Thoughts on the Pilot

I saw this four days ago quite possibly for the first time since seeing it on a small black-and-white television fifty years ago. If I had seen it more recently it was still over forty years ago.

It blew me away! Extremely well done, beautifully filmed, and very true to the book.

Main question I had was the first scene, where they were starting their journey in deep snow. Generally people did not undertake such a trip until around May, when grass would be long enough to feed the stock. I don't know when the Ingalls started in real life or how many people may have traveled in winter back then. I was impressed by the use of oxen. Trained oxen are very hard to find. I also wondered if people were still using muzzleloaders in the early 1870s and was told some people had ancestral guns in use as late as the 1940s.

Question if anyone knows: the scene where Mr. Edwards was wading a creek in a blizzard looked awfully real. Anyone know if that was filmed in real snow? Victor French must have been freezing!

One scene I really remembered from watching as a kid was when Mary said she was going to save her candy and Laura said, "Not me" and took a big bite. If I recall correctly from the book (which I read four times) they each took one lick.

This pilot movie looked even better in comparison with the later series, which tended to stray from the books and could sometimes get silly, and the two movies made since then. I plan to watch the Disney one again--I don't think I saw all of it when it was shown. The DVD is very cheap, BTW, but I don't even have to buy it as the library has it. That one annoyed me by leaving out Baby Carrie, and it annoyed a lot of people by having Laura with a slightly darker shade of blonde hair than Mary's rather than proper brown hair. This is a bigger sacrilege than putting blonde braids on Heidi. Laura is an American icon. They could afford a 6-hour miniseries and couldn't buy brown hair dye or even a realistic wig? I do want to put in a word for the guy who played Pa; as I recall he was pretty good. Kudos to the original movie which still shines above all!