- Welcome back to another segment
of Behind the Scenes of "The Waltons."
Today, I'm talking about the episode, "The Prize."
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"The Prize" is an episode from Season 2,
in which many members of the family and a special guest
who comes by the mountain
are all in search of their own sort of prize.
Early in the episode, I am in the kitchen,
washing my hair or doing something special with it,
but because at one point I asked mama
if she would pour a vinegar rinse over my hair.
And I think it's just designed to kind of help
get all the extra oils out of my hair
because Grandma makes some comment about that.
And Mama replies that at my age,
I've got more oil in my hair than I know what to do with.
I was fortunate to not go through
a really oily hair phase personally,
but that was a lot of hair to get wet
and to have to then deal with wet in a number of scenes
and they weren't all shot at the same time.
So for several scenes that are supposed to be consecutive,
when you see me, my hair is still wet
or some degree of wet inside, outside,
and depending on when those were shot,
they would have had to wet my hair down again
so that it matched.
Evidently Yancy has given Ben a pig
that he is named Rover that has now grown,
and he has been asked if he will let his pig
be used for a greased pig contest
at the upcoming fair for which he will be paid a dollar
and he's hoping to maybe use that dollar
to get a female pig and start a little pig farm. You know
raising pigs and selling them.
So he's looking forward to that.
I thought it was interesting that he named the pig Rover
and we never really saw the pig again,
but in later seasons, Jim Bob had a peacock
that he named Rover,
so Rover became a popular Walton pet name.
It's Sunday after church and the Baldwin sisters
stop by with a guest.
This is Oscar Cockrell,
who was a boyhood friend of John's
and also a sometime suitor early on of Olivia.
I guess they went on a couple of dates
and she says later that she only went out with him
to make John jealous.
So she was never seriously interested in him,
but he seems to have been seriously interested in her.
Now the character of Oscar was played by Peter Donat.
Peter was Michael Learned's first husband,
and they actually were divorced in 1972
shortly before Michael started doing "The Waltons,"
so interesting that he came back
and did an episode of the series.
Clearly they were still close enough
that there was no animosity with them working together
and they had lovely on-screen chemistry.
And I never sensed any sort of tension
around the set between the two of them.
I think being the parents of three boys together,
you know, they had to always have a working relationship,
so that was lovely to see.
Peter was also the nephew
of Oscar winning actor Robert Donat.
Oscar is back on the mountain
because he is running for the legislature,
so he is back to drum up support
and sort of campaign in the area.
He has mixed feelings about pursuing this political career,
because he feels that he is not particularly easily able
to get people to warm up to him,
that he has trouble connecting with people,
and he sees that members of the Walton family,
he feels that John is very good at that.
John Boy is good at that.
Olivia is good at that.
And he, I think, wishes that he were more like that.
Olivia is planning to enter a cake from the recipe
of Cousin Polly into the fair contest
and is hoping to win first place.
Grandma is going to be entering a quilt
that she has spent three years making,
and she is also hoping to win first place.
Lighting always fascinates me,
particularly when there are circumstances
where lights change - things like that.
In this case, we are all supposedly,
the three girls are going to bed.
I go and I turn the lights out
and you see the room definitely gets very dim.
Then I get in bed and the three girls have a conversation.
Well, when they go into this two-shot of Erin and Elizabeth,
you can see them very clearly.
So it seems like an awful lot of light,
and yet no one turned the light back on.
It cuts back to Mary Ellen,
and there was a lot of light on me.
So I can see how it would be challenging
if you dim the lights the way they really would be,
you wouldn't be able to see the actors at all,
and yet if you throw on enough light for them
to really be visible, then they can look like,
where did this light come from?
So definitely an art form to being able
to light all of this.
And I think it was more difficult in film circumstances,
because digital just allows for different manipulation
of the light than film actually did.
When Olivia is getting ready to frost the cake,
and she has been in need of almonds,
she finds out that they weren't able to get almonds
from the store, that they were all out.
So she's not quite sure what she's going to do,
and Grandma confesses that it wasn't almonds
that Cousin Polly put in. That
it was actually whiskey.
Mama is shocked, and Grandma was like, well, you know,
and surprisingly, that Grandma's kind of like,
"well, it's not illegal anymore since prohibition is over,"
and she knows that Grandpa has a secret storage of it,
a little bottle that he keeps
that he doesn't know she knows about.
She said she feels that it's good for men to have secrets.
So she doesn't want him to know,
but she is willing to go pinch a little bit, just a smidgen,
as she says, for the cake so that'll have that extra taste
and Olivia, really wanting to win, goes along.
Oscar comes by driving a beautiful convertible,
I'll try and see if I can find out what that is,
and he talks to Olivia as we are picking raspberries.
Mary Ellen eavesdrops, having her, I think, suspicions
about what Oscar's intentions are.
Oscar talks to Olivia a little bit about his wife
who is, I guess, a bit younger
than all of them were in school.
