Walking in on a true WTF TV moment

My wife was watching Little House On The Prairie today. I had been somewhere else in the house with the kids and I walked in on it.

I watched for no more than three minutes, but during those three minutes an orangutan was apparently trusted to baby-sit a real baby. The orangutan starts a fire. Baby cries. Orangutan saves baby and they evacuate outside the house. Both cry outside the homestead as the fire threatens to engulf the domicile.

Who shows up to save the day? A youthful Shannen Doherty. She douses the fire. Crisis averted.

That's all I watched. That's all I needed to watch.

Am I on drugs? Did I really see that?

I have so many questions, not the least of which is how an orangutan showed up in the prairie? Where was whatshisname with the Oakland A's cap?

It was a true WTF moment. I couldn't have walked in at a better WTF time. Ever have that happen?

 

Wow. Just found the clip. This is all kinds of unintentional hilarity. I must have walked in the room at about the 4:08 mark. I missed the "violent" and ridiculous prelude.

 

As someone who grew up in southern Minnesota and spent countless days in Walnut Grove, Mankato, and Sleepy Eye, I had those moments while actually watching Little House as a kid, and still do on the reruns. The most memorable being when Laura ran away from home and lived in the mountains, where she meets the angel/god Ernest Borgnine. Mountains in southern Minnesota. Mountains in the prairie; even as a kid, I wondered, WTF?

Unrelated: A highlight of my life was when Nellie, Alison Arngrim actually, left a comment on a blog post of mine after I wrote about her memoir. I was hoping she'd make fun of my stuttering or something.

 

When you lived in southern Minnesota, was it common for orangutans to randomly make an appearance?

And I just realized that two of Shannon Doherty's three most prominent TV roles had her as a native of Minnesota. That means absolutely nothing to the greater good of the cosmos, but I thought I'd share.

 

Oh, quite common. In school we learned about the great orangutan outbreak of 1868.

I have to say, that clip is amazing and not an episode I remembered. I'm not as good with the later episodes (so weird seeing an older Willie who isn't a sniveling henchman). Is it possible that Little House producers got caught up in the Every Which Way But Loose fever and thought, "All right. We've done Jesse and Frank James coming to town. We've done the blizzard that killed the kids. We did the first forward human pass in football history, let's capitalize on everyone's love of orangutans."

 

You also had primary characters getting smoten with blindness for no good reason.

But don't forget an old TV adage ... when in doubt put an ape/monkey/orangutan in the cast.

 

To be fair, I believe "Little House" was set in the days before hunting and trucker domestication drove the wild orangutan to extinction on the American Plains.

 

They added a kid, then killed him off.

 

Been awhile since an SportsJournalists.com thread caused me to ROTFLOL.

This is great stuff. By all means, please carry on.

 

Just for the record, that aspect of the show actually followed true life. "Little House" books author Laura Ingalls Wilder's older sister Mary did, in fact, become blind as a teenager -- the result of a stroke that occurred after a bout of measles, and she did attend a school for the blind in Iowa, although she never married.

The "Little House" TV show portrayed Mary's blindness as a result of eye damage caused by scarlet fever, and she later married. Creative license, I guess.

My all-time WTF TV moment -- Dallas fan that that I am, of both the original and the current, continuing edition -- was Bobby Ewing's shower scene that raised him from the dead in the first incarnation.

 

But didn't her husband suddenly develop blindness too? Or am I misremembering that?

They should have done a spin-off of Little House. They could have called it Cathouse Carrie.

Carrie, the daughter that was never on, and seemingly, no one gave two shits about, channels her prairie neglect and becomes the biggest whore in the Twin Cities.

Could be a madcap comedy. Could have orangutans. And since Little House aired on NBC, it could have a guest starring role by Greg "B.J. And The Bear" Evigen, who ends up in 1800s Minnesota after Bear turns his CB radio into a time machine.

Will Bear find his long-lost great-grandape? Can-Can B.J. mosey on in to a one-night romance with carefree Carrie? ... Find out after Pink Lady And Jeff and Frank Capra Mysteries, tonight on NBC!

 

I don't know what it says about me that I laughed at the acting ability of the orangutan when he got shot. And I'm an animal lover.