Did you ever see that episode of LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE where the kid has a job delivering drugs for the local doctor? He then of course starts sampling them, and becomes a hopeless morphine addict (ah, the days when you could get that stuff from your local doctor). There's a graphic scene where he's withdrawing, vomiting and convulsing:
This was supposed to be a family show, but my sister, who would have been about six, broke down crying afterward. Nothing like showing children the graphic results of opiate addiction. Damn you, NANCY REAGAN!
AUNT JOHN SEZ: I've said it before, and I will say it again, the town of Walnut Grove really was a red hotbed of nefarious activity. Albert's morphine addiction really comes as no surprise considering his first true love was sexually assaulted by a mime and impregnated before falling her to her untimely death. Poor Sylvia…
UNK SEZ: Trouble follows that Albert kid wherever he goes! Wasn't he in the vicinity when this basketball mishap occurred?…
I love the joyous withdraw music! Wheeee!
Hilarious.
This show was traumatic. My mom made me watch it when I was a kid, and people were going blind and stuff…. horrible. I am actually a big Waltons fan, but had to wait until I was an adult to really appreciate it.
This is terrible to admit but me and my brothers were such horrible gremlin children. In the episode where Mary finds out she is blind, Michael Landon cries and snot pours out of his nose. We all laughed hysterically yelling "Gross!" and completely missed the gravity of the situation
and Yikes I found the scene…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7crihqEzl8
I just had to get that off my chest. Children can be so cruel!
Blame Michael Landon, he used the show to teach kids things like drugs are bad, rape is evil, and bigotry is wrong. Remember episodes like when the Jewish man came to town and the kids claimed he had horns under his hat or the one about the black doctor?*
*In the books there is a black doctor. He shows up one day when all the Ingals are suffering from malaria in the middle of nowhere and are delusional and nurses them back to health, though normally he only treats Indians. It's about the only thing besides Mary going blind that Landon seemed to have kept from the books, though he gave him a totally different introduction.
This brings to mind kindertrauma's most controversial post which just happened to be our very first post! We dared to write about an episode of "The Waltons" and soon the Walton's forum was ablaze with fury…
"It is unbelievable the disgusting garbage and filth that is on the internet. This vulgar and obscene website should be eliminated!"
"It is by far the worst thing I have ever read, its just an excuse to bash "The Waltons", I am outraged!"
"Oh my God! How rude could this person get! Did you notice the author didn't even have the guts to leave an area for a responds?"
"Feel sorry for those who would take time out to viciously pick on good shows, good books, and good people. I saw that the person on there even took time out to make fun of Little House! I don't mind someone constructively breaking down what they don't like about an episode, but there's no need in anyway, to go as far as that person obviously did in that article."
Meanwhile the actual post is the most innocuous thing in the world….
https://www.kindertrauma.com/?p=20
Horror fans, you think you're scary?
Walton fans are beserker-loco and just waiting to be set it off! Mary Ellen will cut yur shit!
Love how "family" shows back in the day had balls. Albert becomes a junky, then is going to die, you already mentioned the fate of his first love, Mary goes blind and loses her first child, and they blow the whole town up in the end of the saga! I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but shows back then weren't afraid of a little nastiness it seems.
I only have three problems with LITTLE HOUSE and here they are:
1. There are about ten really fabulous episodes (the BEST ONE EVER being SYLVIA) but there are about 900 boring eps you have to sift through to get to the gold. This is thenonly show when it pops up I check the TV GUIDE description to see if its gonna be a good one…and it NEVER is (Ive thought about just NETFLIXing the bix sets so I can JUST watch the ones I like
2. The nuns in my Catholic grade school used to try to "make" us watch it so we could talk about the eps the next day and theyd just about PUNISH me and this other kid who would refuse to watch it!
3. If you WIKIPEDIA seach the real Laura Ingalls WIlder you find out a lot of the **** that happened on the show was made up! The worst crime here is there WAS no "Albert" in real life! And we all know most of thye good eps were Albert-heavy, so right there youve admitted that you made a charactor up to make the show good!
Ive never seen the Albert Heroin ep but my older sister told me all about it….and it served its purpose because it managed to keep us off heroin. Hahaha. This is one of the ones I look for when I channel surf.
(By the way…correct me if Im wrong…but isnt there an ep where Albert actually DIES? And fans complain this cotradicts Lauras little voice-over at the end of the Heroin ep where she says Albert grew up to be a doctor? )
Well one of the last TV specials led up to Albert's death, but I can't recall that we actually saw it.
It makes me almost physically ill to see a grown woman say the way to find out what parts of Little House were made up is to WIKIPEDIA it, rather than just to know because you read the books as a young girl. A big E.T. owwwwwwch!
The only Little House episode to scare, or at least deeply disturb me, was the one where the little boy gets shot. He and his brother go into a bank or a post office or somewhere where a robbery is happening, and just as they come in the door the robber is startled and shoots without thinking. The boy drops out of camera angle before his brother knows what happened. I didn't know it was going to happen, and it scared me so much! I was a teenager when I saw it.
The boy survived after being "in the woods" so to speak through the whole episode, but it was harrowing to say the least.