Airdate: 4/2/81
At Boatwright, a
new invention is being tested out: television. Unfortunately, the board of
trustees has no interest in devoting any money to its study, but John-Boy
thinks he can change their minds with a televised demonstration of the nascent
medium. After a failed attempt to use Greek mythology to appeal to their
academic sensibilities, he realizes that it’s really all about images –
something he discusses in his first TV broadcast, one that the family can now
enjoy thanks to Jim-Bob’s fixing up of an actual television set – a huge
appliance with an enormous… 5” screen. On the other front, Rose is green with
envy when Stanley seems to fall prey to the feminine wiles of Zuleika Dunbar,
and goes on a health-compromising diet to complete.
Plenty of foreshadowing in this episode, in which John-Bob eyes a potentialcareer in television writing. Of course, most middle-class Americans didn’t get their sets until the 1950s, but this TV is a primitive model, and it makes sense that an institute with money – a university – would have one. As for Jim-Bob building one, well – he is a mechanical whiz-kid after all.
This coming
around full circle idea reminds me of the later years of Little House on the Prairie, when Laura Ingalls Wilder starts to
get the idea to write the Little House
books, or when Alex Hailey at the end of Roots
II gets the light bulb to research his ancestors. Final goodnights feature
some winking byplay, when Elizabeth speculates what John-Boy would call his
show: “I don’t know. The Waltons?”
Anachronism alert: the book John Curtis reads with John Boy
to make him rethink his broadcast is Richard Scarry’s “Best Mother Goose Ever,”
published in 1964!!!
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