
that felt boundary breaking, and the next week something that
felt sort of like a strange cultural throwback. In many ways,
mirror the contradictions inherent to Michael Landon himself. On the

(53:28):
one hand, he was a family man who ran his
set as a tight ship so that his crew could
go home on time. Charlotte Stewart, who played Miss Beatle,
remembers this especially.

Speaker 11 (53:39):
Most of the television shows that we did in those days,
they'd work you till ten eleven o'clock at night and
he had to come back in at like six in
the morning, and they didn't care. They would pay for it.
But Michael was a family man and the guys, all
the men and women that worked for him on the crew,
being at families like every on the television show, but

(54:00):
who cared. Michael made sure they got home for dinner
at seven.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
On the other hand, he had a rather messy personal
life at times, certainly not one Charles Ingalls would have
led on the Prairie.

Speaker 4 (54:14):
This was a man who espoused family values and community values,
and was married three times and had children, was three
different women, and was deeply flawed and human. But who
isn't doesn't mean he's a bad person. It just means
he's a human person.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Everyone we spoke with talks about Michael Landon's incredible work ethic,
and his respect for his cast and crew. Alison Arngrim
writes in her memoir that the child actors of Little
House boast that there have been no arrests and no convictions.
Michael was devoted to the show and protective over his
creative vision, which is most visible, and how he decided

(54:53):
to end the show. So, Joe, guess how the series ends?

Speaker 6 (55:02):
Alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, an invasion of a clown mime army.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Close. But no, they blow up Walnut Grove.

Speaker 10 (55:16):
No they don't. They blow up the town.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Yeah, A tycoon comes in and buys all of the
land and all of the buildings in Walnut Grove and
they can't get any of them back, so their only
recourse is to blow up the entire town.

Speaker 6 (55:38):
As one does, as one does.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
I think I went back to this as a teenager
to remember if I remembered this correctly. Because I watched this,
I was old enough to watch this in primetime, and
for years I wondered if I'd imagined it, they blow
up the entire town. Yeah, And the thing is they
blew They actually blew the set up in real life
because Michael Landon did not want anyone else coming along

(56:12):
and using his little House on the Prairie set, so
he blew it up, and he wrote the episode around that.

Speaker 6 (56:19):
That's such a dude thing to do. It's like mine, mine, mine,
no one else, no one else is going to be
here after I'm gone.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
And then the crazy thing too is the last shot
of the last episode is they don't blow up the
Little House like they don't blow up the iconic Little House.
That's the empty little House is the last shot. And
in real life he also didn't blow up the Little House.
It burnt down in a fire, like a random fire
years later. So, I mean, the blurring of fact and

(56:47):
fiction in the Little House world continues right to the
very end of the television series.

Speaker 6 (56:52):
Michael Landon was a real special kind of trip, is
is what I'm gotting from this episode?

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Go Landon was? I mean, cosmically speaking, it sort of
feels like could there have been a more perfect person
to continue the Little House legacy? Truly, He's sort of
perfectly formed for it.

Speaker 6 (57:18):
Honestly, what do you think Laura would have thought of
what became of her legacy on these TV shows?

Speaker 1 (57:26):
So, Like, in doing this episode, the funny thing I
kept coming back to is the similarities between Rose and
Michael Landon, Like two people who were amazing storytellers and
you know, could take these simple tales and then fictionalize
them in a way that we can't get enough of,

(57:49):
and take these characters and turn them into sort of
these like heroic male heroes. Rose, as we know, loved
taking men and turning their biographies into these heroic story
so I kind of feel like Rose would have loved
Michael Landon. I don't know what Laura would have thought,
because she was very you know, she was of her time.
She was very conservative and didn't like talking about sex.

(58:10):
But I think and would have gotten on great. Both
Rose and Michael Landon saw these essential truths in Laura's
story and tapped into them in such a deep way
that it's so satisfying. We can't get enough of the

(58:31):
simple tale of little House.

Speaker 6 (58:34):
They tapped into Laura's story in such a way to
create some completely bonkers content.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
It completely bonkers.

