Xanthe

On 6/10/2019 at 10:09 PM, j swift said:

Which begs the question - When did Cass become a lawyer? 

 

He came to town working for a rival publisher and trying to sign Felicia Gallant away from Cory Publishing.  Then he helped run Nicole's fashion business and a coffeehouse.  However, when was he first established as a lawyer, and what was his first case?

Cass was always a lawyer from day 1. He arrived in July 1982. According to the synopses on the Another World Home Page, he came to town to work for Cory Publishing and within a few weeks he had agreed to represent Cecile in her divorce. He didn't think of poaching Felicia until January 1983.

On 12/15/2018 at 12:02 AM, slick jones said:

 

This is a screencap of Toby Miller, Mikey's father, 1990.   He looks familiar. He reminds me of Hunt Block. Is it him?

I have no idea who it is, but if it helps the scene where Mikey's parents meet Michael and Donna is in an ep online here (at about 21:45):

On 9/7/2018 at 2:06 AM, Paul Raven said:

Thanks for posting.

 

This was a few months into Margaret DePriest's stint.

 

Sure, it wasn't perfect but she had set up a good family structure with the Loves and McKinnons. Any older viewers tuning in would probably only recognize Rachel and Ada.

Part of this revamp should have included returning the Matthews to some prominence as they did later on.

Unfortunately, most of these characters were gone in a couplee of years and the show had to rebuild again

Quinn, Maisie, Cheryl, Scott, Nancy, MJ etc all had heaps of story ahead of them but were dropped for other new characters

Not the way to build viewer loyalty.

 

The Loves and McKinnons existed and thrived before Margaret DePriest started in 1986. What she did was create characters for Donna, Peter, and Nicole's dead father and MJ and Kathleen's dead mother and bring them back from the dead to create a vast historical family entanglement. And she completely rewrote MJ's backstory with the recast. I guess she also made the decision to create the character of Cheryl. In theory she could have recast Ben and made Mary and Reginald's adopted child a female love interest for Ben. It was certainly odd that Ben never came to see his mother.

On 9/7/2018 at 12:13 AM, victoria foxton said:

 

The scene with Scott physically restraining Cheryl comes across as creepy to me even though we're clearly supposed to be thinking about how erotic Cheryl finds it. Scott was not written as a creep but he does seem too old for Cheryl. Not as much too old and as creepy as Chad Rollo, Cheryl's sister's former pimp, though.

On 8/18/2018 at 4:02 PM, j swift said:

Also, @Xanthe does John being in the picture that made Donna go mad fit with his entry into Bay City?  I recall Rhonda Lewin's Vicky was there when he was introduced and she was inappropriately flirtatious until she found out that he was her uncle when Donna confronted them on John's boat.  While, John may not have recognized his now grown niece, wouldn't he know that they were twins if he posed with them in a picture?  I know its a kerfuffle but, I would be eager to hear anyone's remembrance of if these two events fit into the cannon once the triplets were re-written into twins and their uncle.

 

Based on what I see in the synopses and character guide on the Another World Home Page, Donna saw the photo and went mad in November 1986. She came home from the hospital in February 1987. Donna couldn't remember what had been in the photo but for some reason she and Michael and Nicole knew that a photo had triggered her illness and spent a lot of time trying to find it or help Donna remember what had been in it. (That's why she started seeing Dr Glaser.) In March 1987 we found out that John Michael had had a younger brother, John, who was missing and presumed dead in Vietnam. Someone had sent a photograph to Michael's mother that appeared to be John alive in the present day, so Michael (followed by Donna) and Mitch (who invited Felicia to meet up with them) went looking for John. They found him in April 1987 and around the same time Dr Glaser helped Donna remember that John had raped her and that the mystery photo had been of John and the infants Marley and Victoria.

Rhonda Lewin played Victoria from Jake and Marley's wedding until the end of 1986. There was no Victoria in Bay City when John was brought in in April 1987. Vicky was brought home, played by Anne Heche, in July 1987, and introduced to John in the Love Mansion, so there wasn't really any opportunity for her to flirt with him unknowingly. Peter stoked her suspicion of John and Donna for months and she disliked John for Michael's sake.

