LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE Reboot Won’t Feature Original Show’s Cast
By Movieguide® Contributor
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE is getting a reboot — but the show’s original actors won’t be any part of it.
“It’s not really like a reboot, they’re not going back to Walnut Grove,” said Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson in the series. “They’re not going to have Doc Baker and Miss Beadle, and they’re certainly not going to have Al Burton and all the people who were made up for the show. It is going back to the books.”
“This [show] is part of the Laura Ingalls Wilder multiverse,” Arngrim said. “So concerns that they’re going to run amok away from the books and make it into something weird — not happening. [Friendly Family Productions] will pull the plug on it before anything like that happens.”
The new show doesn’t draw any connections to the old one, so that means the original show’s actors won’t be making cameos.
“None of us, as far as I know, our gang, are in at this point,” Arngrim said. “I have been joking for years that I’m finally old enough to play Mrs. Oleson, so call me!”
Trip Friendly, head of Friendly Family Productions and son of original LITTLE HOUSE producer Ed Friendly, called Dean Butler, who played Almanzo Wilder on the show, to let him know the show was coming out ahead of the news announcement.
“There have been so many different announcements about reboots or re-imaginings,” he said. “But this had a different feel to it. This felt like this was really real.”
“One of the first feelings, in all honesty, is probably, well, ‘If this works, are they going to forget about what we did all those years ago?’” he said. “And then the next thought is, ‘It’s going to be very difficult to create something that touches people’s hearts in the way that the original did.’”
He recalled the show’s creator, Michael Landon, who headed the show and played Charles Ingalls.
“It’s never going to be what Michael [Landon] did,” he said. “Michael was Michael. He was a unique creative presence with this magical touch with an audience. And look, the creative team on the new show may also have a magical touch with an audience, but it’s a different touch and it will be different.”
Rachel Lindsay Greenbush, who played Carrie, doesn’t share the same sentiments. “I think it’s great,” she said. “I think with social media, we tend to think of ourselves more as individuals — and in the story of the series and the books, it’s more about community as a whole, and your neighbor. And I think that’s needed more today.”
READ MORE: NETFLIX ANNOUNCES LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE REBOOT
“A lot of the fans have really craved more historical content in the story,” she continued. “I can’t wait to see it come out, I can’t wait to watch it.”
Arngrim admits viewers may have certain expectations about the show.
“It’s going to be hard,” she said. “I feel great sympathy, because I know that no matter how brilliant all of these actors could be…they’re going to get compared, by some viewers and certainly by press, to Michael Landon and some poor little girl’s going to get compared to Melissa Gilbert.”
“There are many properties that do get remade with whole new cast and whole new looks and whole new ways of looking at it quite successfully,” she added.
“And we often find, ‘Oh, that one didn’t work. That one wasn’t good. Oh, I really like this one better than that one.’ So as strange as it may sound, Laura Ingalls’ books and Little House on the Prairie may be one of those things that is eternal and it’s just going to keep happening,” she said.
Though recent news seems to make it like there are no connections to the old show and the reboot, Friendly said he hopes to draw in fans of the old show.
“It has been a long-held dream of mine to carry on my father’s legacy and adapt Wilder’s classic American stories for a 21st-century audience in a way that brings together fans of both the books and the original television series,” he said.
Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura on the show, said, “I think there’s room in the Little House universe for all different kinds of stories to be told — just like there was always room in the Little Women universe to keep retelling that story. These are classic stories, and no one’s done it where they hewed to the books completely.”
“[The original] was Michael Landon’s interpretation, and now it’s time for someone else’s interpretation. And I think there’s plenty of room for that. And I think there’s a lot of other stories to mine beyond that. So I think this opens the door in a lot of ways for all kinds of Little House on the Prairie projects.”
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