The untold story of "Sylvia" - the most WTF episode of Little House ever

Gave me nightmares

You have to be a big MARY! to be traumatized by fucking Little House On The Prairie

R2, we were little kids. Geez, lighten up

Matthew and Patrick were so cute.

Is this today's rape thread?

I had a crush on Matthew

What about the one where Albert gets addicted to heroin?

R3 is a pussy

R8 is a tough longshoreman who spends all his spare time on gay gossip boards

when I was 3 yrs old my pussy didn’t tremble with fear over Sylvia

Sure, Jan

Not all of us are riddled with bouts of irrational fear over some shit on a family tv show from 1974

[quote][R8] is a tough longshoreman who spends all his spare time on gay gossip boards

...while wearing an apricot tricot baby doll nightie.

R4 needs to have her internet privileges taken away until she learns to link properly!

Nothing screams masculine more than picking fights over Little House on the Prairie.

Some very bad things happened on that show. It’s kind of shocking that it was considered good wholesome family TV.

The episode when Ma tried to amputate her leg was another lulu.

Little House got very dark at times. This and the one where the blind school burned (or burnt?) down with Alice and Mary's baby dies.

Michael Landon was one sick puppy

It says in the article that Michael Landon wrote the Sylvia episode himself. And directed it.

Where's the "What the fuck?" button?

And cried behind the camera while they were filming it, r20. He was probably drunk -- didn't he swill liquor on set?

Olivia Barash, who played Sylvia, seems to be suggesting here that she was going to be a regular on the show until Melissa Gilbert put the kibosh on it. Although it also kind of sounds like she's talking out her ass. She likes like kind of a nutty old lady in the current picture.

R10

R22, I loved the episode of Six Feet Under when Carol, Catherine O'Hara's character, said that looking at Melissa Gilbert was like looking at Satan himself.

Bonus parting line: "Bring me some cinnamon toast up to my bath and I'll tell you how I made Melissa Gilbert cry!"

You don’t fuck with MG.

Now we need an inside look at the "Albert gets addicted to heroin" episode

The alberts addicted to heroin episode was good but I was disappointed there was never a relapse or it didn’t take a few episodes for him to get clean.

I did heroin with Kurt Cobain

The next time we saw Albert after the heroine episode was when they killed him off with leukemia. I guess since Mary was gone they needed a new punching bag character

^^I meant to type heroin but it was actually morphine Albert was addicted to

Mary did a big disservice to blind people everywhere by portraying Mary as bitter with a huge chip on her shoulder.

Matthew Laborateaux was definitely the apple of Landon's eye for a while, but after a few seasons he was: demoted as a regular, and then brought back, as r29 notes, first with a drug addiction and then with cancer. I'm sure my fellow LHOTP nerd here also recalls the leukemia episode contradicted the drug addict episode -- the latter ends with Laura's narration saying Albert grew up to be a doctor, but then in the cancer episode very strongly implied that he was going to die.

I can also see more clearly now the way Matthew would sort of whine and snivel his way through emotional scenes. Acting!

After these dark and disturbing episodes, the ending song was always so happy with Half Pint skipping in a field.

*field of daisies... ^

I also had a crush on Jonathan Gilbert

Is this on YouTube?

There is a brief recap of the episode:

What do we know about Michael Landon’s psyche? Was he a nice guy? Good father? Pleasant to work with?

R38 read Alison Arngrim's memoir. It's HILARIOUS, minus the obviously dark bits about her child abuse

Sylvia will be airing on the Great American Family channel tomorrow at 1.

WTH? Is that a scarecrow costumed man or a creepy clown? And WTF are they doing on the Prairie? Is this a carnie kidnapping storyline?

I don't remember watching the Sylvia episode when the show was on the air, but there was another episode that freaked me out (as a child - Mary! me all you want!). Laura's friend drowns in a pond, and the mother of the dead girl is delusional and thinks Laura is her daughter. She locks Laura in her creepy cellar with rats crawling around. Such a wholesome family tv show! The 70s were fucking weird.

I feel like I wrote this on another thread, but I remember thinking what a sick ploy for ratings this episode was. But then when the original manuscript (with annotations) of Laura Ingalls Wilder's book came out, she did write in it how a neighbor tried to rape her when she was a teen. Laura was hired to take care of his sick wife and he tried to have his way with her during the night.

Alison Arngrim interviewed the Silvia actress on her show. I haven't watched it yet.

Sorry, that was the audio feed. Here's the video.

I thought this was about country/pop star Sylvia from the 80s!