The triplets were never canon. The photo was "mysterious" because the audience hadn't seen it and Donna couldn't remember it. I seem to recall reading that they were planning on doing the triplet story until they cast Philece Sampler and decided that she seemed too young to be Scott's mother (or indeed Marley and Victoria's mother, which perhaps should have influenced them to cast an actress with a more appropriate age?) and changed it to the John story. Of course Clara and John didn't quite fit with the info Marley found when she had first gone looking for the Garrison family and found out that Michael had changed his name to Hudson.

On 8/18/2018 at 11:05 AM, j swift said:

 

@Xanthe, here's two weird details from the anniversary book - 1. Reginald believed that he hadn't fathered either Donna or Nicole when he locked Donna in the basement.  2. When Nicole left the first time (after being a model and getting hooked on drugs by Ted Bancroft) she was going to go to  medical school (I guess they just totally dropped that thread when she came back as a fashion designer).

 

 

I have no memory of Nicole wanting to go to medical school. I remember Anne Howard's Nicole being a fashion designer. I don't remember if Lauri Landry's version was supposed to be doing any type of work (either modeling or design) but I have a dim recollection that she sang. Based on the synopses she didn't seem to have any type of storyline of her own -- just support for things either Jamie or Michael were doing. I wonder if she talked about med school with the Doctor version of Jamie Frame (Laurence Lau).

I also don't remember any details of Reginald not being Donna and Nicole's father. There wasn't any follow up to find out who their father really was (unless it was supposed to be Jason?), so it might just have been a mind game (he loved psychologically abusing all of his children) or a way to excuse his infidelity and treatment of their mother. IIRC they showed photos of Elizabeth Love using Anne Howard as a model, but I remember very little of Nicole's relationship with Reginald.

9 hours ago, j swift said:

1. Wasn't Donna's mother already dead/ran off; wouldn't people ask how Reg had a baby on his own?  If Donna's mother wasn't dead in the OG timeline why did she let Reg lock their daughter in the basement?  Wouldn't Mary and the other household staff still have to cook and clean for Donna?  Why was splitting up the twins a solution to the problem; why not just send them both away?

 

2. Bridget starts out as calculating and manipulative of Donna then, for no reason, she becomes nice and is OK being a maid/nanny for the rest of her life; even staying on when Donna lost her money and couldn't pay her salary.  Why did Bridget stay in Lassiter for 16 years?  Certainly Vicky's parents in Lassiter couldn't afford a nanny for all that time?  Why wasn't anyone ever angry at Bridget for her part in the scheme? Everyone is mad at Donna but Bridget is much closer to blame than an 18-year-old pregnant girl who was held captive by her father in the basement for six months.  

 

3. Perry's death is out of the blue, and then never discussed again.  Nobody ever knew that Vicky saw Perry die.

 

Donna's mother was supposedly in Europe during her pregnancy with Marley, I believe. I think people in Bay City were supposed to believe that Donna was with her. When they layered on the story of Reginald and Mary/Marissa that really did limit the window in which Reginald could maintain control of Donna in Marley's early years, but even before that I think they wrote it that Donna's father had died when Marley was still very young.

Bridget was calculating only in the sense that her allegiance was to Victoria. Once Victoria was accepted as a member of the Love household she was loyal to the Love family. The Carsons (Victoria's adoptive parents) had supposedly been rich long enough to employ Bridget. By the time they died Bridget was emotionally invested in Victoria and therefore stayed with her even though the money was gone.

I don't think Bridget was (at least originally, before Reginald) supposed to have known that Reginald was separating twins without Donna's knowledge or consent. If the family didn't want the baby and Bridget was making sure that the baby was well cared-for then she wasn't to blame for taking her away. And when Victoria revealed herself in time for the bone marrow donation she had a fake story about where she had been raised that didn't include Bridget.

I'm not sure what you mean about Perry's death being out of the blue. It was a sudden tragic accident, but the setup was there in that Perry had been suspicious of Jake and Bridget and was trying to find out what they were up to. Victoria arranged to meet him in the stables as Marley but when he wasn't taken in by her impersonation she told him that she was Marley's twin and just wanted her fair share. He refused to believe that she was a legit twin and insisted that she must be a scam artist who had had plastic surgery, and accidentally fell. Victoria spent quite a while worried that someone would find out that she had been there, and Nancy in particular was suspicious -- but when the Loves were so kind and generous to her (Marley voluntarily splitting her trust fund), Vicky eventually admitted to them that she had been in the hayloft when Perry died. (However she did lie and tell them a version in which Perry had been totally fine with her as Marley's twin, not that he had been threatening to expose her as an imposter.) Since Victoria hadn't killed Perry, just been present when he fell, there wasn't really anything more to it. I don't remember whether Carl ever found out -- he was into all the Egypt/Arizona/Chapin stuff at the time, and Nancy was dependent on Ecstasy and falling in love with Chris Chapin.

