Blergh

Watching this show, I have to wonder if there will be ANY granite left over in another ten years since these homeowners seem to think 'granite countertops' are as vital as air [evidently never having heard about how hard it is to clean once knives cut grooves into it]and there's NO more granite being made for a few more million years!

Interesting to know, Trooper York. Typical that they couldn't just let Hoss's Uncle visit without killing him. Now why didn't Adam's maternal grandfather the sea captain ever bother to visit? Could he have just been confident that Adam would grow up to be just as boring as his late daughter was?

Good point, Maverick! There seemed to be a GREAT deal that went unexplained re Carol in addition to how she knew these kooky folks. Like did she just sponge off her folks [the Tylers] for the 'few years' after her marriage to Mr. Martin ended and did Mr. Martin die or did they divorce? They never said on the air! I tend to side with the idea that they divorced if for no other reason than the fact that she insisted the girls change THEIR surname to Brady as soon as she wed Mike while I think had Mr. Tyler been someone who'd died, she'd have mourned him and wanted the girls keep that surname until their own marriages [as things usually went back in the day]. Also, why didn't she, her daughters or any of her side of the family ever interact with the Tylers after she married Mike? Apart from one time she said they couldn't babysit The Bunch in 'The Babysitters' due to them being out of town, neither she nor any of the above even refer to the Tylers again much less interact when visiting the Bradys. Oh well, it still was a fun show even if they all needed an Alice to keep things going! LOL

BW Manilowe, I think you could be right- especially since the way the Bradys acted 'naturally' on the commercials was almost EXACTLY the same as when they used 'Meerna's' techniques. I never understood how Carol had become acquainted with Meerna in the first place,though. Even her being a friend of a friend meant that that middle linke would have had to have been REALLY kooky. LOL

I know it was dealing with death but didn't care for Phil's funeral. I mean we never seen the character on screen and whenever Sophia told stories she almost always said "except Phil" so I really felt no connection or anything like that. Maybe if they had Phil visit maybe 2 or 3 times then maybe. And I [usually a fan of Sophia] thought they let Sophia get away with too much stuff against his widow Angela. First of all, she actually insisted that one reason she hated Angela was due to the dowry check Angela's late father had made BOUNCING and then wouldn't take Angela's check without a driver's license. WHY didn't someone point out that, after a husband dies, the husband's family is supposed to pay the widow the principle of the dowry. Hence, Angela owed HERSELF the money not her owing Sophia. Then, too, if Phil was such a 'great father' why is that NONE of their children made it to the funeral or even had anyone explain their absences? Still, what saved it for me was that Sophia actually admitted that a BIG part of her problems with Angela [and Phil] was that she felt guilty over his crossdressing. And, even though it was somewhat uncharacteristic of the character [and the show], it was very moving when Sophia FINALLY broke down and cried 'My baby boy is dead'!

I always thought it was a bummer that after the disastrous "Golden Palace", Sophia got sent BACK to Shady Pines [as if Dorothy or even Gloria didn't have the means to have her live somewhere she liked ] just so she could keep wisecracking on the last gasps of "Empty Nest". Then again, I just prefer to pretend the last episode onwards never happened and Sophia and the Girls just kept living together.

"The Talking Machine" was full of anachronisms. For starters, this Season Two episode was supposed to take place sometime around 1876-1877 when Laura was about ten but the Edison phonograph wasn't even invented until 1877- much less marketted yet. Even if somehow had some assistant sneak it out of the lab and instantly get it to Walnut Grove, the sound quality it produced would have been decades ahead of what was feasible at the time. A listen to Handel's 'Israel Out of Egypt' by the Crystal Palace choir in 1888 with literally thousands of singers barely sounds like two folks sing-whispering in a cave and the recording couldn't amplify the sound so Willie hiding the machine to record Laura and having Laura's speech be perfectly understood by the entire class would have been impossible- to say nothing of Laura's speech sounding perfectly synchronized as though Nellie would be able to crank the cyclinder to play exactly the same speed as Willie did to record. Oh, and they used the word 'airplane' a quarter century before devise was invented and fifty years before the term was. LOL

