DRW50

It helps H&A that it has been more popular than Neighbours in Australia for a long time.

I've only seen drips and drabs too. I always mean to watch more. Yes. Skye was even Australian before Robin. Soap viewers were asked to accept a lot back then.

I agree. I do miss the "very special episodes" period compared to what a terrified blob TV is now. I just didn't ever vibe with these stories when they involved Karen, all the way up to that horrible season 12/13 story with the paintball road rage. Stories like Val teaching the young woman to read, even if it may have seemed dated in presentation by 1991, I appreciated more.

A very short Loving fragment at about an hour and 25 minutes.

P&G didn't start saving until late 1979 and even that may be spotty. There is a good chunk of 1979 available, through old tape trading it seems, but not much before that time. I think Michael Zaslow or Maureen Garrett had the material they gave for the Roger Scandal Years tape - I wonder if any of that is still around in full. Probably not.

About 20 minutes of material in this starting at 14 minutes, the highlight of which might be a location shoot with Erica, Barbara and Travis that starts with a basketball team and ends with Erica being in danger and running around a building! I can't remember if this was ever up before. I know some of the race car stuff references would be in a Soapnet repeat. They definitely had a lot of confidence in Travis/Larkin for this amount of location material. There's a good amount of location footage in these in general (just a reminder of how much bigger the budgets used to be) as they also herald the arrival in Pine Valley of Mitch Beck, on a motorbike. @slick jones There are several credits crawls in this (the one at 33 minutes has a full cast list). Linda Cook also appears in the "tape 3" material below, so that means she was on AMC through 1987 rather than 1986. More scenes from about 42 to 51 minutes. Some of Jesse undercover, and some of Skye. These two sets of clips must be some of Robin Christopher's very first material. She seems so green (and she was indeed just 22 around this time) it's jarring with this Playboy Channel-ass material where she meets and [!@#$%^&*] a stranger who then abandons her the next morning after taking her car (he does leave it somewhere for her and gives her a call). I wonder how differently Antoinette Byron would have played it. How long was Mitch Beck around for anyway? Brian Fitzpatrick is hot (even if we don't get to see any skin), but this is mostly just another reminder of how sad Skye's life was, no matter what year or town she was in. It's also an unintended contrast with the AIDS crisis as there is no mention of condoms so she, for all we know, has unsafe sex with some pickup. I wonder if this may have been one of the reasons the show started an AIDS story months later. (based on Skye's role in that story I'm not sure she cared much about learning safe sex practices) Not really trying to tag everyone as it's just fragments but @Maxim you might be interested in the Skye material and @Jonathan the Erica material. @marceline You might enjoy the Jesse/Angie material. It did, yes. Lisa was on ATWT from 1985-1993 (with a few later guest appearances). An often very heavy role. I just posted a few more as I saw your reply so this is good timing. I'm always fascinated by 1987 for AMC as the show was all over the place in story yet also successfully rebuilding itself from some rocky years (until the writers' strike and other issues would once again topple the cart).

@Vee They were the bright spot for me in the first year. Unfortunately, the second year made some mistakes with them, but still, they are ending the show intact (I hope). Nothing compared to the decimation of Wendy Rodwell. The show's final cast photo, which...is very unique.

From about an hour and 6 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes you get some clips from mid-March 1987.

Thanks for sharing, @Vee . I'm sorry that Bobby and Shelley and Audrey never truly had endings but for the most part I think the show ended in a way that makes sense for the universe Lynch and Frost created. If Frost doesn't want to move forward, I respect that choice.

There's also a certain late '70s earnestness and cheese that can be tiresome in the first season, mainly in the Karen-heavy PSA episodes. That tends to fade, at least until that equally tiresome Pollyana speech in the last season.

Thanks @Maxim Another reminder of how quickly some of these stories go. And how much Cain is just sort of thrown into stories during his time on the canvas rather than necessarily feeling genuine, in spite of Chris Cousins' natural appeal. I think they may have been better off having Max in Cain's role during this story, especially given Blair's involvement. He might not have gone after Renee, but that could have been tweaked.

Thanks. I was not really watching during anything with Ava and Bill. I did have memories of Lewis Construction in the Dylan years. I guess considering our current policy is to destroy any energy but fossil fuels, we can say GL was ahead of its time.

At about 17 minutes there's a behind the scenes feature on Sheila's 1995 stay in the nuthouse, including interviews with Kimberlin Brown, Faith Minton and Spice Williams (who played two of Sheila's tormentors).

Thanks. I am trying to remember that '90s story. I was still watching then but zoned out, clearly. I guess that last story was from Jordan winning an Emmy. Thanks again for knowing all these details. Dinah would name something Maximus...

Thanks.

I also have a memory of that Rob wearing a choker or a puka shell necklace...if there was ever a time to have a smarmy bisexual whore in male form on a soap that was it. '80s Reva would have loved him, I'm sure. Tim Adams was a very good looking guy but they never had any real purpose for him - I think he was there for some drama with Richard/Cassie and everyone knew how it was going to end. It would have been more interesting if he'd returned happy and with a new wife and kid and Cassie lashed out at him, resenting the years she wasted on him, which Edmund could have used against her.

That and the actor who played the first Rob "cheap trade" Layne...I wonder which episode those scenes of them rolling around on a bed is from.

@MLH I can't find your exact post, but regarding what you said about the recast Roger not being able to play Roger's signature stories, like raping Holly, I do agree with that. I think Roger was just not recastable, but Dennis Parlato was more suited to playing the levels of Clay on Loving (who was on the surface similar - messy relationship with his daughter, businessman, loved the ladies, haunted, but underneath was a very different character). I liked Dennis on Loving and I wanted to give him a chance, but I just couldn't after what P&G did to Zaslow. And he seemed very ill-at-ease to me, as if even he knew the whole thing was wrong.

I think this was kind of a mess backstage (although I may be wrong), similar to some of the issues the show had in the mid/late '00s with real life actor relationships. That may be one of the reasons why Rauch hit the brakes on the relationship...although it may have just been that he realized what Laibson didn't, that Wendy Moniz was better at playing an insecure bitch than a heroine. I would see some fans at the time insist that Dinah had been ruined after she went so dark in the late '90s, and I would think - ruined from what? Lonitrat? Unless they were hardcore Jennifer Gatti or Paige Turco fans, I didn't buy it.

Thanks. I'd forgotten Matt was in construction too. This may also be why GL in the '90s was big on some characters designing and building their own houses. They would have loved the HGTV peak years.

Thanks. I do remember Construction getting more focus, as Josh was more in construction (wasn't there some story in the early '00s about an accident on a site that was tied to that bad Catalina illegal immigrant story [boy imagine the reaction to that story now]).

The most I tend to remember of her at WSPR is sitting in the office. I don't even remember how much we get of that soon. I always loved the WSPR office and the Lewis Oil offices - mainly Vanessa's. The colors appealed to me. They looked less like sets than the Spaulding offices did. It also seemed like as the years passed, we just saw anything Spaulding go through Alan's library, or office, or whatever it was. I guess in the Peapack years they may have passed off an empty warehouse as a Spaulding office? What did happen to Lewis Oil in GL's last decade? Did Billy run it? Was it just running itself offcamera?

There can't be enough talk about this time period as it's so unique to the show and to soaps in general. I always enjoy reading your analyses.

Thanks @slick jones I had a thing for Zelkjo Ivanek when he was on Homicide.