S4E12 What I've learned from watching Little House on the Prairie

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Transcript

Speaker 1 (0s): Good morning bows and bow ties. I know it's been a minute. So, you know, I am a fan of the TikTok, and I usually watch TikTok right before I go to bed, and then maybe a few minutes in the morning. I didn't get a chance to today, surprisingly, I slept through the night and I don't typically do that.

So where am I going with this? I just wanna talk about some of the things that I've learned from watching Little House in the Prairie. For those of you who are new to my channel, I am the Black Opinionated Woman, also known as above. So if you're coming to this channel, you're not getting hard research, right? I don't have cyclists for that. So I give my opinion on stuff. My hair is not in my hair, right? I look like I have old lady hair today. Anyway, so I give my opinion on whatever I want, basically.

So why am I talking about Little House in a Prairie? Well, there was something that prompted me to revisit Little House in a Prairie because of a conversation I had at work, okay? And I did not realize that Little House in Aqua was actually, if I remember correctly, it was set in South Dakota. Now, when I was young, this, this show came out before I was born. I believe it aired, it first aired in 1972, okay? but I, remember watching Little House on a ferry as a child.

So clearly I was getting stuff that San Vacation I was born in 1976, so I believe this show had a nine year run. So with that being said, I, I know it's like, why is she just get to the point, you know, I went back and found some clips on tiktoks, you know, oddly enough, before I found other clips online. And it was basically, I believe, set in the 1870s I think that was the setting for the show.

And it was all about what was life on, you know, out in the Midwest, the Great Plains, like as a, you know, a family meeting settled and, and where they settled and, and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, that show, even though it was a show in the 1970s and eighties, about the 18 hundreds, late 18 hundreds, you know, I watched that show and I enjoyed that show.

I learned back then things. And now when I look at what's like, I, I go back and I re-watch these clips. I look at the messaging they tried to send us. Some of it is kinda like, obviously it wasn't caught up with the times, so maybe the language has to change or whatever. I looked at how, if they wanted to convey beauty, they don't do it loud the way it's done today.

If they wanna show that someone is beautiful, they will just adorn them appropriately based on the time period, of course. And that's that. And they'll do it consistently. They're not gonna beat you in the head with it, right? Like, as far as what they do today, it's not exaggerated. It's, it was simple. So now granted, the messaging back then was beautiful, was blonde hair, blue eyes, right? So the people that they would bring on to the show or whatever like that, were young ladies who had blonde hair, blue eyes, And.

they also, for whatever reasons, made them seem really evil. But when I think about when they wrote shows, they, they, they were so purposeful. So one of my favorite characters back then was Nelly. She was the shadiest, meanest little girl. And then what was interesting about Nelly was there was like a redemptive arc, okay? So towards the end of the series, you know, she started having very, she started having very redemptive equality, redemptive equality.

I can't get the words, redemptive qualities. Her and Laura Ingles became friends. They showed how even some of the, even evils people or most evil people need, love it. It showed the humanity of people when they saw a group of people encounter sickness, you know, such as like the Scarlet Fever. And then I, I look at what they did with that show.

When they showed how people, how they handled injustice, whether it was, back then we used the word Indian today, we used the word native words, native American or Native. They showed what that was like when people saw something that was wrong, they showed community, right? Like, Hey, this is what's going on. I. think one of the, I remember there was a scene where the man who owned I think he owned the general store.

So Charles Ingles comes in with a watch from his father, and he wanted to sell this watch. I don't know what it was worth, but apparently it was worth, you know, some coin. And Charles was going through a really hard time. I mean, like, he just wasn't coined up. He wasn't coined up. He wasn't, was some of you whacked out weirdos out there? You say a high value man, because he wasn't coined up. Although everything about who he was pointed to a man of substance, right?

PE he was very high value. So the guy who owned the general store takes the watch, and he is baff, not b he's not confused. He was taken aback like, I cannot take your father's watch. And Charles Les was like, you know, he had to humble himself for his family. See? 'cause at that moment it was all about taking care of his family. And he had to sell something that meant so much to him.

His father's watch, I can't remember if his father had passed or may or not. So the, the general store guy, whatever, apparently, I guess he gives him money for the watch, but he over infl how much is worth? He's like, so if I'm just making up numbers, if I was worth $5, he gave him nine. Like, he said, well, I can't take it for anything less than nine or whatever. 'cause he did not wanna take this man's watch. He knew what it meant to Charles this pocket watch or whatever it was.

And he just didn't wanna take it. But you know what, instead of making him feel bad, like he wanted this man to have his dignity and I think Charles saw it for what it was like, this man is trying not to embarrass me. They showed what mean girl looked like on that show. Nelly was the perfect mean girl. Some of the stuff that she did when I looked back was funny. I'm like, this is a shady PITC page. I don't want the cast on my channel. But, but I think, What I liked about that show, which is so different from today, was they showed what it was like as a family.

They showed it with community. They showed what it was like to face hardship, and there was a redemptive arc to, you know, the story. When you look at what's happening today, there, there is no redemption. There is no community, right? So there's no redemption. And when you look at what we create, we create these shows that tear each other down and there's no redemption in the end because there's no community, there's no love for each other. There's no sense of overall good or morality back then.

If you look at what the, the, these, the, these communities back in the Midwest or the Great Plains they had, they believed in Jesus. They had a higher power. They had all that good stuff. So they had like a code for how they needed to move, how they were going to operate within the community. Today, we are so far away from God. There is no unifying thing. There is no community.

