Vee

Poor little Vincent Martella and Kyle Gallner. Too pretty to survive.

I liked that a lot. Reminded me a lot of the original Survivors, as Carl and I have talked about. I hope it's playing well with the rest of the audience. The plague is bad, bad news - it clearly started with the livestock.

What doesn't excite him actually excites me.

Joe also had a fling with the young Cathy Craig, IIRC.

Dorian had young Dan Wolek before Joey, apparently. Who'd have thought?

IIRC, when Malone was still there he'd originally brought Drew on to have an interracial romance with Rachel, which Becky Lee Abbott would turn up over to be violently against, igniting some sort of racial strife in Llanview - which makes absolutely no sense, having seen Becky Lee. This was the story he vaguely outlined in some fan correspondence a while back, without really mentioning Becky by name but I know it was going to be her role. Seeing as I found both of the young actors in those particular roles at the time to be stunningly boring, I would have found it hard to care.

I believe someone else later on did plan for Drew and Nora - HBS talked about it in an interview around the time JFP came aboard - but it got scuttled.

Man, I can remember the recons with the telecine stills of those scenes and the audio running over them, but seeing it in motion - wow. I never thought I'd see them.

These are both absolute classic stories, and cornerstones of the Patrick Troughton era.

I remember the Poseidon reveal. I had no idea who Carlo was.

DV Bordisso and the psychic spies! That story still doesn't make any sense to me. Did B&E write it?

Just FYI: Robert Bogue (Mallet) has another featured voice role in the new Grand Theft Auto V, releasing tomorrow at midnight. I thought I heard his voice while watching some video from the game, and I checked into it and it's him.

The Rockstar Games projects, and the GTA series in particular, have often featured soap alumni, particularly a number of alumni from OLTL and GL. GTA IV featured the late Doris Belack (and Sunset Beach's Tim Adams, who played Ron Walsh on OLTL), and Bogue played an ambitious bouncer in the game's second expansion, The Ballad of Gay Tony.

I always liked Bogue, and he has a facility for dark comedy that both of his GTA credits enjoy.

Gary's show was high camp, mostly dumb - unlike the technique Ron Carlivati perfected years later, which on its best days mixes good, smart storytelling with comedy (and on its bad days does something quite different) - but he did bring back the show's heart after an extended hiatus, and he dearly loved OLTL and worked to respond to just about everything under the sun from fans. He tried to please everyone as well, which was impossible. It was a goof of a show, but it was fun and it gave me as a fan back some sense of pride, especially when a story or character did really work and connect (Natalie, the baby swap, and then Cristian and Natalie).

Gary got in hot water with the old school Todd and Téa fanbase the following year when he brought her back, and then publicly commented on the classic fanbase mailbox-stuffing technique. It's common for most fanbases on soaps, really, but I'm not sure any other exec has ever addressed it or singled out a particular fanbase. I don't think they ever forgave him for that. I always thought it was horrible that they'd made a point to write in that Todd did not bother to call the Coast Guard to go get Téa and Ross. I don't know whose idea it was. It was typical callous, cartoonish Todd at that juncture, but it was so unnecessary, particularly after the emotional scenes he'd had regarding her, Blair and Starr before leaving that island.

I loved Téa and had missed her since two years prior, but I thought her return in '02 was crap. Specifically after they cut the scenes they'd apparently shot with her and Tim Stickney, addressing the way Téa abandoned R.J. They set that up with R.J. talking about Téa with another character, then the meeting never materialized onscreen. Bullshit.

I did!

I don't remember the day to day writing being terribly good, to be honest.

It would have the occasional poetic flourish by Malone - "Jen and Joey - we're the priest and the punk!" - but would come out sounding so stupid.

Malone has always been very, very spare in talking about this run. I wish he would because oh my God, it was a disaster and so much of it was him.

So, back in 2003, this happened. Mitch and Dorian seek the Bahdra diamond, the mystical Indian gem reputed to be responsible for Victor Lord's wealth and power. Yeah.

Sadly, I can't find a clip of the sequence where Dorian and Blair got trapped in this room with a series of torture implements and encroaching poison spikes as they attempted to take the diamond for themselves. This was all in the basement of Llanfair, BTW, so it's all still down there. This was a strange, strange time at OLTL - every day was like DOOL.

Has this been posted yet? I am apprised it is from 1979 and may be Lemay, or right on that borderline around that time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPGsaDQCxs

I like Glenn's everything.

I don't know if they'll leave early, but I assume they may be on the road by the time the show breaks for the winter.

Ty, I believe.

That was Larry Gilliard from The Wire. So good.

I believe I recognize that scene - slightly transposed to a new setting - from the comics, too. If I'm right, Tyreese will be just fine.

