The Silver Dollar Saloon

Does Adam make all of his money on the Ponderosa, the timber, and mines, or does he take architecture and engineering side jobs?

Continuing from #4, which has been locked. Beginning a new discussion thread for members to discuss the episodes they most recently watched. As with previous threads, members may add a screen cap from their favorites if they wish.

Is there an episode when the Cartwrights are in a cafe/ saloon/hotel loudly speaking about making sure a large amount of money is delivered to where it needs to go? I am sure i have seen it. I just cannot find it. In my head, I call it the Cartwright School of Financial Management.

After running into the third Laurie today in about twenty episodes, I started poking around this afternoon to look at the crazy repetition of women's names on Bonanza. I found eight Laura's or Laurie's from memory or just a little searching on IMDB - if you can think of any I missed, please chime in! Laura White (Season 3: “The Storm”) Laurie Hayden (Season 4, “Five into the Wind”) Laura Dayton (Season 5, recurring) Laurie Ferguson (Season 8, “Something Hurt, Something Wild”) Laura Pollard (Season 9, “Star-Crossed) Laurie Adams (Season 10, “Sweet Annie Laurie”) Laurie McGraw (Season 10, “The Unwanted”) Laurie Nagel (Season 11, “The Medal”) The three Laura's were all se…

Not sure where to post this, but I came across it this morning and thought it was interesting! https://cartwrightmovieranch.com/about-us/

I'm reading Dead Wake The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson. If you remember, Charles Dickens wanted to stop the printing of one of his works in Virginia City. It could have been construed as copyright infringement. Interestingly, according to Erik Larson, in 1844, Dickens brought a series of legal actions against "'literary pirates'" who republished A Christmas Carol. On the inside front and back of Dickens' own volume of this story as well as elsewhere in the volume, were notes about the lawsuits Dickens himself had jotted. It's possible the writers of "A Passion for Justice" may have learned about the lawsuits and worked them into the premise for the s…

Bonanza's musical director David Rose was the first husband of Judy Garland. (Martha Raye was Mr. Rose's first wife.) From what I understand, David Rose and Judy remained on good terms. I also understand Michael Landon revered and adored David Rose about as much as revered and adored Lorne Greene. I also read or heard somewhere that Judy gave Mike an autographed picture signed something like "Best Wishes from Dorothy Gale to Little Joe". I also read Pernell appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show the same night Liza Minelli did. (Judy was waiting in the wings.) Also., Lorna Luft played a nurse on Trapper John. M.D. The Impossibe Wish: seeing Pernell and Judy singing together. Fi…

2028 will mark the 100th birthday for James Garner (4/7/1928), Shirley Temple Black(4/23/1928), Rosemary Clooney (5/23/1928), and of course, Pernell Roberts (5/18/1928), Dan Blocker, and of course M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E (11/18/1928). Any more? P.S. I just got back from a solo trip to Disneyland.

How many episodes of Bonanza could be considered murder mysteries? I'll start: The Sisters.

Some Presidential Holiday Fun: What are some ideas for episodes that you wished had been made. 1) Sequel to "The Crucible". How did Adam deal with the trauma Cain inflicted upon him? 2) Sequel to "Marie My Love". How did Adam and Hoss deal with a new stepmother? 3) Sequel #2 to "Marie My Love". How did the whole family deal with Marie's death? Did Ben leave his boys, leaving Adam in charge? I know, I'm a total Adam Gal, but I'd love to hear more ideas.

The Cartwrights were rich, they bought their clothes, and no wives on the Ponderosa. In some episodes, women wear a crocheted shawl. I don't remember seeing them doing needlework or sewing, except for the women who worked as a seamstresses because they had to earn money. In the Laura-Ingalls-episodes, fabric is often bought in the Olsen store. Caroline sews clothes for herself and the daughters and shirts for Charles. Has one of the numerous girlfriends ever sewn a shirt for the Cartwrights or knitted them socks?

Everyone - I am trying to find any books on Bonanza - fiction or not - to create a library of Bonanza writings. If anyone has any titles that I can research and see if I can locate a book to add to my new library, please let me know. Thanks!

While perusing The Western Hero in Film and Television by Rita Parks, an appendix pertaining to Bonanza caught my attention. I thought I'd share it here! Edited to add: if it's too difficult to read, let me know and I'll type it up.

Continuing on from thread #3 which as been locked.

