Harper Valley PTA started
out as a 1968 radio hit for Jeannie C. Riley, about a widowed single mother who
isn’t bothering to conform to small town standards because she wears miniskirts
and laughs at jokes. According to the local PTA, this makes her a floozy and
her degenerate ways must be stopped, so they send her a cease and desist order
in the mail. She goes to their next meeting, airs the town’s dirty laundry and,
metaphorically, flips everyone off before she goes back to living her life as
she damn well pleases. Great song, very catchy.
In 1978, it was made into a drive-in movie starring Barbara
Eden. If it had starred literally anyone
else, it probably would have been lost to the sands of time. But the same piece
of casting that saves it from obscurity dooms it to not making any sense.
Barbara Eden, even in the most mini of skirts, doesn’t seem as a scandalous
figure, or the kind of woman that other women would be venomously jealous of.
Like, if she ever played a serial killer, the general response would be: “Aw, leave
her alone, FBI! She’s fun!”
And when you’re turning a three minute song into an eighty
minute movie, you have to pad the story. So there’s car chases and kidnappers
are hired, and then people have to get disguised as nuns, and there’s a subplot
about a real estate mogul who threatens to foreclose on women’s houses if they
don’t make out with him, and it’s a lot. Which means when, in 1981, they
decided to turn the film into a television show, they had to take a lot of
stuff back out, and the end result is that the general premise gets
a little lost in the shuffle.