2 hours ago, SFK said:

Wait, so Donna just went along with Marley being raised as her sister and Vicky being given away? I've got OLTL on the brain, I guess I always assumed it was like Viki and Meagan and she was drugged/hypnotized. I do know about the infamous scene of hospital hysteria and the three pillows ("Triplets!!!"), not sure if that was a flashback?

Donna went along with Marley being raised as her sister (because the Love family's reputation could not support publicly acknowledging a baby born out of wedlock to a teenager, and the alternative would have been not getting to keep her baby at all). She didn't know/remember that there was a second baby.

The scene with the three pillows where she repeated "my baby" was one where she was having a mental breakdown before being carted off to some kind of institution. (It was Anna Stuart's last scene and then she came out of the hospital after a little while as Philece Sampler.) Reginald had shown her a photograph of her and her newborn babies (after his henchwoman had been suspiciously serving her presumably drugged tea) and she went into a tailspin. We didn't see the photograph and there was a lot of speculation at the time that the photo had revealed that there were triplets, but when the alleged photograph was eventually revealed it was of John Hudson holding two babies. There was no explanation for how (even assuming that Reginald had made arrangements for John to pose for a photograph with Donna's newborns without revealing his entire evil plan to give away one and raise the other as Donna's sister) such a photograph could even remotely be considered evidence that John might be the father of Donna's children which was part of Philece Sampler's Donna's anxiety when they retroactively introduced the idea that John had raped (well not *really* raped because how do you build a love triangle on that, I mean how could Donna possibly have known whether she was raped, it's not up to her to decide this when we're trying to present John as a character with redeeming features, Donna probably really wanted it but she knew it was bad because Michael was her boyfriend) Donna before she slept with Michael. I guess the most charitable interpretation is that Reginald intentionally sent her mad by letting her know that he knew that John could have been the father of Marley and Victoria, and that the photograph itself was a fake. But before they turned it into the John Hudson story it seemed very likely that there would be a triplet and that triplet would turn out to be Scott Lasalle who had been raised in South America as Marissa/Mary's adopted son.

On 8/15/2018 at 11:57 AM, j swift said:

 

Also, thinking back, what was Vicky's original plan to swindle Marley?  I remember she wanted Jake to seduce Marley, but what good would that do them to get money? 

 

Did Vicky know that they were sisters or did she just think it was a coincidence that they looked alike?  I remember the scene when Donna told them that they were her twins but did they already know that they were sisters?

 

I guess the whole integration of Vicky into the Love family happened pretty quickly after she donated her kidney to Marley that I've forgotten the details of her original con (just like the writers forgot that Vicky had donated her kidney later when she was pregnant and in two comas). However, I vividly recall the cliffhanger when Jake got back to the motel after spending the day with Marley, and a vixen look-a-like turned around and said, "It's about time."

 

Vicky knew that she was Marley's twin but Marley didn't know Vic existed. Vicky's plan was IIRC that she would impersonate Marley long enough to get access to Marley's inheritance when she turned 18. Jake was supposed to keep Marley away from home while Vicky accomplished her plan but then Marley got sick so she had to be admitted to the hospital for treatment. And the donation was bone marrow, not kidney.

She didn't really want Jake to seduce Marley -- she wanted him to make up to her so that Marley would trust him. Jake was Vicky's lover. She was bitterly jealous when he actually liked Marley.

On 7/15/2018 at 10:34 PM, j swift said:

 

 

 

John Hudson (AW) - merchant marine/n'er do well brother who hated his brother but also changed his last name to the same assumed last name of his brother and also was a doctor but he didn't tell anyone he was a doctor for about five years

 

The name thing was never really explained, but John's medical experience was not hidden. I think maybe the Vietnam medic part was based on the actor David Forsyth's history, and later they developed it into an actual profession for him. But when I scan the AWHP synopses, John first appears in April or May 1987, and in October 1987 there is a clear acknowledgement:

OCTOBER 5-9, 1987
"John used his Vietnam doctoring expertise to save Vicky's life after she crashed her sports car."

