Product Description
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Waltons: The Complete Ninth Season (DVD)
Good night, Waltons. For nine inspired and inspiring seasons
(from 1972 to 1981), the Walton family became America’s family.
Viewers’ hearts were captured by the story of John and Olivia
Walton, their seven children, Grandpa and Grandma as they faced
the Depression and World War II with not much more than a love of
the land and the rock-solid support of one another. This elegiac
final season is the ideal capstone to the Emmy®-honored and
beloved series. After enduring terrifying dangers in Europe and
the Pacific, the Walton boys gratefully return to Walton’s
ain after the war ends. But peace brings new challenges and
new beginnings. And for many of the family, young and old, it
brings new love. Share the final goodnight with The Waltons.
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The final season of The Waltons is notable for the ever-changing
number of people sitting at the family's long dinner table. Early
in the season, with all four boys at war in Europe and Japan,
plates are set for John Sr. (Ralph Waite), cousin Rose (Peggy
Rea)--the de facto woman of the house with matriarch Olivia
(Michael Learned) gone away--and sisters Mary Ellen (Judy
Norton-Taylor), Erin (Mary Beth McDonough), and Elizabeth (Kami
Cotler), plus brother Ben's wife Cindy (Leslie Winston). Once the
war is over and Ben, Jim-Bob (David W. Harper), Jason (Jon
Walmsley) and John-Boy (Robert Wightman, replacing Richard
Thomas) are back home, the number of people seated at that table
still continues to go up and down for all kinds of reasons. That
fluctuation says much about the state of the family and of The
Waltons itself, long past the era when all those kids were still
in school and regularly eating with a full complement of parents
and grandparents. With both of the latter gone and even John Sr.
disappearing halfway through the season to help ailing Olivia
move to Arizona, it's the young people ruling the roost now.
Things start off powerfully with the two-part "The Outrage," in
which John Sr. leaps to the defense of an African-American
employee, Harley (Hal Foster), who has been living under an
assumed name since escaping a chain gang years before. Never a
show to back off from issues of discrimination, The Waltons: The
Complete Ninth Season, tackles gender bias (Mary Ellen is turned
down for admission to medical school, while Erin is one of many
women on Walton's ain who lose their jobs to returning
veterans) and anti-Semitism (Jason's wonderful girlfriend Toni,
played by Lisa Harrison, causes a stir when everyone discovers
she's a Jew). Meanwhile, John-Boy falls in love with a Parisian
bookseller who encourages him to write an article about stray
land mines, though his true destiny as a writer leads him back to
his roots. Ben, too, is full of ambition following the war, eager
to attend engineering college but needed at the family mill after
John Sr. leaves. Jason takes over the Dew Drop Inn and finds a
way to make a go of it with Toni's help. Rose rediscovers love
again when her dance partner, Stanley (William Schallert),
returns, albeit as an emotional wreck. (The Rose-Stanley
storylines in season nine are among the sweetest episodes.) In a
strange development, Mary Ellen's allegedly late husband turns
up, a very different and darker personality than he was before.
Other new and recurring characters continue to add color and
texture to the show, most notably Ike (Joe Conley) and Corabeth
Godsey (Ronnie Claire Edwards), the Baldwin sisters (Helen Kleeb,
Mary Jackson), and newcomer Rev. Tom Marshall (Kip Niven), who
starts off a firebrand and ends up a civilizing influence over
the aforementioned anti-Semitic tensions. --Tom Keogh