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List Price: $39.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 2015
Released: April 28, 2009 |
| Our Price: $27.50 |
| Used Price: $24.64 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
For nine seasons from 1972 to 1981, the Walton family was America's family. Viewers' hearts were captured by the story of John and Olivia Walton, their seven children, Grandpa and Grandma as they faced the Depression and World War II with not much more than a love of the land and the rock-solid support of each other. This elegiac final season is the ideal capstone to the Emmy-honored and lovingly remembered series. The Walton boys endure terrifying dangers in Europe and the Pacific, then gratefully return to Walton's Mountain when the war ends. Peace brings new challenges, but also new beginnings and - for many of the family, young and old - new love. Share the final good night with The Waltons.
Description of The Waltons: The Complete Ninth Season:
The final season of The Waltons is notable for the ever-changing number of people sitting at the family's long dinner table. Early in the season, with all four boys at war in Europe and Japan, plates are set for John Sr. (Ralph Waite), cousin Rose (Peggy Rea)--the de facto woman of the house with matriarch Olivia (Michael Learned) gone away--and sisters Mary Ellen (Judy Norton-Taylor), Erin (Mary Beth McDonough), and Elizabeth (Kami Cotler), plus brother Ben's wife Cindy (Leslie Winston). Once the war is over and Ben, Jim-Bob (David W. Harper), Jason (Jon Walmsley) and John-Boy (Robert Wightman, replacing Richard Thomas) are back home, the number of people seated at that table still continues to go up and down for all kinds of reasons. That fluctuation says much about the state of the family and of The Waltons itself, long past the era when all those kids were still in school and regularly eating with a full complement of parents and grandparents. With both of the latter gone and even John Sr. disappearing halfway through the season to help ailing Olivia move to Arizona, it's the young people ruling the roost now.
Things start off powerfully with the two-part "The Outrage," in which John Sr. leaps to the defense of an African-American employee, Harley (Hal Foster), who has been living under an assumed name since escaping a chain gang years before. Never a show to back off from issues of discrimination, The Waltons: The Complete Ninth Season, tackles gender bias (Mary Ellen is turned down for admission to medical school, while Erin is one of many women on Walton's Mountain who lose their jobs to returning veterans) and anti-Semitism (Jason's wonderful girlfriend Toni, played by Lisa Harrison, causes a stir when everyone discovers she's a Jew). Meanwhile, John-Boy falls in love with a Parisian bookseller who encourages him to write an article about stray land mines, though his true destiny as a writer leads him back to his roots. Ben, too, is full of ambition following the war, eager to attend engineering college but needed at the family mill after John Sr. leaves. Jason takes over the Dew Drop Inn and finds a way to make a go of it with Toni's help. Rose rediscovers love again when her dance partner, Stanley (William Schallert), returns, albeit as an emotional wreck. (The Rose-Stanley storylines in season nine are among the sweetest episodes.) In a strange development, Mary Ellen's allegedly late husband turns up, a very different and darker personality than he was before. Other new and recurring characters continue to add color and texture to the show, most notably Ike (Joe Conley) and Corabeth Godsey (Ronnie Claire Edwards), the Baldwin sisters (Helen Kleeb, Mary Jackson), and newcomer Rev. Tom Marshall (Kip Niven), who starts off a firebrand and ends up a civilizing influence over the aforementioned anti-Semitic tensions. --Tom Keogh
The Waltons: The Complete Ninth Season Reviews:
Happy ending for some 
2009-10-17 - The ninth or last season of the Waltons held happy endings for some, but not for all of the people living on Waltons Mountain. Not everyone's dreams were fulfilled, but it ended with all of the characters, seemingly, accepting whatever life gave them so far.
As usual, all is well with the Waltons, but be forewarned that the tenth episode called, "The Tempest" should have never been written. The dead are always left better off dead and not brought back to life, especially in such a disagreeable way. That part was played by a different actor who was not the same actor who had played the original part of the person who was mistaken to be dead. They had to hire a totally new actor just to present us with this unlikely and unnecessary episode. Even the reality of war could not justify such an unbelievable episode as this one was. Neither did it have a happy ending or even a happy followup in another episode. It left me feeling sad and empty, unlike most of the other episodes that had given me so much comfort.