But because he had not formally trained, when he arrived in Bay City he was not qualified to practice medicine and it wasn't until sometime later that he took it up as a career.

Does a character have to have been onscreen for the backstory to be considered "changed"? Donna Love's father was originally introduced as dead. In 1986 he figured in Chris Chapin's backstory and was called Brandon. However in 1987 they brought him back from the dead and called him Reginald. I don't consider being brought back from the dead changing the story; if they explain where the character was and it doesn't contradict anything that was previously shown onscreen, fine, whatever. But changing the name when it was previously established as something else is a change in my book.

On 4/2/2018 at 2:23 PM, j swift said:

 

Which leads to one more bit of timeline exposition that never made sense.  Donna Love married to Carl in Europe from approximately 1979-1982 and was a loving stepmom to his son Perry.  During that period did Nicole, Peter and Marley Love live in the Love mansion by themselves?  If the twins were so important to Donna why did she leave when Marley was a teen?  Carl must have been very special to Donna but later writers seems to have forgotten that they were involved.

 

 

Carl and Donna never seemed to have been a love match. Her being kind to Perry had nothing to do with her feelings for Carl.

My impression was that Donna had been coerced by her father into marrying Carl, but the story may have changed over the years depending on when Reginald was supposed to have died. Did Donna live with Carl in Europe? I know that's where Felicia found him, but by then he and Donna had been divorced for some length of time.

12 hours ago, slick jones said:

You're probably right about Ellie, but from my old notes (at least what I have from my notes I have --I was 15 at the time, so I may have misunderstood--)the "Garrisons"  included:

 

Her grandfather Joe, grandmother Margaret, mother Edna. Edna was sister to Michael's father(or Edna's husband was.

 

Again that was over 30 years ago, and my notes have been rewritten a number of times. Neither Eugene or Bertha are in my stacks.  I know Josie Nichols was Dee's Grandma Evans in 85. She may very well have been another character (Bertha), but I don't have her.

 

I've only gotten as far as June of 1980 in the AWHP synopses, so  I haven't gotten to Ellie as yet.

I don't believe Eugene was ever seen onscreen. When Marley was searching for Michael, she got the name Michael Garrison from Donna's diary and hired Catlin/Larry to search for him. Catlin traced the Garrisons to Barnesville, Massachusetts, which is where Marley met Ellie and Great-aunt Bertha who had no idea where Michael was -- but it turned out that his company New Resources was somehow ruining the town. Marley wrote a letter of complaint to New Resources and when he saw the name Love and location Bay City he decided to come to Bay City in person. Interestingly, Marley's street address on the letter was 986 Edna Dr, which I guess was the place she was living with Dee at the time and not the Love Mansion.

I don't recognize the names Joe or Margaret, but depending on when they were mentioned they might have been ignored by other writers. By the time the storyline of John-lost-in-Vietnam was created, for example, John and Michael's mother was Clara. The brother Eugene was never mentioned again. And in early 1985, Donna's father's name was given as Brandon instead of Reginald.

17 hours ago, j swift said:

It would have also been hard for his long lost son Nick to look him up. 

The name change happened before he met Nick's mother, so it wouldn't have been an issue in that case.

8 hours ago, j swift said:

I was reading today's AW recap from 1981 on tumblr and it occurred to me that Clarice Hobson had an entire family for two years.  Two brothers, Denny and Leigh as well as her father Charley.  I clearly remember Leigh because he was played Chris Knight from the Brady Bunch and that was a huge deal to me as a child. 

 

However, in re-reading the family's history two thoughts come to mind.  First, Denny seems almost like a re-cast for Leigh.  Leigh came on as a bit of a schemer, was coupled with Sally but, was basically a good guy and left town. Whereas, Denny came on a schemer, was coupled with Sally, and then turned out to be a more interesting bad guy (mostly due to the actor James Horan).  Second, I know each writer wants to create their own history but, it would have been interesting if the Hudson's were really Hobson's but the Hobsons flee Bay City just like the Halloways.  Micheal and John never seemed to have historical ties to Bay City, despite living there through high school.  Having familial ties to Clarice would have been a nice touch. 

Not that it affects your point, but that reminds me that the way the story was originally told, Michael's family name had been Garrison when he worked for the Loves, but he later changed his name to Hudson (making it hard for Marley to track him down). If he had too many links to an existing family, you might have to explain why Donna never had the opportunity to confront him in Bay City earlier. But I suppose it wouldn't be any harder than to explain how Michael found the time between leaving Donna and losing John in Vietnam to force his mother and brother to adopt the name Hudson as well.

