I’ve tried to ignore it, but I just keep getting irritated. It would have taken me hours to transcribe a reasonable portion of my list of complaints.
So, instead of critiquing the new broadcast Little House on the Prairie (I can hardly come up with anything you all haven’t thought, I feel sure) I’ve decided to invite everyone in to a Turkey Shoot. In other words, please wax eloquent about all the ways you find the televised adaptation irritating, outrageous, offensive, pointless, etc., and all the opportunities lost by not making a legitimate show about the challenges of life in the period and the process of settling the west, as well as raising moral families, in this beloved family classic.
So, to that end, let me invite everyone to join in with their most pungent or humorous observations and suggestions in the comments. The more outraged, the better — it can hardly be excessive related to the offense. I’ll eyeball what results and declare a winner in the category of righteous merited rhetoric.
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “Turkey Shoot”
Totally unrelated, but I LOVE the turkey miniatures! They’re so CUTE!
(Sweeping .22 across from left to right, ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching.)
Be sure your blood pressure can tolerate it, before watching…
I appreciate the optimism of all who thought it might be worth watching and tried. I was not one of those people; I just assumed it would be dreck.
I probably will reread the books at some point.
The decades old TV adaptation? I’m not TVing much, but I can see potentially making time for that adaptation.
I cannot imagine that the TV people now could make a tolerable adaptation.
I can think of things that could be said about modern TV people, that are too strong to be a really accurate and truthful statement. In general, they are terrible at what their jobs should be, and that way because of the training they were given at the tertiary schools. The environment that rewards them is also bad, but the training has many negatives that could be mentioned.
Didn’t like the Michael Landon TV version, and don’t have Netflix, so can’t comment on the new TV version.
Okay, now I’ll have to take one (episode) for the team. Little House was one of the series we read to our kids when they were in early elementary school (also add in Mary Poppins, Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit, and others that escape me at the moment). I enjoyed all aspects of that effort, from the books themselves to having the kids snuggled up listening to the next chapter. While I’m certain this adaptation will be flawed, I’ll see how it doesn’t match up to my memory.
I’ve made it about 8 minutes in to E1. It’s tough going…
So far the bit I remember that is true to the spirit of the books is that Pa is good with horses. I really cringed at the extremely well dressed and outfitted black doctor showing up IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE to treat Ma. I think about 3 minutes at a time will be my tolerance level, and I’ll probably have to reread at least the first book to cleanse my palate.
Supposedly that’s based on an extremely minor character in one of the books, but it didn’t ring a bell for me.
When the girls had typhoid, Laura remembered a black face leaning over her.
Okay, that sounds familiar.
I’ve given a pass to watching the new version, myself. I loved-loved-loved the books growing up, still love them, but was indifferent to the previous TV version.
What I would love to see – but likely never will – is a miniseries encompassing the entire book series; following the Ingalls family from Pepin, Wisconsin, to Kansas – then to Minnesota and then out to the Dakota Territory, as Laura and her sisters grew up. It would mean swapping out the child actors, of course (which is probably why it wouldn’t be feasible). ‘
As an aside – the insight came to me as an adult – that Pa was not that good a provider; he made a bust of farming in Minnesota, and then barely made it in the Dakotas? Someone else commented that he seemed like one of those men who was always impulsively running off after the Next Big Thing.
None the less, Laura adored him, and his family stood by him through thick and thin, which does say something positive for the man.
I do remember from the books getting the same impression about Pa and his provider capabilities. Never really good with money, even when it was required for getting the essentials his family needed to make a life in the wilds.
Looking at the stories as an adult, it is obvious that the Ingalls were not the most respectable or law-abiding of families. That becomes even more clear when you learn more about Laura’s life and how some of these stories actually ended, but even in the books there were a number of references to her relatives needing to move on in order to get themselves out of trouble.
Pa came across as one of those restless types who never settle down—but I’m not sure how much of that was him always wanting to move on and how much of it was that he, too, risked serious legal trouble if he stayed where he was.
I can’t believe the kind tolerance I’m seeing here… I just reread the entire series, to make sure I wasn’t mis-remembering anything, but here are some of the egregious mods they’ve applied to preach THE MESSAGE of the current era…
1) They’ve introduced an extensive sentimental personal friendship between hero (Laura) and an Indian girl (and her family).
2) They’ve turned the doctor into a major character, made him black, and gave him a white storekeeper love interest.
3) They’ve created a tough “frontier” town girl as a stand-in for , oh, I don’t know, perhaps a competent lesbian — she works with the men in most of their functions without remark.
4) They’ve entirely misrepresented the way that “taking and proving land for settlement” is handled by the process of the period, making it something the big bad railroad is criminally involved in — a “crime of industry” rather than a rules procedure from the Govt.
5) They’ve just about buried the moral education of the children by their parents.
6) They’ve created a local town as a foil to present “mean rich kids” vs “virtuous suffering other kids” as a feature of family class (rather than just kids being kids).
7) They’ve made the mother a preaching voice for tolerance of all sorts, (based on events not from the books) to show the town what they’re doing wrong, while they play with giving her a job (she was too busy for that with homesteading in the books).
8) The focus has moved altogether from the difficulties of growing up, of homesteading, of being independent and responsible, of doing the best with difficulties… to finding grievances, to finding people to accuse, to demonstrating a “big tent of tolerance”, to minimizing existential issues (nature) vs social ones.
It’s not so much that it’s wrong on its own merits (which I judge it to be), it’s that it falsely represents the beloved original and, by extension, all the courage, strength, tenacity, and moral fiber that build and hold the primary family together, as representatives of the sort of people who built our land.
I have to lol at the idea of Ma being the tolerant one where the Indians were concerned.
I haven’t watched it, but i’m waiting for the ‘sloppily painted on antigun message’ part.
I have to imagine that if the revolution kicked off, the tail end of the counter revolution might involve some schlub going after all the idjits who made TV unwatchable. Presumably he is arrested by the only man who never watched TV, and there is a mistrial when the jury refuses to convict.
That story, adapted to the screen, would be more worth watching. Maybe even the version I first imagined, which has way too many extended monologues, especially for a comedy.
That sounds as if the show writers et al decided to base it on the, shall we say, “updated and socially-correct” view of Wilder, and recent biographies by Miller and Frazier, possibly also on Romines’s study on gender and culture in the books and in Wilder’s life.
They’ve turned Little House on the Prairie into Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman? Man, I hated the smugness of that character.
It seems like that’s what happened.
If it makes you feel better, it isn’t kind tolerance; it’s that you were pretty much the only one kind and tolerant enough to even give it a chance. The rest of us either just assumed it would suck, or didn’t have Netflix and sure as heck weren’t going to get it for this.
Most modern mainstream western entertainment is made by people who found 1984 aspirational. “Every story rewritten” as it were.