"That's For Me to Know" (Season Seven). I usually liked Dorothy but IMO, this episode epitomized one of those times she got away with more than she should have. Yeah, I know Sophia was literally opening a Pandora's Box by telling Dorothy that she had something in a box and it was PRIVATE but, Dorothy was SO determined to record 'THE family history ' [read: HER interpretation of the family history] that she broke it open expressly against Sophia's permission. Then rather than apologize for having blatantly violated Sophia's privacy and gone against her wishes, Dorothy kept self-justifying her motives saying that her grandson Robbie had to know ' THE family history' and practically ordered Sophia to quit being mad at her. OK, Sophia fessed to a hithero unknown first marriage but even then, Dorothy went FULL BLAST to dictate the account of it even AFTER Sophia told her it would 'change their relationship forever' . Yes, I will admit that it was touching that Dorothy explained how Sophia having her earlier arranged marriage annulled so she could eventually marry the man she loved [Dorothy's father Sal] was a 'strike for women's rights' AND a good thing and it was good that Sophia realized that she shouldn't be ashamed of her past actions there. However; I REALLY wish Sophia had told Dorothy that, even though it WAS good of Dorothy to get her to think of the annulment on positive terms, that that STILL did not justify Dorothy into breaking into her stuff and going against her express wishes AND that Dorothy was just going to have to accept that it would be a LONG time after a LOT of effort on Dorothy's part before Sophia would consider Dorothy someone to TRUST again. Sorry, two wrongs on Dorothy's part weren't made right by her new interpretation of Sophia's past, IMO.

Anyone else wonder why everything about Dorothy's background [age, ages of kids, how long she'd lived in Miami,etc.] changed EXCEPT that she'd been married to Stan for 38 years before he dumped her?

How can anyone who saw it forget the episode in which Rose inheritted an ailing PIG and they all turned into one-dimesional cons to try to care for it just to get a large windfall? Talk about veering into 'Here's Lucy' territory?

What was odd was that Adam's and Hoss's doomed mothers each had surviving kin yet had no problems with Ben taking their late daughter's/ late sister's baby boy to parts unknown- and NEVER attempted to visit them at the Ponderosa. Only Little Joe's hithero unknown uterine half-brother did so and that was only after he found out that his paternal grandmother faked his death so her hated daughter-in-law would vamoose New Orleans with Ben.

Agree with ALL the above. Also, why did they spend SO much time dealing with John-Boy and Janet having their twins on the Mountain [and turning all other sibs into wallpaper], only to end the last movie with the news that they were boy-girl twins and NOTHING more [like given them names]. FWIW, I 'd like them to have named the boy ' Rome Zebulon' and the girl 'Rebecca Esther' [and NOT use their first and middle names e.g 'John Curtis'].

Since you all spelled out the Walton In-Laws Pitfalls so well, no WONDER Drew just stayed Elizabeth's 'steady ' for something like 20 years! LOL

A fairly good, funny, clever show in its time [well, especially the early pre -Avery years]. However it was SO topical that even viewers who'd lived through the 90's would have needed to have 1990's World Almanac or search engines to get the bulk of the jokes! I wonder if Bea Arthur [who lived to see "Maude" overlooked for the same hyper-topicality and heeded that lesson by pleading with "Golden Girls" writers to keep it as non-topical as possible] ever tried to reach out to Candice re topicality pitfalls before it was too late.

I always thought they left a LOT of stuff unsaid between the two characters- like once how Esther said she's borne 'THREE babies' yet only John was the only evidently living offspring and his brother Ben had volunteered for WWI against Zeb's wishes only to be killed so what was the fate of their THIRD child? The closest clue given was that once Elizabeth or another grandchild happened upon a picture in the attic and Zeb said in a choked voice that that was 'Amy'. Was Amy their daughter and, if so, what happened to her? Oddly, neither Zeb nor Esther ever got upset at the Godseys' adoptive daughter being named 'Aimee'. Also, was Esther related to Martha Corinne besides being her sister-in-law through Zeb? I seem to recall them having the same maiden name of Tyler [and it was hardly unheard of for brothers to marry two girls from the same family].

I'm not arguing with that. However; the few times he was allowed to be a musician, he seemed happiest -until Steve, Katie, Bub or Uncle Charley shot down his ambition. Perhaps if they'd let him be a beatnik instead of a square, he wouldn't have taken his frustrations out on everyone else. Just a thought.