If you look back just 50 years or a hundred years, the black community meant to, I mean, with the black church meant to the community, we were always getting together fish fry or whatever. There were like tons of church programs and the things that we would do in a community. We were a community. We had the grandmothers and the aunties and everybody else, or friends of so and so, which was like another auntie looking after the children. I remember when I was growing up and I grew up really dysfunctional, but I was roaming the neighborhood.

And it was nothing for somebody's parent or grandparent ever to tell me to come in, eat some smothered pork chops. 'cause they thought I was just too thin. It was telling me things like, did you get your schoolwork done? I'm like, yes. Like, whatcha doing out here? I'm like, I don't know, just playing. And they'll always tell you, better not get in trouble. But they said that to everybody today, our beauty is, is, is everything is so fake and everyone looks the same.

I don't know, I just felt like, and I was looking at the clips of a little house on the Prairie, and every clip I was looking at was the long clips. There were long clips. So I can get the context of what was happening. And I was like, you know, we don't tell stories today like we did back then. I think with AI coming on board, I'm sure, well, I don't know what came outta the writer strike. I did not review the, the terms of the deal.

But I'm sure with the invent of ai, they're gonna write great stories. but I don't know if they're gonna write stories that have this really great human element. I don't really expect people to get where I'm going with this little house on a Prairie reference. But the show was a really good show. It had such a long run. I mean, you had Laura and Nelly fighting.

I mean, that Nelly, they, some of the clips from Nelly were so shady and so funny. Even my daughter was laughing. I was like, look at this. Look at Nelly. Your father smells like a meal. And she's like, my father know. She's like, my pot works hard. She's like, so do Neil. I was like, you, no. She's like, can't take that back, Nellie. It's like, I will not. Oh my gosh. You guys just have to be there to appreciate it. But Charles, he was a man's man.

He took care of family, he took care of the community. They were a community And. they took care of each other. you know, when he wanted to take his wife on vacation, And, they had the community look after the girls. I was like, you know, we don't have anything like that these days. We don't care about each other. We don't love each other. There's nothing redemptive about anything.

Our shows suck. This is the reason why I, I just cannot get into the real house size of Atlanta or Potomac or married to medicine, or I just can't. They're just so mean to each other. There's no sisterhood. There's no womanhood. Like, well, everybody goes to various stages of womanhood, but there's no sisterhood on these shows. Even the, so-called matriarchs are the worst ones.

These people are bereft of any sort of humanity. I mean, they talk to each other like trash. They're not mentoring the young ones. Why do you think you can have somebody like a Candace Dillard on the Real Housewives of Potomac or some of these other ladies out here, and it's like, you can't say anything. 'cause everybody's gonna start crying colorless. Well, I'm saying it, whatever. Anyway, so I don't know. I would, I I, I would love to see more shows that had some sort of humanity in it.

you know, what show closely, in my opinion,

Speaker 2 (13m 41s): I,

Speaker 1 (13m 43s): When I look back in the nineties, I feel like one of the best shows besides like The Cosby Show and Different World and stuff like that, you know what show I enjoyed immensely, Roseanne, and I know she's a little bit of a wackadoodle today, but that show, when you look back at the things they talked about and the love they have for each other, and I, I just feel like we don't have shows like that anymore.

We don't have real Carly, any real sitcoms. Our shows are a lot about comedy and maybe breaking the fourth wall, such as like Abbott Elementary, which I do like to show whenever I get a chance to watch on television, right? Abbott Elementary is fine. We have a lot of reality television shows, But we don't have shows that have a redemptive arc to it, like a little house on a Prairie. We don't have shows that show any humanity, any community, anything I.

think the show like Roseanne at least said, okay, we're gonna talk about real issues, but we're gonna still show humanity. I mean, show humanity. We're gonna show commun. I can't talk this morning. We're gonna show community. We're gonna show family. We're gonna show some triumph. And triumph doesn't have to look magnanimous, right? It, it might be something small. It could be, you know what, we saved our house.

It be we saved our house. Or Oh my goodness, maybe our children can go start off at the community college. It could be any of those things. We don't have that stem. What we have is people, like a, was a doctor having from married to medicine, getting online, justifying how she's going to get the people what they want, talking bad about everybody instead of being the matriarch and, and, and, and bringing, like, she's feeding this negative en this negative engine.

It's what the people want. Sometimes you gotta curate what people want. So I, think about how when I look at my TikTok read, y'all gonna leave me alone because I enjoy TikTok. I get, I curated my content. I don't get as much of the angry black women content anymore. Somebody that still shows up just because I like to follow black women. But the same token that comes with that is a lot of these women are angry. So they, they wanna bash relationships, bash marriages.

They want to talk. They just, they're just in a bad place. And. they talk about it over and over and over. But a lot of my feed that I curate, it has to do with lions and cubs in the wild. Right now I'm on little housekeeper, TikTok, but I get a lot of ballet TikTok. For some reason I've enjoyed it. I'm trying to think what else is in my feet. It's a lot of the same things.

but I curated certain things because I don't want to be bombarded with a bunch of angry black women telling me about how all black men are evil. Now, there's a difference between pointing out shenanigans, right? Because there's a lot of shenanigans going on. But if all of the content is about why black men are these horrible people, there's a lot of foolish ones out there. I'm just kind of like, well, what else do you have to talk about?

What else is going on? all right, that was just a little off the top of my head, thinking about Little House on the Prairie. And let me know your thoughts.

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