Xanthe

28 minutes ago, Marissa Gallant said:

Mitch- hold on, Felicia is coming.

Did you like Mitch and Felicia together? I thought the relationship between Mitch and Rachel made some kind of sense in a last gasp of the 70s kind of way, and I believed that they could be drawn together as fellow artists. But when he returned I didn't feel anything between him and Rachel and the chief reason to pair him with Felicia seemed to be because they wanted to eliminate Zane as too far outside the "core families" and that meant Mitch was an adult human male who needed a mate to keep him from breaking up Rachel and Mac. Maybe it was partly because Margaret DePriest didn't know how to represent artistic types -- she was the one who changed Jamie from a writer/publisher to a doctor.

14 hours ago, j swift said:

It was 1984, and it had to be a New York based soap, so that narrows it down to Ryan's Hope, Loving, All My Children, One life to Live, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow, or Another World (lol). 

I don't know, the actress could be employed on the West Coast while the ex-husband languished in Westchester, couldn't she?

8 minutes ago, AbcNbc247 said:

I'm curious why Lemay chose to rewrite his own story.

I was trying to figure out whether he had intended to make it a part of the original story somehow, but he left the show and didn't see it through. Or else he thought Iris needed a big reason to come back after so long and needed the biological relationship to justify her investment in Cory affairs. 

I did not realise that Iris' mother Sylvie was in Bay City as long as she was. Based on the timeline it appears that Harding Lemay introduced the character almost immediately after Amanda's birth and the sudden revelation that Mac was not Iris' father. Then Sylvie persisted under Tom King throughout the Kirk Laverty story and eventually confessed (falsely) to his murder, and at some point it was revealed that she had served time for murdering her rapist, Iris' father, and Iris had been born in prison. When Iris returned in 1988 and provided Mac with the evidence that he was indeed her father, was Mac meant to be surprised that he was really her father, or was he supposed to have known all along and just been lying to her?

I suppose the fact that Mac was Iris' biological father wouldn't have prevented Sylvie from being raped or from murdering the rapist. I think what shocked me was the AWHP describing the rape/murder as having occurred when Sylvie was a "young adult", which makes Mac's involvement with her sound kind of skeevy. Maybe the retcon eliminated the rape and murder altogether if it wasn't part of Lemay's story?

ETA: Apparently today is the anniversary of the day Mac told Rachel he was Iris' father after all. 

16 hours ago, Nicholas Blair said:

Ideally, Alice would be 1) blonde; 2) someone with star power who immediately reads Soap Opera Heroine; 3) someone who can access deep emotions.

Since obviously AW struggled to recast Alice with someone suitable with the constraints they were working with at the time, as a thought experiment, assuming that time and space and money are not constrained, is there any actress past or present, living or dead, big screen, small screen, or stage, who would have been close to an ideal Alice? (Assume that she is willing to bleach her hair, and if that is not sufficient, go to any lengths to change anything about her physical appearance, in order to perform the role.)

2 hours ago, Vee said:

A seasonal format is definitely necessary.

The way people have often watched soaps, at least with the advent of the VCR,  has been to pick and choose which storylines to follow and which to dip in and out of. The real streaming innovation for serials might be to enable that type of "choose your own path" with temptations to interest the viewer in following side paths. Maybe that idea is better suited to offering vintage and antique soap experiences rather than producing new content though.

41 minutes ago, Paul Raven said:

Good question.

I think the first major recast would have been the lead on 'First Hundred Years' I guess there would have been an announcement as viewers would have been surprised and puzzled as to why there was a different face onscreen.

Oh, thank you, that's very interesting. Do you know why Olive Stacey left and how long it was before the replacement (Anne Sargent) appeared? I tried to do some searching and came up with nothing. Neither the wikipedia page for the show nor the IMDB has any comment I could see.

18 hours ago, FrenchBug82 said:

I checked and the other un-recast returnee I could think of, Anna Stuart, got a traditional "Donna will be played" voiceover.

I searched without success to see if I could find the 1998 return of Sandra Ferguson as Amanda, but if they didn't hype up Anna Stuart of all people I would be surprised and horrified if they had done it for Sandra Ferguson.

I associate it a little bit with the slips you get in your program when the understudy is going on for someone. My guess is the likelihood is that they didn't make any announcement in radio serials, but for television they felt there was an immediate need to make sure the audience knew it was a familiar character with an unfamiliar face and dispensed with exposition. But I have no idea who the first recast was and how it was handled.

Stephen Schnetzer used Stephen St Paul in a couple of early credits (Paul is his middle name).

Sandra Ferguson who played the first adult Amanda on AW got married and became Sandra Reinhardt. Then I think she went back to Ferguson, and after she remarried she became Sandra Robinson and eventually Sandra Dee Robinson.

Thinking about recasts, when I was paying attention they typically would make a voiceover announcement of the new actor's name at their first entrance depending on how recently the previous actor had been in the part or if it was just temporary. Is that still the convention? I wonder when soaps started following it. 

23 minutes ago, Paul Raven said:

Jada is certainly an out there choice.

No denying she is a great actress but I can't see her as Alice. Jada as Carolee worked in that physically she fit the look for Carolee. It's like suggesting Jacquie Courtney could have stepped in as Carolee.

I think recasts work best when there is some sort of physical resemblance. That's how its mostly done.

The physical resemblance often doesn't go beyond hair colour, especially for women. One of the weakest recasts I can think of relied heavily on physical resemblance: Judy Dewey as Blaine. Dark-haired Mary Page Keller was a popular recast in the same era after a series of blonde Sallys. 

4 hours ago, AbcNbc247 said:

Dallas was among the first, or possibly the first prime time show to do cliffhangers, which had to have been inspired by soaps. 

Cliffhangers were a feature of movie serials before daytime existed. Nighttime could have recognized them as essential to the serial form without going through daytime. 

10 hours ago, DRW50 said:

10 percent think the show should advantage of the situation by hiring a younger actress to play Iris. This group believes Kate  Collins would be an excellent choice. 

I keep turning this over and over in my mind trying to understand the point of younger Iris. Was it just a cluster of fans of Kate Collins? Did they want Iris to have sexier romantic adventures? Did they have any thoughts about her relationships to Rachel and/or Dennis? 

4 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

We tried our own soaps, too, but only a few. They were awful, and came and went quickly, with little notice or fanfare among the audience. The two that lasted the longest (still, not that long) were High Hopes in 1978 (starring Bruce Gray, better known from his stint on The Edge of Night) and Strange Paradise in 1969 (a supernatural rip-off of Dark Shadows). Both these series ran for less than a year, if I recall correctly. There were at least two other soap attempts I am hazily remembering, which only survived for a couple of months, but I cannot recall their titles. One was something like Morning Glory (?), broadcast on our public broadcasting network, the CBC. Being a soap fan, I valiantly tried all these shows, but...no. Just no.

 

Strange Paradise is available on youtube. I can't find any other Canadian soap attempts anywhere.

Don't forget the short-lived Moment of Truth, which starred Douglass Watson. It apparently aired on NBC in 1965 as well but it was made and set in Canada and aired on the CBC.

There was a racy made-for-cable serial in the early 80s called Loving Friends and Perfect Couples that Cali Timmins (AW's original Paulina) and Lisa Howard (later on Days as April) were in.

9 hours ago, Chris 2 said:

Sam Groom was a charismatic, appealing actor. He should have had a successful career in primetime, but he was never in the right place at the right time, I guess.

I’ve read that he came back for the final episodes of AW as a minister. If this is true, I wonder why they didn’t have him come back as Russ.

 A one day cameo isn't much. If the show had really wanted to make good use of him and he was available they could have had him either instead of David Bailey with Anna Holbrook's Sharlene or after David Bailey left.

1 hour ago, DramatistDreamer said:

Geez, Peter Scolari?! Oh, how sad. RIP.

I shocked myself by bursting into tears.  Loved him in everything I saw him in, but I have a very nostalgic fondness for Bosom Buddies especially. 

1 hour ago, AbcNbc247 said:

Yeah, some of them are dated incorrectly, but not to the extent where you can’t figure out the actual date.

I think this was shot at the Paley Center, which forbids filming of any episodes that they have. Some angel (probably Eddie Drueding) recorded this in secret. 

Interesting. The Paley Center does have in its catalogue an episode with the May 26 date. I wonder why it doesn't synch up with the daily synopses. Perhaps there were preemptions affecting the schedule?

1 hour ago, amybrickwallace said:

Hmmm, interesting. Never knew about Nic Coster coming in with no pants.

It's in his memoir and we had some discussion in this thread back in April about his and John Considine's "pranks".

I think the dates on this upload may be incorrect -- the first date listed is May 26, 1976, but the first scenes shown correspond to the daily synopsis for May 31 per the AWHP. The first scene is the one where Robert Delaney smashes Mac's bust and slashes Iris' portrait. (The day with the argument leading up to this cataclysm and the rehearsal where Nic Coster was so angry with Beverlee McKinsey he came in without any trousers on would therefore have been the episode before on the Friday.)

The video quality is not good as it seems to have been someone filming their TV set.

2 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

Was Zane more of a fun character when with Felicia?  My mom liked them together in the 80s.

And when V. Tibbley was playing Alice..she was tested with Mitch and had chemistry.

I really liked Zane with Felicia. He was down-to-earth and laid back and seemed to mesh well with Wally. If they had to bring back Mitch for Matthew's sake I would rather they had kept Zane alive and found something else for Mitch to do in his adult time. Having him pester Rachel was also tedious, so not breaking up Mac and Rachel either. I thought at a couple of points they were testing Brittany with Mitch and Jamie. I don't know if the idea of Mitch and Brittany appeals to me only because it would have had the virtue of sidelining characters I didn't like or if they could have been a good match.

On 10/15/2021 at 9:50 PM, vetsoapfan said:

You are being fair, because you are being truthful. The Chromakey was dreadful, and we were NOT interested in watching strangers playing once-beloved characters, particularly Linda Borgenson who was painfully bland and nondescript. Borgenson and Canary had no chemistry at all. There was no reason to care. 

Did they realise any improvement in the ratings with the audience checking out whether "Steve" and "Alice" were worthwhile? Was David Canary considered Bonanza-famous?

Did they intend to recreate the Steve and Alice romance, or was the plan all along for Rachel to get Steve back while Mac and Alice receded into the background? I have a hard time grasping what attracted Mac to Alice -- his other relationships that we saw onscreen seem to have tended toward difficult women. (But perhaps Janice was sweet to him to his face in order to entrap him and I am considering her secret murder plot against him to consider her difficult.) The love quadrangle seems very lopsided.

1 hour ago, vetsoapfan said:

In Canada, neither Hulu

For some reason, things that are on Hulu in the USA are often included with Disney Plus in Canada. That's how I watch Only Murders in the Building. 

On 10/10/2021 at 11:26 PM, slick jones said:

EMILY OF THE NEW MOON   Isabel Murray           1998-99

Extremely minor correction: it's Emily of New Moon, no the.

4 hours ago, Nicholas Blair said:

Lemay more or less brags about how he disliked Courtney and Reinholt from the beginning, mentioning a Christmas party where he ignored the two of them while spending all his time with his new BFFs on the show. I don't have the book to check the exact names, but I believe this would have included Nicolas Coster, Susan Sullivan, Victoria Wyndham, and a few others.

The party was the 10th anniversary party and you have caught them all except Beverlee McKinsey. 

Right after this Lemay mentions the difficulty they had casting leading men. He liked John Considine (Vic at that time) but found he had no chemistry with any available leading lady. He then mentions an actor who had left over salary issues and then been hired at another soap where the sponsor had approved the salary demand they had denied on AW. Any idea which actor that might have been? Maybe James Douglas, who left the role of Eliot Carrington to play Grant Colman on ATWT? 

2 hours ago, j swift said:

I have vague recollection that David Oliver invested in the company that produced the first college guy calendar.  In the 1980s it became a huge trend, which obviously peaked with the Chippendale's calendar and the teen pop movie Campus Man; which was based on their story.  However, as I remember David Oliver was one of the original investors, and the campaign came out of the USC marketing and business department students.  I know McGinley is a few years older than David Oliver, but they were both Trojans, and USC has a long history of students who began successful businesses while matriculating, including everything from cookies to real estate.

Thanks for this. I had no idea. 

Thinking about Perry, I wonder how old he was when Donna married Carl and whether she had Marley with her the whole time. 

8 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

Alice had an acute schizophrenic nervous breakdown in 1974 and practically recovered overnight, which was both absurd and irresponsible writing. Yet through it all, the audience adored Jacqueline Courtney.

Lemay's version of this story is that the nervous breakdown was written as "muted catatonic grief". He complained to Paul Rauch about Courtney's "histrionic display"; Rauch claimed that Courtney avoided being directed properly by waiting until taping to reveal her performance, and anyway refused to change her interpretation. So Lemay then wrote her as cured because he wasn't getting what he wanted. Courtney's alleged unwillingness to change is the complete opposite of the story where she immediately shifted from bubbly Alice to please Irna Phillips, so it makes me wonder whether Rauch was lying to Lemay or whether a more secure and mature Courtney was simply emboldened to insist on her own interpretation. It's certainly possible (in either case) that Courtney's abilities were limited and she needed to play within her range. If Lemay had been able to figure out how to play to her strengths instead of expecting her to be something she wasn't it would have been better for the show.