I read Gavin MacLeod's bio- and perhaps the most stunning revelation in it re Ted Knight was that he and Gavin were BEST FRIENDS and Gavin was the one most broken up by Ted's death. That's even more shocking than learning that Cloris and Valerie were chums despite their characters despising each other!

I liked how, regardless of how bitterly Lucyfelt about Desi's contribution re the state of their marriage and its end, Lucy ALWAYS vigorously touted how vital his contributions were to the show's existence much less the success of the individual episode.

Yeah, it's sad that the TV movies turned the closest multimensional non-John Boy sib into a caricature AND seemed to revel into transforming Toni's life into a nightmare.

I liked how each of these characters evolved over time. Ike started out as a rather complacent businessman who was perfectly happy with how the store and his life had turned out. Moreover, his store was regarded by all the Waltons as a nearly magical place stocked with exotic foods and goods, the center of the community AND with its Post Office and telephone, their only link to the outside world. Yet, it wasn't just the Waltons become more worldly and sophisticated that knocked down Ike a few pegs even though they had mutual admiration to the end. Corabeth entered the picture. However; she started out as the Waltons' sheltered cousin who was suddenly jolted to the outside world with her mother's death and considered the stay at Casa Walton a pitstop before she was ready to venture to Richmond to try her hand at joining a secetarial pool despite no experience. Then she met Ike and despite crying over her saying yes to his proposal, married him and the rest was history. It's interesting that Corabeth was supposed to be a one-shot character but Ronnie Claire Edwards impressed the suits enough to have them change the episode's ending AND have her become a regular once they could write her into more scripts. It didn't take long for Corabeth to transform herself from a frumpy wren into wanting everyone else there to believe that she was more sophisticated and genteel than everyone else including her family. Yet, despite her being often unfair to Ike and often treating their adoptive daughter Aimee as though she was a toy to be neglected unless Corabeth was bored with other stuff, Corabeth was not entirely unsympathetic and did bring some needed comic relief to the show. With their sumptuous mansion and comfortable pension, the Baldwin Sisters seemed to have the least problems of any of the community yet they couldn't help but make mischief via The Recipe. They supposedly were ignorant of it being moonshine despite themselves and the other [most men] partakers getting hammered by it. Yet, even though Miss Emily often mourned the departure of Ashley Longworth, they never became 'mean drunks' or self-pitying but merely sillier with the consumption. It's interesting,too, that they regarded the Walton children [especially John Boy and Jason] as having potential that they were happy to help nurture. Earl has said that these characters were based on female moonshiners he knew [which was virtually unheard of for that time and place] yet, unlike the TV characters, they were mother-and-daughter rather than sisters, wore overalls and knew EXACTLY what they were brewing.LOL

As the kids outgrew the cuteness, the show relied on the other characters more and more to the point of listing them as regular cast members the last season or so. So here's a place to discuss them

What was the deal May 13th episode in which these squatters kept coming BACK even with cameras filming them, new doors,etc.? It seems they considered the place MORE important than just a spot to crash, smoke and drink in.I wonder if the buyers knew about these squatter before buying the place. Odd that they treated Christina's reaction to seeing the first one spotted as though she'd just seen a spider and nothing more.

Somewhat relieved that Alex actually got Hailey to be sure she REALLY wanted to be with Andy instead of just seeing if she COULD break him and his blah girlfriend up. Yeah, Andy took the cab all the way there for nothing but if Hailey's not sure she wants to more than banter with Andy, it's better he be alone than get himself into a nothing unbalanced deal. Also relieved that Phil just performed the ceremony without actually attempting any magic tricks [as I could easily imagine him bungling one up when push came to shove at the alter]. Nice speech by Claire in the end. Also happy that Alex just had a good 'inside joke' laugh with Lily and nothing more at Luke and Manny's expense after spending this whole episode seeming to try to frame them into making it look as though THEY were a gay couple getting married. Best of all, Jay saving the day for Mitch and Cam even if he likely risked bankrupcy having his own country club transformed instantly into a wedding venue [and almost certainly risking getting endlessly heckled by his country club cronies until the day he dies]. Nice tasteful but realistic clench by Cam and Mitch at the end,too.

Yet, in the TV movies they REALLY dumbed down Jason by making him into a yahoo honky-tonk player. Then again, they also dumbed down all the OTHER Waltons by having them be ignorant of Elvis in 1963! Who had NOT heard of Elvis in 1963?