Speaker 6 (58:43):
So look, Laura was clearly beloved. Her stories are clearly beloved.
And what I'm taken away from this episode is that
Michael Landon was very beloved.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Even the people we talked to who talked about him
being complicated or flawed, everybody loved him. Like literally everybody
loved him. People followed him around. He was beloved. Michael
Landon remained a beloved figure for the rest of his career,
and then in nineteen ninety one, at the age of
fifty four, he called a press conference at his home

(59:16):
to announce a terminal cancer diagnosis. But Landon faced the
diagnosis with his usual charm in humor, as he demonstrated
in his final Tonight Show interview with Johnny Carson, You've.

Speaker 9 (59:28):
Got a pilot you made for this fall.

Speaker 7 (59:30):
That's right, called us, called us, made it for CBS.

Speaker 16 (59:33):
I don't get better.

Speaker 7 (59:34):
It's their second mistake since buying baseball.

Speaker 5 (59:38):
So you know, I was a.

Speaker 9 (59:40):
Little worried about this interview. Now you've made me feel
much better.

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Whatever his complications, Michael Landon made everyone feel better, So
it was even more shocking when he died just two
months later. But as Landon predicted way back when he
conceived of the show. Decades later, Little How lives on.

Speaker 4 (01:00:01):
He said, you know everyone's going to be watching these
shows long after we're all gone, he said, long after
I'm dead. It was like this prophetic thing and everyone
he said it to it, Yeah right, oh by it,
and like didn't believe him.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
We didn't get it, Michael got a half century later.
The stars of the show continue to draw huge audiences
in real life. People come to fan conventions, to events
at the actual Laura Ingalls houses, to book signings.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
We get the people who come for autographs and sometimes
they cry because it's so intense to meet the person
that you've grown up watching. I know, Melissa Gilbert, obviously
it's Laura shed People just go into a coma. A
lot of people don't think they're gonna be emotional that
they meet Maw and that voice and she sounds the
same and she's so sweet you that's I see. People

(01:00:51):
really lose it over. Charlotte Stewart, Missus Beadle.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
All the actors we spoke with, seems grateful to be
part of the Little House legacy.

Speaker 17 (01:00:59):
Cute visit Wanna Grove is to relax and know that
people are about to show up for each other.

Speaker 11 (01:01:08):
When I got Little House on the Prairie, people in
Hollywood went, what Little House on the What?

Speaker 4 (01:01:15):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
How boring?

Speaker 11 (01:01:16):
Well, guess what, We're still on the air.

Speaker 9 (01:01:19):
It's as big a gift as anything I've ever received
in my life. To be associated with those books, with
that woman, with those stories, with that television show is
the gift of a lifetime.

Speaker 4 (01:01:34):
Not a day goes by that I don't think about
Little House in the Prairie or mention something to do
with Little House in the Prarie, or Laura or Rose
or the Ingles relatives, or something that has something to
do with them. And it's so infused in my being
at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
Sometimes it feels like Laura Ingles Wilder has had nine lives.
She's been reimagined so many times, for better and for worse.
When Laura and Rose sat down to write the books,
Laura wanted to preserve her family's legacy. She had no
idea she was creating such a lasting brand, but that's
exactly what she did. Laura not only inspired a TV

(01:02:18):
show we're still watching, she launched the careers of many
stars we still know about. She spawned additional book series,
Fashion brands, entire lifestyles, businesses that have made millions of dollars.
And that's what we're going to talk about next week
when we dig into the Business of Laura. Wilder is

(01:02:45):
written and hosted by Me, Glennis McNichol. Our story editors
our Joe Piazza and Emily Meronoff. Our senior producer is
Emily Maroanoff. Our producers are Mary dou Sheina Ozaki and
Jessica crime Chitch. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip. Sound

(01:03:05):
design and mixing by Amanda ro Smith. Our scene in
additional music was composed by Alise McCoy. We are executive
produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki Tor, Ali Perry and Me.
If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us
on Apple Podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot.

(01:03:27):
Extra special thanks to Dean Butler for connecting us to
so many Little House cast and crew members. Thank you
to the Friendly Family for helping us navigate the Little
House world. Thanks to NBC for allowing us to use
Little House on the Prairie clips. Thanks to Michael Landon
for letting an entire generation know it's all right. To cry.

(01:03:48):
Thank you, as always to CDM Studios. We've listed extensive
resources in our show notes on all the topics we've
discussed in this episode. You can also find our contact
and go there if you want to write us with
your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram at
Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast, where

(01:04:09):
you can see behind the scenes footage from all our travels.
Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.