If you've read this blog for a while or checked out our domain, you will know that I am a fan of the four Addie Mills specials that CBS television produced in the 1970s. The first, The House Without a Christmas Tree, led to three sequels, The Thanksgiving Treasure, The Easter Promise, and Addie and the King of Hearts (about Valentine's Day), and the stories starred Lisa Lucas as Addie, Jason Robards as her father James Mills, and Mildred Natwick as James' mother, who raised motherless Addie in late 1940s Nebraska.

I was just turned 17 when House Without a Christmas Tree aired for the first time. I loved Addie. I was always drawing to go along with my stories and made a calendar every year using a calendar blank and illustrated with drawings from my stories, and in that she reminded me a lot of myself. She also loved English and vocabulary as I did. Unlike Addie, I didn't want to be an artist when I grew up; I just drew for fun. I also didn't have Addie's extroverted personality, which I envied. She wasn't afraid of anyone.

The specials ran from 1972 through 1976, and, of course, Addie grew up in the course of the stories. I remember that when I first saw the shows I loved the first two installments and was more lukewarm about the second pair, and for years had chalked it up to the fact that Addie getting older and worrying about clothes and boys was boring. In any case, when the specials showed up on the Disney Channel back in the 1980s, I videotaped House Without a Christmas Tree and Thanksgiving Treasure and skipped the other two.

While Easter Promise made it to VHS, King of Hearts simply disappeared. After I put together my Addie Mills website, I thought I would love to see them both again, but knew Easter Promise would be the only one available.

A week or so before Christmas this year, I found a copy of The Easter Promise on Half.com that was very reasonably priced (things like this program and The Gathering are super-popular on eBay and video sites and command big duckies), so I sprang for it and rewatched it just recently.

These are character-driven stories and I've heard many people complain that they are dull. While I disagree (courteously! <g>) about Christmas Tree and Treasure, I did find myself a bit bored during Promise. I thought the stories for the first two were more engaging; even the second tale on the old theme of the child befriending an embittered elderly person had a couple of twists to it. But the Promise story just seems like the same take on another old theme: child befriends successful person who turns out to be not the success people think and who is really insecure and unhappy.

Had the story been more appealing I probably wouldn't have noticed what bothered me the most.

CBS went very cheap filming all the Addie stories, using the same videotape they used for the daytime soaps. Many critics of the stories really hate this, but I was always able to look beyond it because I enjoyed the characters and stories so. In fact, it gave the stories a "reality show" type POV, as if you were observing an actual family in 1940-whatever.

However, in the first two specials CBS also allowed the story to be filmed "on location," if not in Nebraska, at least on the prairies, the Canadian prairies, and in a little town in Ontario, Uxbridge, that looked a lot like Nebraska must have looked back then. You didn't have the Little House on the Prairie effect with "Minnesota" looking like the southern California hills and it lent much to the verisimilitude of the story.

The Easter Promise exteriors are filmed on a stage set and it shows very, very badly on videotape, especially a scene where Addie arrives when James and Grandma are working in the vegetable garden and also in the scenes where Constance's house is visited. The situation which has been so carefully crafted previously is jolted by the glaring sets and for me, at least, the illusion was ruined. One scene has Addie visiting James on the job and he is using his crane near a wooden bridge that has been used in so many television shows that it sticks out like that proverbial sore thumb in the background.

They couldn't even be bothered to try to duplicate the "Clear River" scenes of the first two stories and it diverges wildly from Addie's original opening narration to House Without a Christmas Tree where she declares that Clear River is so small there are no buildings over three stories tall and the town has no traffic light because none is needed. The closing scene clearly shows a downtown that is a lot larger (and taller) than Addie described.

So while it was nice to see Lisa Lucas and company again, The Easter Promise (yes, I'll say it) failed to live up to the promise of its predecessors. Still, a DVD set of them all would be really nice.

Labels: Addie Mills

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:37:00 AM

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