The rest of this season was good, but it did not appear that this season was originally intended to end here. I would have preferred that this last season had given us a better ending to the entire story. That could have even been done by John Boy at the end of the last episode, but it was not. In speaking about himself, he could have also added some more information about the rest of the family members in his very last words.
In another one of the last episodes of this season, Rose and Stanley finally got married, but it never showed what happened with the rest of the Waltons. Mary Ellen and Erin could have had a double wedding at the Baldwins house in the last episode (something a little more spectacular for a last episode than just an old people's reunion for the Baldwin ladies with the Waltons showing up). Although it was implied that Elizabeth and Drew would someday be married, what about Jason, and Jim Bob? In one episode, Jason and his girlfriend overcame the obstacles they faced to getting married, yet the season left them unmarried, not dating and no explanation!
Jason and Jim Bob probably never did fulfill their dreams of becoming a concert musician and an airplane pilot, and you're left wondering if they settled for what they were doing at the moment. Mary Ellen was left still studying to become a doctor and who knows how far Erin went in her career, as well. That's reasonable, but did Olivia and John ever come home? And what about Grandma? They finally did tell where she was, but it still leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions about her and everyone else.
John Boy continued writing, of course, but they really should have done a tenth season to answer these questions about the other characters. Even if they could not do this on a practical basis, at the very least, they could have used the Special Feature at the end of the eighth season, known as "A Decade of the Waltons" for an ending here, where it really belonged, at the end of the nineth season (at the very end of the Walton's story). That would have given the ninth season and its viewers some closure, if not a really satisfying ending.
Even with all of my complaints about it, I still love all of the Walton series, including this one, but this tells me one thing. -Endings are important and should be done right. I'd still recommend that you buy it because the only thing that you'll really be disappointed in, is that it all ends here. Sadly, there is no more 'Waltons' and we'll never see anything this good in a television series ever again. I'm sure that we can all say 'Amen' to that.
Grey's Anatomy 
2009-09-23 - I just like this show. I think it's funny that they have to do surgery on just about everyone.
Final Season
2009-08-18 - I grew up watching the Waltons. Although it is disapointing that they tried to replace John Boy with another actor. I still enjoyed the last season anyway.
A bittersweet final season with the Walton clan...
2009-08-14 - The final season of The Waltons finds the family in the grasp of World War II's final year. Now, all four sons are in the Army, with Ben taken POW by the Japanese. Meanwhile, his wife Cindy is living with the clan, taking care of their baby Virginia and dreading news of his fate, while daughter Mary Ellen decides to pursue med school, and daughter Erin continues her job as office manager at the factory. Youngest daughter Elizabeth, long considered the baby of the clan, is turning into a young woman, preparing to finish high school and thinking about her own future.
Noticeably absent are Ellen Corby as Grandma (vaguely said to be off "visiting" all these long months) and Michael Learned as Mrs. Walton, said to be off at the VA hospital where she began volunteering when eldest son John-Boy came home gravely wounded. In reality, Learned had asked to be written off; yet on the show itself, her absence was poorly explained as the character continued to stay at the hospital long after John-Boy recovered and went back into the war -- missing numerous Walton special occasions such as youngest son Jim-Bob's high school graduation and all four boys marching off to war, occasions a mother certainly would not have missed, being a mere drive away.
All throughout this season, it's clear -- both to viewers and the Walton family -- that life as the family knows it is changing irrevocably.
Particularly memorable Season 9 episodes include the two-part "The Outrage," where John struggles to clear the name of Harley, a black friend who was long ago charged with killing a white man; "The Pursuit," when a obsessive girl arrives at the Walton home, claiming to be pregnant with Jim-Bob's baby; and "The Last Ten Days," showing Ben's nightmarish experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war as the fighting begins to wind down, and the family is both optimistic about the war's end yet scared that Ben's angry captors might choose to kill him upon their defeat.
No matter the show's shortcomings, The Waltons was and is, throughout its long run, a classic series. True to life, each episode is full of life-testing situations, warmth, faith and humor -- it will long be remembered and missed by countless fans.
dvd review
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