And his wife is off in Europe
and seems to be perfectly happy
to sort of live her own life,
and I think Oscar doesn't have
a particularly happy, close relationship and marriage
as John and Olivia clearly do.
That evening, Grandpa goes for a little nip of the recipe
before going to bed and notices that some is missing.
He's a little bit like, "who might have taken that?"
He looks over at Esther and as he gets in bed,
he leans over to try and smell her breath
to see if she smells of the recipe,
and he startles her awake and accuses her
of having taken his whiskey.
And she's like, "don't be ridiculous."
He says, "well, someone in the house
smells like the recipe."
Oscar ends up giving John Boy a ride to the fair,
and as the two of them are driving along,
the shot transitions from a live scene on the back lot
to a process shot.
So in this case, this would be a screen behind the car
with footage from a road playing behind them.
However, I noticed that it didn't seem to be
exactly the same terrain as they were driving on
in the real shot, mainly because I know that back lot
and I know that that's not what it looked like.
And all of a sudden we have different trees
and it's wider and all that.
But if someone didn't know what the back lot looked like,
they would totally buy this.
We arrive at the fairgrounds
where all kinds of wonderful little booths
and a few rides have been set up
somewhere on the backlight of the studio.
I think we were someplace in the jungle,
maybe on the edge of Western Street where they set this up,
perhaps in the area near where the church we use
sometimes was.
So it was always a lot of fun
when they had this sort of thing set up,
because shortly after that,
all the kids get to go ride on this,
what Elizabeth calls, a merry-go-round,
which is really just kind of a roundabout
sitting in these buckled in kind of seats.
And so there we were, we got to go ride this for some time.
And again, because of the way shooting is done,
there are several instances where you can see
that we are on this ride,
but it would have been different shots,
different angles, the camera would've moved,
and so when they finished,
they would have gotten us off the ride,
they would have reset, but then they would have,
when they started again,
if they could see that ride in the background,
they would have put us all back on that ride
in the same seats we were in,
and we would have ridden again
to be in the background of that shot.
So that can be fun sometimes
if it doesn't go on and on and on,
and you aren't getting a little seasick from it.
In this case, I think it was a lot of fun.
The Baldwin sisters also have something
to enter in the fair in competition,
and that is their jelly.
They really confused the woman
who is running the jelly stand,
because they can't quite tell her what it is.
It doesn't look like raspberry,
it doesn't quite look like strawberry,
and they're like, "oh no, no.
It's a very special recipe from our Papa, the judge."
And she's very confused.
And finally, they all agree
that it'll go in the family recipe section,
which is just perfect.
John Boy finds Grandpa sitting with a couple of other men,
just, you know, telling tall tales
about being with Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill
with the rough riders when they charged up the hill
and John Boy knows this isn't entirely true.
Grandpa does like to tell tall tales,
and sometimes they get more and more exaggerated
the more he tells them.
A cute sequence as the men compete
to try and ring the bell.
Oscar comes nowhere close, John Boy sends it
right up to the top as does John Walton.
It's time to judge the jelly competition.
And as Dr. Vance, one of the judges,
taste the Baldwin's jelly, you see his reaction,
and it doesn't take him more than one taste
to realize what this jelly is flavored with.
And all the judges are very enamored of this jelly
and it does indeed win first place.
John and John boy win at the ball toss
and win the kids a couple of stuffed prizes.
Grandma, unfortunately, does not win
in her quilting competition, and she's very upset,
because she feels that the person who actually did win
is using a quilt that she had won with once before
and so she's not playing fair.
Olivia does in fact win, her cake wins first place
in the cake competition,
Grandpa swipes a little taste of that frosting
just to confirm what he suspected,
that indeed the recipe was the secret ingredient
that put Olivia's cake over the top.
As it's time for Oscar to give his speech,
he's getting some ribbing from the audience
who are unimpressed by his prepared written speech,
and finally he tosses it aside,
and he speaks from the heart,
and makes a far stronger impression on the crowd.
He's just himself and says what he really feels,
proving once again, the best thing we can do
is be ourselves and be honest.
It kind of wraps up with the greased pig competition
where a number of the men in town
try to catch the grease pig.
The pig at one point gets out of the little pen
and runs through the fair
and everybody's trying to catch it.
Ultimately, George Porter catches it and as he does,
he recognizes his mark on the pig's ear,
asks Ben where it came from,
and John offers to buy it off of him,
because he knows Ben wants to go into raising pigs,
into that business, and so he arranges to buy the pig.
He doesn't have the money on him,
Oscar pulls out his billfold,
and then looks at Olivia who basically, you know,
sends him a look that says, "no, he shouldn't do that."
And she offers up the $5 she won
for winning the cake competition
and they use that to buy the pig.
As they walk off, John comments that he felt bad
that Olivia didn't get to buy something
for herself with that money,
and she replies that she has everything she could want.
That's what I have for you for this segment
of Behind the Scenes of "The Waltons,"
about the episode, "The Prize."
I'll be back with more Behind the Scenes
of "The Waltons" and more Ask Judy.
Thanks for watching.