The Homecoming

I watched this as a little gayling when it first aired. The only characters I liked were the wealthy Baldwin sisters.

Which was originally based on the XXX Blockbuster, “Deep Throat”.

The original title was.....”Grandma wears a strap-on”

[quote]I watched this as a little gayling when it first aired. The only characters I liked were the wealthy Baldwin sisters.

Me too. If I were one of the Walton girls, I'd ditch that Salvation Army dame and go hang with the Baldwin Sisters.

Uh.... Would you want a broken doll?

OP, receiving a doll with a crushed face is understandably disturbing to a child. As I recall, Elizabeth screamed "Someone killed her!"

As far as Mrs. Walton assumption about her son's tobacco use, masturbation is not a subject usually brought up in Christmas themed TV movies.

Whoops, Mrs. Walton's.

Why didn't Patricia Neal do the series? Was a TV series beneath her?

Boys didn’t begin masturbating until 1957, when Elvis began thrusting his pelvis in public.

Grandpa Walton, Will Geer, was a radical homosexual.

[quote]Geer became involved with Harry Hay, a homosexual activist. In 1934, Hay met Geer at the Tony Pastor Theatre, where Geer worked as an actor. They became lovers, and Hay credited Geer as his political mentor. Hay and Geer participated in a milk strike in Los Angeles. There Hay was first exposed to radical gay activism in the person of "Clarabelle", a drag queen who held court in the Bunker Hill neighborhood and who hid Hay from police. Later that year, Hay and Geer performed in support of the San Francisco General Strike, where they witnessed police firing on strikers, killing two.

[quote]masturbation is not a subject usually brought up in Christmas themed TV movies.

The scene in "The House Without a Christmas Tree" where Jason Robards finds Addie diddling herself and explodes in rage still frightens me.

[quote]The scene in "The House Without a Christmas Tree" where Jason Robards finds Addie diddling herself and explodes in rage still frightens me.

Poor Addie, between her closet gay father and her repressed dyke of a grandmother, the girl got no peace.

I love "The Homecoming." IIRC, it was a Hallmark holiday television special. I thought I'd read that Neal didn't do the series, because either she or the producers thought that the rigors of doing so week after week might affect her health too negatively. I miss the days when there were so many really special holiday programs on television leading up to Christmas and New Year's, with obvious lots of love and great production values put into producing them.

When did CBS stop regularly airing this at Christmas time? Because I remember it airing several times as a child in the late 1980s and early 1990's. I really wish they would run more of these in December instead of all the repeats of their regular shows and the few specials that air every year.

Was Grandma as big a bitch in the tv movie as she was in the series? Half the time she was yelling at the kids for being kids. All kids sass their parents. If I lived in a house with that cranky grandmother, I'd be asking to go live with Olivia's parents, whoever they were.

R15 Southern children don't sass their parents, unless they want a switch. That was the one thing that always seemed unrealistic to me about The Waltons, no one ever seemed to get spanked.

[quote]no one ever seemed to get spanked.

They had to learn Bible verses, which was a worse punishment.

Mary Ellen, go to your room and learn 10 verses by dinner time.

Aw. I loved this and The House Without a Christmas Tree.

At 46:51, the actress playing Erin does her best "Jan Brady" imitation.

As a youngster it was Max Baer Jr.'s tight bluejeans that turned me gay. But John Boy Walton was my imaginary boyfriend.

Loved this tv movie. I watched it every time it aired, and I think it's beautifully done.

R20, I could never get past Richard Thomas' birth mark to lust for him enough, but when Elizabeth got a boyfriend later on in the series, I fell hard for him

Tony Becker, who played Drew, Elizabeth's boyfriend: