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I hope that anyone who is attending the 60th anniversary celebration event today will have a marvellous time and that the cast and affiliated guests will all be appreciated. I see that earlier this year there was an update on the Another World Homepage to the daily synopses from May - September 1964. Based on the May 4th synopsis, it sounds like the only non-Matthews character who appeared was Pat's boyfriend Tom. Liz Matthews was played by Sarah Cunningham (whose real-life husband was called John Randolph) and Jim Matthews by John Beal; both were fired almost immediately and replaced by Audra Lindley and Leon Janney respectively. http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/aw1964.html Thank you. This is so hilariously typical of AI: on the one hand, a set of very plausible quite grammatical sentences that are on the other hand almost entirely factually wrong or at best inane. It doesn't know how to identify the beginning of the soap and mentions characters who were created years later.

I went back to this discussion after looking at the AW Bible looking for evidence of intended maiden names yesterday because one of the interesting things was that Irna emphasized that Liz had loved her husband Bill very much and her adoration of her son came second. Obviously things can change between the bible and the actual implementation (for example the character called Cynthia in the bible became Pat) but it did make me curious about whether Liz had been depicted as a loving wife initially and the loveless marriage was an innovation of Lemay's. I haven't read through the whole bible yet but I must say the I found the description of single career woman Janet who "doesn't know she's lonely" to be really off-putting. Maybe it played out in a slightly more balanced fashion but I thought Janet deserved better.

On the AWHP character guide for Liz it mentions without explanation that Liz's maiden name may have been Hill. I did a little poking around and found that the source was the scripts used for the 1966 daily synopses. See the note on April 8. http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/aw1966.html There is nothing mentioned for Mary on her page in the character guide. I started looking through the AW Bible on the AWHP but haven't come across any hints so far. I will refrain from attempting to start the rumour that obviously it must have been Russell.

Thank you!

What is the difference between the $65 option in the list and the $45 option?

Perhaps Australia was exporting rather than America importing.

Oh, I'm so glad! I had sort of assumed that Pat would have been living there and ruled it out. I wonder where Pat was. Probably in and out of prison herself.

For what it's worth, after Evan's murder, based on the AWHP synopses, John was in the hospital for some time. He was released in March 1978 and apparently wherever he was living, Michael and/or Marianne lived with him. I don't see anything on the Addresses page that is obviously John post-Olive. In fact I don't see an address for Olive's grand house. http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/address.html I glanced at the Soaps & Serials novelizations but I'm not sure they cover this period so probably nothing illuminating there.

Thanks! There is an online auction of memorabilia linked at the end of the article as well for those who might be interested.

Another World had Carmen Duncan and Julian McMahon in the 90s. (I do not mention Joy Bell because I am not aware of any other soap credits for her.)

Thank you so much for this. I am just starting to watch and his voice feels so familiar even now.

Thanks! The idea of Dennis as a reckless rich racecar-driving playboy that Marley was attracted to despite her better judgement that they went with was good in theory but juxtaposing him with the much hotter IMO Byron Pierce spoiled that for me. If Dennis had been ridiculously hot or charismatic that might have made more sense but neither Chris Bruno or Laurence Lau would have worked for me.

I like most of your ideas but I don't know whether I can see this since most of my frustration with Laurence Lau's Jamie was his stodginess. He was less stiff in some respects than Chris Bruno but I don't think I have my head around what kind of character Dennis should be. I was aware of and just kind of accepted Jim Poyner in the rôle but don't have much of impression. Do you envision any particular storyline for Dennis?

To each their own but Sandra Ferguson's Amanda never really worked for me. Somewhere between the writing and the performance the threads for a potentially interesting character were lost. I feel like there were several scenes where Julie Anne was required to provide a lot of exposition explaining Amanda's motivations that simply had not been shown to us otherwise. Amanda did have some good scenes with Rachel and with Mac but I felt that they didn't do enough to build up her interests beyond Sam so she didn't have enough to fall back after she and Sam got married. It's too bad Amanda and Julie Anne were not part of a larger group of friends which could have helped to broaden their interactions.

Thanks! The name just wasn't coming to me. I see he was listed in the AWHP Minor Characters and was on for about 1 year (1989). The Lawrences also had a mother, Esther, played by Sandra Reaves Philips who apparently passed away in December.

