Reviews

In the last episode of Mr. Moron, the cheap so and so, he bought a house in California, near San Francisco. That must have cost Monk more than two cents. A few episodes ago Monk gave away 400 hundred dollars to strangers when he was undercover in a bank. He pays around 1200 dollars per month for his apartment, and even more a month to see his shrink 3 or 4 times a week, but he is too cheap to buy a a new coffee pot and to pay Natalie what he owes her. Make no mistake Monk has money and lots of it (Trudy probably had a good insurance policy with a double indemnity clause as well as a good retirement account that would have gone to cheapo Monk) but he has no respect to the people who help in cope with his petty life and apparently they take this kind of abuse willingly. He owes darling Natalie 1800 dollars in back pay which she likely will never get even with his 5000 dollar commission.

The show opens with Natalie telling Moron Monk he needs to replace his 27 year old toaster. Moron Monk is too cheap to spend the 20 to 30 dollars to replace his precious heirloom which he may have owned before his Trudy marriage. Wow. Cheapo Monk has a nice apartment that likely cost 1200 dollars a month, he sees Dr. Kroger, what 3 times a week. That must cost him 300 dollar a visit. That adds up to 3600 a month. No wonder he can't pay his assistants what they are worth. Yet because, well he is a moron, halfwit Monk can give a stranger 2 dollars so she will have an even 100 dollars to put in the bank where he is now working as a security guard to find Trudy's missing jewelry. The clod wastes his bank time and ink to even out the ink in two Bic pens. Wow. This is funny, ha ha.

For some reason, after Will Greer died and Ellen Corby had her stroke, the writing in this show declined terribly and got overly simplistic and mushy. This episode is a case in point. The always interesting Miss Corby sadly is not in in this episode.

As pointed out, there are two plots in every episodes in of the Waltons. One has teaching Ike to dance. That is the minor plot. Elizabeth and Amy connived to have Ike learn and have newly introduced character cousin Rose teach him. Corabeth finds evidence that Ike may be having a liaison and determines to leave him for the umpteenth time with a brief note. In typical sappy fashion, All's Well That Ends Well.

The major plot concerns Olivia and her love of children. Olivia becomes a bleeding heart on the discovery of children running wild at the plant where Erin works. She decides to open a day care center and take care of the children while their parents, who apparently have no grandparents or other country relatives, to care for their children. Her plans go awry when one of the toddlings wanders into John's shop and turns on a power saw. A brief moment of suspense as we break away for commercial.

John's shop, of course, is never locked except by a wooden plank that is easily removed. This hazard with the child allows John to shut down Olivia's day care center forcing her to seek other solutions from the big, old, lying, ogre, owner of the company that employs the children's parents who rather have a bar built than a daycare center. A typical trope of TV shows like this is business people are evil or stupid or greedy. We, at least, have two of these in the character of J. D.

Hey John Walton, aren't you concern about buglers stealing your equipment? Rarely see that old dog of your'n anymore. Woof Woof.

Anyway, this problem could have easily been solved if John Walton bought more padlocks and maybe some cowbell. Buy those too John. More Cowbells. More Padlocks. Again All's Well That Ends Well. Yuck! Does John Walton even know there are padlocks?

What this episode reveals is how stupid the Walton characters have become when a simple padlock would have secure a safe place on the Walton saw mill for these poor waives to play.

"Mr. Dillion", Chester might say, "Why did you let that varmint go free". And Matt says, "Cause I got nothing to hold him on".

Wait a cotton pickin' minute! I don't believe Jim's story. I don't believe the first one and I don't believe the second one. And why is Doc there? Just so he can get face time on TV?

Jim showed himself to be a liar and Matt just shrugged it off like it was another Sunday on the Prairie. Don't feed me those prairie Oysters!! No sir, I am not buying this left over stale cow-pie. Two wives missing and that is not suspicious. The guy rides off to do what--have a 3rd and 4th wife missing?There was an easy way to find out if the guy was telling the truth or not. Dig up the body and have doc examine it for foul play. Wasn't that the excuse for Matt bringing Doc out there in the first place? So why wasn't that done?

It may not have been decisive but it would have revealed more than we got from a guy with two missing wives and lies. Come on Marshall do your job.

The themes of this episode are pride and vanity. John-Boy is the object of both. He enters a special writing class and, at first, feels inferior to the other students. Meanwhile his determined mother, worried about her son, seeks out a book publisher, not realizing it is a Vanity Press.

When John-Boy learns his writings are going to published in book form, his confidence grows as does his ego. He becomes a braggart, and conceited around his pretentious classmates, only to end up embarrassed when he learns his writings are published by a Vanity Press and that he is responsible for the bill.

The program shows the Vanity Press as a shady business run by dishonest people who resort to trickery to sucker people into paying for their writings to be published. John-Boy had ample opportunity to learn the truth when he signed the contract but his pride at being published made him not carefully read the contract agreement to the point of even objecting to his father reading it.

Some people may think a Vanity Press is a con job as a previous reviewer wrote but they are, in fact, a legitimate business.

John-Boy's published short stories were not worthless as shown in the episode, he received his books as agreed in the contract, he also had a responsibility to sell his books. I have known people who have used a Vanity Press to get their writings published, and then have marketed them and had them sold in legitimate bookstores. When interviewing them, they seemed quite happy and excited by their success. I am sure there are less ambitious people who do not follow through but selling your product is part of the agreement you are making when you use such a service. The show simply fails to follow up on this aspect of using a vanity press so John-Boy's are shown as a worthless adventure.

There are things John-Boy could have done to sell his books. He could have taken them to his college book store and worked out an agreement that they would receive a percentage of the sales, and priced his books so that he could pay off his bill to the publisher and made a profit. He could have taken them to the town book store and worked out a similar agreement. He could have advertised them in a local newspapers, or bought advertising in a magazine or comic as bodybuilder Joe Wider did when starting his body-building and nutrition business or Hal Richman did later when starting his famous sport game company Stat-O-Matic. He could have set up a stand on his campus and sold his books from there. John-Boy simply gave up and acted emotionally irrational when he learned of his mother's mistake in publisher and acted like his precious writings were worthless because he was published in a Vanity Press.