I don't believe one or a handful of saboteurs could make that place so insecure simply by going in and out and pulling [!@#$%^&*] that they'd have to leave. They'd have to be actively disabling and destroying all the defenses. And it looks like those fences aren't holding so well anymore.

Yeah, I assumed he saw Sasha. I didn't think she'd last too long - I was surprised they made her a regular. I do like her, though, so hopefully she'll hang around a bit.

That looks fantastic. Just what I was hoping for from this year - a community. I'm sure Carl will be thrilled with all the Carol stuff.

Season 6 was basically the nadir of the show. I remember what happened very well. They used the back end of the last episodes of that year to try and get people excited about actual things happening - Lexi goes apeshit! Coop tries to kill Lexi! Billy gets with Jennifer!

Season 7 was a return to form IMO, and a much smarter, better show. It had its flaws but it was on a major upswing and 90210 was a piece of [!@#$%^&*] at that point. It should not have been canned while 90210 went on - that was an injustice, pure and simple.

Was his last name seriously "Man"? Oh, no, it's Silva, I see that now and I should've remembered.

I remember seeing NM on ATWT and finding his hair with sideburns wildly out of date even then. That whole show seemed so lame when I would tune in. Ellen Dolan with a terrible hairstyle, involved with some criminal. Carly and Molly, the wacky dykes with more bad hair. And then NM turned up on OLTL looking exactly the same and it took not one but two public outbursts for him to finally be let go years later.

I missed Hannah Stokes desperately when she was gone.

Jerry Lacy actually did appear as Mr. Trask once or twice more, in the final weeks as they revealed who killed Angelique. I believe he was on during the Carolyn Loomis Death Tour - him and Amy together. I believe it was both his and Denise Nickerson's final appearances, his in Parallel Time, hers on the show entirely. I was surprised he turned up just for that.

I actually really loved Kate Jackson on the show. I thought she was already excellent and that both she and Vestoff were great with Selby. When they very pointedly had Daphne wear Vicki's old clothes - going so far as to mention it onscreen - I held out hope that had the show continued, they might have even recast Vicki with Kate. That would have worked too, IMO.

We don't talk about Kathy Cody.

The most fun portion of Parallel Time for me was the early period when almost all the superstars were off filming HODS. They were basically putting any old [!@#$%^&*] thing onscreen, and anything could happen - Hannah Stokes! More and more Cyrus and Sabrina! John Yaeger! Elizabeth Eis! Dameon Edwards, the most evil publishing executive in history! He's returned to destroy us allohwaithesgonebye.

And don't forget Mr. Trask, the evil butler! That was great.

There wasn't enough of it, but I enjoyed it.

I liked the Parallel Time world a lot. I had a terrible story idea for it when I was very, very young many, many years ago. I'll always remember the last week of shows for Carolyn Loomis where she wandered drunk and crazy chewing through basically every inch of the town before being killed in the tower. Good times.

I guess you could say he was one of the leading men, yes, although he was always the second banana in those last storylines as Desmond or whoever. Ultimately his characters were either Renfields or someone else's buddy. He did wonderful jobs with those parts, but you would never have seen a more cultured, smarter Willie romance anyone in the main timeline a la Will Loomis or Desmond.

The poor man. All my best.

I do agree that after 1795 or maybe the initial Quentin story if you're being generous, the individual personalities and lives of any character who was not Barnabas, Julia, Quentin or any of the monsters or at times the kids largely fell by the wayside. Nancy Barrett always infused Carolyn with so much fire, but not much of it was on the page - Joan Bennett, Louis, Katie Scott, etc. all did what they could with what little they had for Liz, Roger and Maggie. And it's a shame because when you do watch the early years of the show these characters were all full, layered and rich. It always felt to me as a teenage viewer that when the show lost Alex, as well as Joel Crothers and David Ford, it turned its back on so much of that. (Mitchell Ryan was also fantastic as the original Burke, a force to be reckoned with, but he took himself out of the equation.)

I think had the show wanted to survive it would've had to transition to somethng more soapy, more on par with Edge of Night. I remember the idea being floated by online fans of having Roger and Julia fall in love - using Louis Edmonds as a witty, urbane rival to Barnabas for her - which I think, shockingly enough, might have worked. It would have required making Roger into something other than a clueless buffoon for the first time in years, but hey.

I will agree KLS was forced into a square hole to try and make Maggie into Vicki. But I think she did a very solid job of it in the 1968 Quentin story. She was a trouper no matter what, but she so rarely got to show what she was really made of as an actress. I loved Virginia Vestoff as Samantha but I do often think about what Katie could've done with that part, a la Kitty Soames only spikier.