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Little Joe (character)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Little Joe Cartwright was the youngest Cartwright on the 1960s television series Bonanza. Little Joe was played by Michael Landon.
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Joseph Francis Cartwright was born in 1842 on the Ponderosa Ranch to Ben Cartwright and Marie De Marigny Cartwright. Joe's maternal roots are from New Orleans, unlike his eastern half-brother Adam. In one episode it is mentioned that his mother had studied fencing, and Joe was likewise taught the skill.
Compared to the rest of the Cartwrights, at 5 feet 10 inches, he is the youngest and shortest: Adam is 6 feet 1 inch, and 12 years older, Hoss is 6 feet 3 inches and 6 years older, and Pa is 6 feet 2 inches tall. Besides, Adam and Hoss, Joe also has another half brother, Clay Stafford, from his mother's first marriage. Clay only stays for a short time (one episode).
Joe is known as the most hot-headed character. He often jumps into a situation and considers the consequences later. In several episodes, he is shown to be an expert tracker (e.g., "The Last Hunt"). He is also the ladies' man, and manages to date a new girl almost every episode in the first few seasons. He was the only Cartwright who never had to worry about a date for a dance.
A running gag throughout the run of Bonanza was that all Cartwright wives or girlfriends eventually died, most of them in the same episode. (However, Hoss's mother was in two to three episodes, becoming the only exception to that rule.) This happens quite often to Little Joe; he loses quite a few girlfriends throughout the run of the season and never appears to feel any guilt in the next episode.
Joe is the only Cartwright ever to hold a job on the Pony Express.
After Adam goes off to sea and Hoss dies, Joe becomes the only Cartwright brother to ever get married on the series. He was wed to Alice Harper, who became pregnant before she was murdered by the men who owed her brother money. In the later TV movies the three Cartwight sons all have offspring, with Hoss' son Josh being born to a fiance after Hoss' drowning death. .
After the events of the series, Joe would remarry, this time to a woman named Annabelle. He would name his son Benjamin, nicknamed Benj, after his late father. Benj was played by Michael Landon, Jr. in three TV-movies: Bonanza: The Next Generation (1988), Bonanza: The Return (1993), and Bonanza: Under Attack (1995).
Jared Daperis played Ben Cartwright in the 2001 prequel television series Ponderosa, set in time when Adam was a teenager and Little Joe a small child. The series was produced by Beth Sullivan (producer of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) and ran for twenty episodes.