I was a kid, and never really liked Little House, but I did watch these episodes. I remember everyone at school talking about poor Sylvia.

I hated the show. I was only 5-6 when the series ended. There was an ugly girl with long hair that lived next door who lived for Little House. She was around 12 yrs old I think.

I never bought Landon's good, decent, Christian man act, even when I was a kid. He always seemed insincere, hypocritical, and arrogant. He seemed downright twisted, mean, and in love with himself. No wonder my grandfather idolized the bastard.

The "Sylvia" episodes come in handy sometimes. They were on Cozi TV last week right before my wife and I left for a doctor's appointment where we received some bad news.

On the way home, she was teary and mopey and I joked "It's fucked up, but not as fucked up as what happened to Sylvia." Boom! Immediate distraction as she started ranting about both Sylvia and R17's episode.

Forgot to sign R50 with 'Token Lesbian,' lest the wife confuse anyone.

Michael Landon was a Jewish atheist. He just was clever in capitalizing on his Bonanza fame to produce vaguely Christian "family entertainment" as an alternative to the changing social climate of the 70s. Ironically, Little House's themes and morals aligned far more with modern day 70s liberalism than it did with the 1870s. Highway to Heaven was completely agnostic and has nothing to do with The Bible, more New Age "golden rule" themes but conservatives see what they want to see.

I bet Grassle didn’t like the Sylvia episodes

This show was twisted as fuck. I suffered through more than a few traumatic episodes just because I had such an intense crush on Matthew Laborateaux.

Turns out it was definitely not the last time my dick’s poor judgment would lead me into danger.

^^Grassle knows about your mini-meat

I don't know how you can sugarcoat life in 1870s frontier. It was rough. The episodes condemning racism were unrealistic, the books, everyone was blatantly racist because that was the time period. Mary was always passive aggressive with anger issues in the books but had to hide her annoyance because that was expected of girls back then. Pa Ingalls was definitely mentally ill in the books, didn't give a shit if his family was starving and constantly falling ill. He just moved around because he wanted to. Laura Ingalls also lied and embellished stuff to make her story interesting.

Laura Ingalls was a fraud. Yes, she also spent a portion of her adult years a prostitute and assisted with two other prostitute’s abortions.

Nellie Olsen herself was an amalgamation of various pretty and rich girls that Laura met over the years. But I find it strange, all those girls were supposedly bullies. More likely Laura had an attitude to piss them off or she was jealous and made them out to be worse than they were.

Amen r58 that has always been my assumptions of Laura.

Laura was the real bitch

Grassle and Gilbert knew everything that went on during production of LH. Nothing got past them.

Laura was definitely an unreliable narrator. Actually, I would say most autobiographies and memoirs can fall into that because they are based on one's perception of events. That's why the best biographies take from not only the primary source (the person it's based on) but also anecdotes from close friends, relatives, coworkers, fans and others to paint a full picture.

I must have missed the Grassle in joke from one of the myriad of LHOTP threads here.

^^It’s no joke. Grassle knew all of the shit that went on during production

[Quote] You have to be a big MARY! to be traumatized by fucking Little House On The Prairie

LMAO!

Laura Ingalls and her daughter Rose were conservative libertarians who glorified "rugged individualism." They opposed FDR's New Deal and felt because they survived, no one should get hand-outs. The books romanticize frontier life and sanitized a lot of the hardships that were actually present. That's why the 70s adaptation is ironic because Michael Landon's 1970s left-wing views creeped into the program.

As someone up thread said, the episode where the School was burning was [ haunting] to me, for lack of a better word. The story of Sylvia was terrifying at the time, too, but I didn't get why they even did that. That show went downhill after awhile, and I just quit watching. I still like the books, though, even though they're written for kids.

The most dramatic moments of Little House On The Prairie

CRY CRY CRY 😥😪

r68 it should have been titled CRINGE, CRINGE, CRINGE: 12 Times 'Little House on the Prairie" made you change the channel

Was this Sylvia the village rapist?

Sylvia you better get off the prairie.

Sylvia looks like Abbi from Broad City

I'd rather live in Walnut Grove in in pioneer times than with the Waltons. There's just something so creepy about that family and the mountain.

R73 did the Waltons shit on dirt? Yes they did. No thx

R45 Olivia seems kooky and fun. Love her look. She teeters a line between looking like a crazy bag lady and an eccentric artsy fartsy gallery owner.

That shot looks like a straight up rip off of Alice Sweet Alice where little Brooke Shields gets it.