If they had kept the Garrison name for Michael, I assume Grant and Ryan would never have been called Harrison.

22 hours ago, amybrickwallace said:

Wasn't he supposed to have some sort of connection to Paulina before they made her a Cory?

According to the AWHP synopses from 1990, they were in foster care together. I don't think that is inconsistent with the story where she turns out to be Mac's daughter, is it?

4 minutes ago, j swift said:

What story brings in MJ?  I read that she dated Stephen Yate's Jamie.

Yes. M.J. was mostly involved in police work at first. My dim recollection is that she had a degree in psychology and tried to apply that to a case where someone was stalking Quinn. She had a kind of silent crush on Larry that never went anywhere. Jamie had been mixed up with Stacey Winthrop and then Nicole Love, but both of them had left town. Jamie and M.J. met when she mistook him for a criminal for some reason. Their relationship was pretty low-key and she was charmingly neurotic about it. I liked them together but it didn't set the world on fire and then Jamie left town.

I liked Kathleen Layman a lot as M.J. and thought she and Julie Osburn (Kathleen) made terrific sisters, but M.J. didn't get a major storyline until after Sally Spencer took over the role. And I liked Ed Fry as Adam tremendously and his romance with M.J.. I could have lived without Chad Rollo and M.J.'s past as a prostitute (at least as it was written), but on the other hand I adored the scene where Adam had to tell her family he was jilting her without revealing why.

On 1/26/2018 at 11:15 AM, j swift said:

The lack of Michael and Mary/Marissa connection is what really bothered me.  I get that Donna and Peter might not have paid much attention to household staff or recognize a maid sixteen years after she left the house.  However, Reg knew Michael had impregnated Donna so, why wouldn't Mary have known him as well?  Mary's complicity in Reg's plans for Donna's twins seems like a large plot hole in that tale.  Which is why I wondered about a writer's strike or some other change in production that seems to have derailed that story.

 

In my own take on the story I wish Mary had been a GL-Diane-Ballard-type who was always loyal to Reg, even at the expense of her family, and then by reuniting Donna and Michael she found repentance and returned to Vince.  However, running off with a guy for 18 years to South America and living in a villa never seemed to impact Mary's decision to live about a bar with a husband that changed faces three times.

Marley is at least a year older than Cheryl -- if Michael left town say 6 months before Marley was born and Mary came to work one month after Cheryl was born, that could be a gap of at least a year and a half with no overlap. Michael met Mary as Marissa when she turned up in Bay City and he didn't seem to recognize her.

Mary left Reginald because he was rotten to the core -- he wasn't written in a way that gave her any justification for being loyal to him after she found out what he had done even though she had apparently loved him up until that point. There was no subtlety about his character and he had no redeeming features. She also didn't just leave him and go back to Vince -- she worked in Vince's restaurant in order to support herself and be around her daughters, and she also went to college. It took some time before she actually got together with Vince. The complexity of her choice wasn't between two husbands -- it was between independence and one husband (and reconciled once she had achieved something like independence and was therefore able to be both independent and have a husband).

Regarding Vince's face -- Mary was dead during the first Vince (Jack Ryland) and really only experienced Duke Stroud and Robert Hogan.

On 1/20/2018 at 1:18 PM, j swift said:

Who wrote the Mary McKinnon/Marissa LaSalle story?  Do we know why they made the new family McKinnons and not McGowens or any other legacy family since Jake had already left the show? Is it a plot that got disrupted by a writer's strike?  Because for a story about amnesia it has a ton of exposition!

Jake wasn't the first member of the McKinnon family introduced anyway, and he also wasn't the first one to interact with the Love family. M.J. came first, and she was still in Bay City with an active storyline when Reginald and Mary appeared. Before Jake, M.J.'s teenage brother Ben dated Marley and Donna disapproved, in a mostly general class snobbery way. But since neither family was meant to be new to Bay City there was nothing in the storyline about being surprised the people existed.

Reading the AWHP synopses I see that when Ben met Marley at first he let her think he was wealthy. Since they hadn't grown up together and Marley must have been too young to be aware of Mary and Reginald, there is no reason why she should have known anything about the McKinnons. The fact that Jake and Victoria grew up together in Pennsylvania is more peculiar.