I think they thought Amanda was taking up that space and Nancy would be superfluous, especially after Paulina was introduced. But I think there could have been room for Nancy as well if Amanda had had a properly defined character. I also wish that Sandy had showed up at some point. It would have made sense after Mac's death and people fighting for control of Cory -- and given his history with Carl. Mary was successful in spite of the writing and in my Reginald-free version Denise Alexander could have been just as good as a different character. Brittany was not successful IMO and she dragged Catlin down with her. There were probably other options for Sharon Gabet that would have been infinitely better. Reuben who was friends with Josie (introduced as Mary's social work client Pilara's possibly abusive boyfriend; they accidentally burned down Mary's Place IIRC). Ronnie a nurse and nightclub singer who dated Zack Edwards. And a younger brother whose name I forget who was a good student.

I agree with a lot of these although I would not have brought Reginald back from the dead at all. They could have had Kathleen investigate the past without Reginald and Mary being alive and bring some upsetting facts to light that had repercussions in the present for the McKinnons and the Loves and the Hudsons and the Frames if they wanted to make Jason Nicole's father or whatever, etc etc. I would have kept Nancy around (but I do agree with the Judi Evans recast suggestion) and done more to make sure she had boyfriends and friends who were linked to the rest of Bay City. I would have handled the introduction of John completely differently and would not have given him the rape/romance backstory with Donna. I would have handled the John/Felicia affair completely differently if it had to happen at all. I can understand a circumstance where John was at a breaking point because of Sharlene's mental illness but he and Felicia should have felt guilty every second of every day.

There is more than one point in time in the past to nod to. They were trying to hit different points and neither their use of Sam Groom nor the Gorilla Nostalgia with Bringing Up Baby overtones was fully satisfying. Part of that was, frankly, because over the years they had twisted and broken continuity in so many places that it was hard to make callbacks that would be meaningful. They did a better job (although still not perfect) with the 25th anniversary cameos. Thanks for this. Bekins looks great. I would have been glad to have seen him in the AW finale whether as Jamie or, if they decided that it would be too much dissonance for people who remembered Russell Todd with Jensen Buchanan, in a random cameo. I still haven't made the time to listen to Stephen Schnetzer's Locher Room, which I also want to get to. I had not realized that he had a role on The Bay. I watched about 5 minutes of one episode and it was not my speed at all so I don't know whether I can or should make the effort to try to see his part.

There were a lot of points where they didn't bother much about consistency, either because they didn't know or didn't think it mattered (or both). I found this episode where Alfred and Vivian come to meet MJ. The relationship between Alfred and Mac seems like acquaintances who haven't seen each other in a long time rather than brothers who were brought up together. Jamie (in between daydreaming about Lisa) casually and apropos of nothing mentions how unalike they are. Mac does mention Alfred's dissertation so that may be where I got the idea he was an academic. I don't know whether they ever intended to do more with the characters but it doesn't feel like they put much effort into them.

Just saw that O.J. Simpson has died. https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/o-j-simpson-has-died-family-says-1.6842823

Unless it was an official P&G account, I wouldn't expect there to be a correlation necessarily between what is available on YouTube and what the show actually had preserved.

There were definitely periods when the show had no real sense of class distinction. When done well there is a distinction between wealth and class and different family members can be affected differently. As I understand it Mac was always less snobbish than Iris regardless of background. And with the later storylines it wasn't clear to me whether Mac had come from a wealthy background or if he had married a woman whose family came from money and that it was her stepmother's influence that had brought Iris up the way she was. For some reason I thought that Alfred was perhaps a professor, but I am not sure whether that is correct. Adam and Neal definitely appeared to have no issues or conflicts or baggage related to class. Maybe around that time Reginald expressed some disdain for Michael's humble background as a stableboy but it wasn't really very meaningful in the scheme of things. Adam and Neal were really just a blip between Jamies and weren't integrated well enough to last. It was nice that Adam attended Mac's funeral but then the waters closed over him as if he had never been. (I take that back -- maybe Adam rated a mention when the McKinnons dropped in to see Kathleen in 1991. But probably not after that.)

I remember the suggestion that they couldn't start with the early 80s because they didn't have all the tapes, but the idea that they were missing tapes from as late as early 1987 is blowing my mind a little. I wonder what the retention and cataloguing system was like because it was certainly common to have flashbacks to earlier events in the early/mid 80s. Most of the time they were pretty recent events (within days), but sometimes they were further in the past than that and they must have had a system to locate the clip they wanted.

Didn't they also want to start there because it was when Anne Heche began as Victoria?

I would have been interested in her thoughts on any time period -- although I have to admit that I never really watched AMC or OLTL and don't have a good sense of what they were like under Nixon. I have to find the link again but I was reading an article originally published in the early 1990s that alluded to Agnes Nixon's having created a character on AW who had been Miss Black-Eyed Pea of 1960. Surely that must have been Lahoma. I've been trying to get my head around Sam Lucas -- was he supposed to be significantly younger than Ada or was Lee older than the novelizations gave me the impression she was?