when doc told charles "stay away from your wife and kids you could have it now" i almost saw a little grin on charles face like "hell yea im in danger i put myself in these situations and i love it, now everyone give me the attention"
shareI loved Doc Baker, the town's doctor/funeral director. I always loved the look of shock and disbelief on his face when one of his patients actually lived! He'd be uninsurable today!!!
share"Doctor/funeral director" ?? lol Well to be fair to the Doc, he didn't exactly have access to the latest medical technology. Even in the cities medical science was crude.
And Doc Baker also had to deal Charles Ingalls who was like the proverbial "kiss of death". Bad luck, injuries, diseases, tragedies, etc., seem to follow him everywhere he went!
And Doc Baker also had to deal Charles Ingalls who was like the proverbial "kiss of death". Bad luck, injuries, diseses, tragedies, etc., seem to follow him everywhere he went!
And is it just me, or did anyone else think that Mrs Bolton was kind of hot? I was kind of hoping that this actress would appear in some later episodes.
share Oh I forgot that part of Charles Ingalls personality. Mr Know-it-All. Instead of farming he could have had a help column in the local newspaper! He missed his calling. He should have held self help seminars in the schoolhouse on Saturday like an early Dr. Phil.
I wonder if the real Charles Ingalls involved himself in the lives of all his neighbors? Farming is such a labor intensive job, sun up to sundown. I wonder how TV Charles had the time to meddle so much.
Iāve heard a few negative things about the real Charles [email protected], but if I had to make a guess, he probably minded his own business. I donāt think that people back then took kindly to others poking their nose in their private affairs.
One member that was active on IMDB listed some of the shady things that the real Charles did. Laura undoubtedly wrote in a way to make her family seem better than they actually were, which is totally understandable of course. But Iāve often wondered who was the real bitch, Laura or Nellie š Iām now inclined to think that the real Nellie (s) (There were actually 3 of them) wasnāt as bad as the real Laura made her out to be.
Yes I think people were too busy farming in those days to get very involved in everyone else's problems anyway!
I would not expect the real Charles Ingalls to be perfect. No one is. Perhaps Laura did whitewash some of her family history. Gee, if someone in my family wrote MY biography I would hope they would "smooth over" the rough parts! ha ha
When you mentioned the "real Nellie" that reminded me that I read a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder a few years ago. I borrowed it from the library and I can't remember the title. The real Nellie was Nellie Owens. She was a classmate of Laura when they lived in Plum Creek.
According to the book she was a nice girl who really liked Laura and tried to befriend her. And as you wrote, Nellie (on the TV show) was a composite of three girls.
Of course the TV show wasn't a documentary of the Ingalls family. Michael Landon spent over a decade on Bonanza and he wrote some of the episodes. So he definitely knew the structure of good drama. A heroine/protagonist needs a good antagonist. If Laura and Nellie had been good pals in all those episodes then they wouldn't have been so entertaining!
Anyone familiar with the Little House books also knows that Charles Ingalls moved his family about a dozen times during Laura's childhood. They didn't stay in Walnut Grove all those years. But again, Michael Landon was doing a TV show which needed continuity and a regular cast of characters.
Something in the way Michael Landon played Charles reminded me of an older Joe Cartwright who finally settled down and had a family. I tend to think of Charles as Little Joe leaving the Ponderosa and striking out on his own without his share of the family fortune.
Michael Landon's formula for the show was obviously successful. He wasn't doing a documentary of pioneer life. He was writing entertainment for a 20th century audience. Doubtful if people would watch a TV series about other people toiling and farming all day long!
Yeah, I think the other two āNellieāsā were Stella Gilbert and Genevieve Masters (Going from memory here). I think that Genevieve also lived in Walnut Grove, and Stella was in Dakota territory. When Laura wrote that āNellie was very prettyā, Iām guessing that it was almost certainly one of the other two girls that she was referring to, because from the pictures that I saw of Nellie Owens, I donāt think that it would have been her.
Laura did the same thing with the Mr Edwards character. Historical researchers are not even sure if such a man ever existed, since there are no census records of a man by that name ever having existed in that area and at that time. Itās thought that perhaps he was another compilation of various men that the Ingallās family had encountered throughout their travels, and that were kind and helpful to them. What kind of gets me is that the real Laura was alive up until 1957, and none of her fans ever thought to ask her about this?
Interesting how the series added missing parts of the real Ingalls family that the books left out. The books never mentioned the real life Burr Oak Iowa move, or the birth and death of baby Freddie. Other tidbits such as the family having lived in Walnut Grove on two different occasions, as well as having moved back to Pepin Wisconsin, were left out of both.
I remember the two-parter with baby Freddie who was just called Charles,Jr., on the show.
Remember how Laura was very jealous of the new baby? From what I have read, the real Laura was not jealous of her baby brother and she was extremely grief stricken over his death. I remember reading somewhere that she always mourned her brother and couldn't bring herself to write about his death in any of her books.
The way the episode plays out though, it's all about Laura. She runs away because she is feeling guilty for refusing to pray for her sick brother. She then asks God to take her and leave her brother for her Pa. Just far-fetched behavior for a child, I think! It's a very popular two-parter, but like so many LHOTP episodes, it's the "Laura Show".
It just didn't make sense that Laura would've been so jealous. I mean, big families were the norm back then and the Ingalls were a farming family. A lot of children, especially boys, would be welcome to help with the chores. Of course sibling rivalry goes way back to Cain and Abel. lol But youngsters expected to have a lot of siblings then. I wonder how the real Laura would've reacted to see that part of her life told in that way. Not too happy, I bet.
I always wondered why Michael Landon changed Mary's story so radically. The show aired while I was still in school and one time I was talking to a classmate who read the Little House books/ She told me some of the differences between the real people and the TV characters. I had no idea the real Mary never married, there was no blind school, no Adam Kendall,etc.
The school and Mary's marriage did open up a lot of story possibilities but I wondered why ML chose to go that route instead of dramatizing some of the real events that happened to them. Well, creative decisions I guess!
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Remember when Mary got kicked by the horse and the Doc said "Im nothing but a small town country doctor!"
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