ridiculous rating

Best movie ever!

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

During the Sixties CBS was known as the rural station because heading its ratings were such shows as Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and the show from where Green Acres spun from, Petticoat Junction. You loved the endearing characters created on Petticoat Junction and the interchangeable regulars on each of them.Petticoat Junction was somewhere in the Ozarks a really rural part of the state. Part of the gimmick here was the Hooterville Cannonball, the railroad that ran from Pixley to Hooterville and back. It was run by Smiley Burnette and Rufe Davis, later Davis alone when Burnette passed away. It was vital to the lifeblood of the economy of Hooterville.After all who was going to stay at Bea Benaderet's Shady Rest Motel which as Kate Bradley she ran with the help of those curvaceous daughters of her's. Bobbi Jo, Betty Jo, and Billie Jo were enough of a sight to make any weary traveler stop. Helping out as little as possible at the motel was Edgar Buchanan as Uncle Joe who did as little physical work as possible, but who schemed big.Scheming was a necessity because the Hooterville Cannonball became an obsession with railroad executive Homer Bedloe, played endearingly by the raspy voiced Charles Lane. Lane brought years of experience playing exactly these types in hundreds of movie roles, but Homer Bedloe became his career part. Half the episodes were devoted to the citizenry of Hooterville rallying behind Benadaret keeping the Cannonball running. You've got to wonder when the US rail system consolidated into AMTRAK just where was the Hooterville Cannonball in the scheme of things?The development of the Bradley girls became known as 'hooters' thereby entering our culture. And the name Hooterville became synonymous with calling any place that happened to be located far from any decent sized city. I remember on a trip to Portugal referring to the village of Fatima as the Hooterville of Portugal. Don't think so, take a trip there and see how far out in the Portugese boondocks it is.From Frank Cady as Sam Drucker the general store owner and a host of other semi-regulars who got in more than one episode of this and Green Acres. They were the real richness of the show. In fact they contributed so much that when Bea Benederet died in 1968 the show just kept on going. It could have kept going, but for a deliberate decision by CBS to cancel those rural comedies because they wanted to appeal to a different demographic.Still Petticoat Junction had its fans. Still does even among city slickers.

no pun intended! That whole theme of the Chico-Chico train pulling into "petticoat junction" is such a blatant latent subliminal seduction, catching us up in the momentum, carrying up in boleroish thrusts clear through to the commercial break preceding the exposition of the story, such as it might be, as the girls strip down, hearing their suggestive sotto voce as punctuation/incantation reminding us that the junction in question is - don't ever doubt it - "petticoat junction!" "And that's uncle Joe, he's movin' kinda slow at the junction"!As for mike minor, this was a hunk o' man, not the kind of guy you'd see on the dick van Dyke or the Lucy or the leave it to beaver or any TV shows at all for many years to come, for that matter. I have to add more comments now. Of course the girls were all hot. Did Aunt Bee really appear on this show, as one post here would suggest? I know sometimes there was this kind of cross pollination of characters between backwoods rube themed shows. Very appropriate for a spinster aunt named with affection after two of the biggest stars of the insect world!At least this show didn't have people like Mr. Haney and all the others on Green Acres which made that show so abominable for long stretches.WOO WOO PETTICOOOOAT JUNCTION!

Several people have stated, why don't they make shows like this anymore? After watching several episodes from a DVD purchased at a convenience store, I can say why: it's a dull show. Almost excruciatingly so. Perhaps an adequate time waster if one can't figure out something better to do and one doesn't care to watch what is on the other one or two networks, but that wouldn't cut it today when a show has to run against several dozen other choices, including the Internet. The only thing noticeable was the implication from the credits that the three daughters regularly skinny-dipped in the water tank. Hot stuff in 1963 to a nine year old boy, but now I think: that water's unfiltered and unchlorinated, you really want to expose yourselves to that? Other than that, they are allowed to be about as sexy as mannequins. And Hooterville seems to run on an economic system somewhat less efficient than that of the Soviet Union. Everything can be paid for with dinners at the Shady Rest, and no one seems to mind that the only transportation around is a Civil War-era locomotive. I guess they all piled into it on Saturday nights and rode it to the drive-in."Green Acres" a couple years later did the right thing with the rural milieu: use it for absurdist humor that didn't con city dwellers with the idea that there American small towns are gentle paradises. And "The Beverly Hillbillies" at least had Buddy Epsen. This one? It will be completely forgotten in another couple decades.

When this show first premiered its biggest attraction were the three Bradley daughters. However, you really got to see a great comedy and the real stars were the late great Bea Benederet as Kate and the late and equally great Edgar Buchanan as Uncle Joe, who was always looking to get rich quick. The girls themselves were pretty well fleshed out characters themselves. Billie Jo was the ambitious star-struck one, Bobbie Jo was the somewhat dim bulb and Betty Jo was the tomboy. Betty Jo became the most evolved character as you saw her grow up from being a girl who was pretty much pre-occupied with sports into a beautiful young woman who eventually settled down and married the man of her dreams. Too bad Bea Benederet passed away. When that happened the wind seemed to go out of the show and within two years it was gone. Perhaps it was a precursor of things to come becuase within a year after it had gone off the air all the great rural television shows were virtually wiped out in the infamous purge of 1971.