I've had a (not terribly serious!) theory for a while that Bonanza actually features two separate and distinct casts of main characters. There are our regular Cartwrights, who are intelligent, thoughtful, highly capable people who work hard on the ranch, help their neighbors, fall into serious and often tragic love affairs, and get into a good number of deadly situations. And then there are the ComedyCartwrights, who resemble the regular ones but are very different in significant ways. ComedyJoe is more prone to wild plans and, unfortunately for everyone around, less capable of carrying them out than regular Joe. He tends to be more selfish and inconsiderat…

I finished out watching Season 8 last night, so I'm back with more statistics before I head into the Candy Years with Season 9. (Side question - does anyone have a good name for this era in between? The Three Cartwrights Era? The Middle Seasons?) Like I did with the Adam Years and my Seasons 1-6 stats, I'll drop a couple of charts at a time as we go, with some commentary. Starting off with the basics, Episode Leads, or how many Ben episodes, Hoss episodes, etc., we had each season. I've also counted "Full cast" episodes when all three shared the lead pretty equally. We had just a couple "Non-Cartwright (NC)" episodes, where even if they were on-screen, it felt like…

Not sure exactly where to post this, but I wanted to let everybody know that Bonanza is playing on Pluto and they aren't playing just seasons 1 and 2 like you see streaming all over the place. I came home last looking for something to watch and happened on the western section of Pluto and lo and behold there it was. Season four in all it's glory. The picture quality is excellent. I'd love to know where Pluto picked up this package. Maybe from TVLAND. I haven't seen any evidence that the show is running there lately and thank goodness for that because they cut the episodes for more commercial time to the extent that it really isn't worth watching. Pluto does not do that. A…

I watched Ponderosa Explosion last night, which was delightful fun but also got me (over)thinking about the Cartwrights and their money situations. Near the end of the episode, Ben tells Hoss and Joe that they can use their wages for the next three months to pay him back $100 for a horse. I don't actually think the writers gave those numbers much thought, but...overthinking brief details is sort of what I do, so here we go! If Hoss and Joe together will need three months to pay off $100, that means they're earning about $16 a month, or slightly less than $4 a week. We talked about wages recently in a discussion about Ride the Wind, and thank you to @CareBea…

Now that I’ve completed my project to watch all the episodes written by ML, I thought I’d share some thoughts about the episodes and ML himself. First of all, until about 4 months ago I didn’t know that Michael Landon was anything other than a pretty boy actor so he has been a complete and wonderous revelation to me. (You may wonder which rock I’d been living under but there we are.) It was that revelation that made me want to watch his episodes in order to see 1) how he developed as a writer and 2) on the basis that there’s always something of the creator in the creation, what they might tell me about the man himself. So here goes! …

What are your guys' favorite comfort episodes? Doesn't have to necessarily be your favorite. For me, I really love S5E12 "Hoss and the Leprechauns". Gets me going every time. I also find any of the "_____ My Love" episodes very comfy to watch.

No eps for me today. Boo hoo.

I finished out my rewatch of Season 7 last night - I figure I'll post more detailed statistics at the end of Season 8, before getting into the Candy years, but I wanted to just drop a few comments on this season now. First, it was clearly all hands on deck when Roberts left, because the remaining three Cartwrights appear on every episode, barring a single time Joe is absent. That's statistically unprecedented - even setting aside Adam's higher levels of absence, the other three have not shown up THAT much in any season before. It also felt like very few of those appearances were just cameos (only a single scene or hanging in the background), and there were mo…

As I’ve mentioned a few places around here, I’m currently doing a (re)watch through the series in order, and tracking some details along the way. The watch continues, but I recently completed Season 6 – clearly the end of an era, with Adam’s departure! It feels like a good time to share some statistics up to this point. Instead of dumping a ton of information all at once, I’ll try to drop a few different stats over the next few days. Here's a couple to start off... Episode Leads: Obviously there are “Joe episodes” and “Adam episodes” and so on, so I’ve tracked how many of each. This gets more subjective when two or more Cartwrights all have meaningful role…

We know that at ML and DB tried to tease each other when out of sight of the camera, trying to make each other crack. What scenes have y’all seen where it seems pretty obvious someone accidentally dropped their character for a moment? I’ll go first with my new favorite episode, The Found Child. Little Lisa is in shock and just stares with no smiling. Hoss tries to get her to eat by making a funny noise but she does crack a little and I wondered if something didn’t happen between takes or if ML was making faces at her off screen 😂

Even though I'm a Joe gal through and through, I relate to Adam the most! We have so many things in common it's almost kinda weird ! We're both the oldest of three (to make it even weirder, my younger siblings and I almost have the same exact age gaps as the Cartwrights), we both love to read, and we both don't get super emotional (or I should say it takes a lot to actually make us lose our cool). Adam sometimes tends to me moody when something's bothering him and I do the same thing, but then of course there's big differences, like his intelligence. I am in no wise anywhere near as smart as he is! Which Cartwright do you relate to the most?