Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 November 22

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November 22[edit]

Little House on the Prairie - episode guide leaflet[edit]

Since there was no episode guide leaflet with the Little House on the Prairie: Complete Series Deluxe Edition DVD, I am trying to create one. The trouble is... some of the plot summaries of each episode are very short, in the wrong order and have words that weren't used, seen or mentioned on-screen? 86.129.30.28 (talk) 22:28, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Do the best you can. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:24, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
[Edit Conflict] Courtesy link to jump-off article: Little House on the Prairie (TV series).
These plot summaries are presumably the ones at List of Little House on the Prairie episodes, which is linked from the article above in the 'Region 1 & 2' table entry for "The Complete Television Series", which was (according to the entry Released as a 'Digital copy' on September 9, 2014 and as a 'Remastered DVD & Blu-ray' on October 6, 2015 (DVD only). Your quoted title corresponds to the last Region 4' (Australia) table entry ("The Complete Series (Deluxe Edition) (Remastered)") which was released on November 18, 2020.
It's very likely that this later version re-orders some of the episodes and has different cuts of some of the episodes than does the earlier version. The section Little House on the Prairie (TV series)#Home media says "There are multiple DVD sets which are noticeably different from one another" and goes on to detail a number of the differences. Differently cut versions of episodes may have been broadcast in different places and dates in slightly different orders; different releases of the same season's collection may not fully correspond, and different "complete collection" releases may differ in details from all of these and from each other.
We must presume that the plot summaries and episode order in 'List of . . . for Regions 1 & 2' are correct for that 2014/15 release version until shown otherwise, but there likely are mistakes and discrepancies because of the abovementioned differences and because different contributors may have been working from different episode version. It would be surprising if your Region 4 compilation of 2020 did not contain many detail differences in episode cuts and running order compared to the 2014/15 ones.
Would it be worth adding details of differences between different episode versions to the articles? I suspect this would be overkill for a general encyclopaedia, and would take a huge amount of research – such minutiae are probably best left to other sites. Would it be worth compiling a separate article listing and summarising the episodes in the 2020 'Complete' release? I doubt it but wouldn't oppose it. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.218.227.124 (talk) 00:29, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have been searching the guide of episodes on Google and some websites (e.g. lhop.steve-p.org, littlehouseontheprairie.com, amazon.co.uk & amazon.com) and some of the plot summaries are very short, in the wrong order, have words that weren't used, seen or mentioned on-screen and have identical summaries. 86.129.30.28 (talk) 20:39, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Inevitably, because they were doubtless written by various different people based on different versions of episodes, and different orders of episodes in different collections, and possibly different original orders of broadcast in different areas and periods. There is no "definitive" version of the series with particular cuts of each episode in a particular exact order of all episodes.
If you want to compile a booklet for the particular collection you have, you will probably have to watch the whole thing and write your own summaries of those versions of all the episodes. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.218.227.124 (talk) 14:15, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]