It’s a silly little thing, but in an effort to save money (two Euros per minute of viewing), companies may forego paying ratings people in Finland to watch a television show long enough to determine its appropriate viewing audience. But, if you don’t pay, then your show gets an automatic 18+ rating, which is what happened when Universal Studios decided to distribute Little House on the Prairie on DVD.
“Long series can get quite expensive to check, and some use this exemption in the law to their advantage,” said Matti Paloheimo, Director at the Finnish Board of Film Classification.
“Such unchecked material should not be shown to children publicly,” he added.
Little House on the Prairie, which ran from 1974 to 1983, portrayed life in the U.S. West in the late 1800s and was based on the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s children’s book of the same name.
It remains popular in Finland, and is still shown weekly on Sunday mornings on state-owned broadcaster YLE.
I know I used to watch it, but I only have a vague recollection of Michael Landon and most of my memory of him comes from a completely different program that I’m sure I haven’t thought about since it went off air. I used to watch Highway to Heaven every week. Then again, I had two channels. You want to watch TV, you’re gonna watch what’s on, even if it’s Stampede Wrestling.
I also used to like The Swiss Family Robinson, but not the version with Helen Hunt done in the States in 1976. Weirdness. I wonder why there were two versions of the same concept within a few years of each other. Even character names are different and the Canadian one was only a half hour long.
My favourite episode was one that actually creeped me out so bad I had to shut the television off at 10:30 in the morning. There’d been a light in the sky that night before on the island and when everyone woke up in the morning, these weird sticky threads were all over the place. I think Marie, the young daughter, gets burned when she tries to remove them and the whole family starts freaking out. The brothers, Franz and Ernest, take their boat, I think, and check if the whole island is covered, which I think it was. Somebody finds part of a meteorite as well and just when it starts to look like Marie will die from the stupid threads, it starts raining and they all dissolve. Everyone dances around because they’re so happy. None of these episode titles look familiar, though. Watch me wind up having to buy the series now…
One Minion's Opinion 