Xanthe

I do wonder whether the original plan was always to put Rachel and Canary-Steve together or whether they changed the storyline based on audience response or behind-the-scenes factors. Vana Tribbey's Alice grew close to Mac while he was separated from Rachel in the aftermath of Janice/Mitch/St Croix. Tribbey was on only 6 months, which seems like she was fired and replaced quickly at short notice with Linda Borgeson. And Borgeson stayed for only a year. Alice during this time period made very little impression on me so I would not have a strong sense of the character and who was better. But it seemed inappropriate to construe Rachel as Steve's True Love and also unhelpful story-wise to squeeze Alice out.

Quite possibly, but I wonder if they will have to do quite so much archaeology and reconstruction to fill in gaps! If the modern shows are more easily preserved and archived it will be much easier to check the primary sources. (But if they are copy-protected so that viewers can't preserve their own copies maybe they won't be accessible enough anyway.)

Thanks! I remember loving the drama of Catlin lying to Sally that he had never loved her, and Ada telling him not to be such a dolt, and then everyone believing he was dead for a couple of weeks or so. I had not remembered that Cecile also went to the hypnotist and "proved" that she loved Peter and Cass equally and could not possibly choose between them. Ben must have met Marley at the party right after this since when they first met she believed he was rich (not that it mattered to her, but Donna would not have accepted him if she had realized he was not from the upper crust). Nancy was shallow and mostly interested in Perry for his money. Nice to see Quinn and Thomasina together. And Donna on good terms with Carl for a change, but mostly thinking about Peter. It was really key to Donna's character in those days that she thought she was doing what was best for her family even as she spoiled their happiness. On the subject of Laura Malone, I saw this interesting tidbit in the comments -- a variation on the baby weight story that suggests the way it played out actually suited her.

Thanks @vetsoapfan and @Tisy-Lish for your recollections. I read some of the 1972 synopses on the AWHP and was surprised to learn that the snakebite story coincided with Robin Strasser's departure -- immediately afterward Rachel took Jamie out of town and when Steve tracked her down she was Victoria Wyndham.

Thanks for the detailed background. The little summary I read on the AWHP gave me the impression that Rachel was head over heels in love with Ted and then suddenly started sneaking around with Steve which drove good-for-nothing Ted away. Were the child actor and the snake in the same shot? I feel like I have seen so many examples of carefully cut scenes where you don't see the actor at the same time as the threat that that's what I would have imagined.

Thanks for this. I gather that is interim husband Ted Clark who I don't think was mentioned in later years even though his sister also married Russ. Based on what I see on the AWHP, it would have been Robin Strasser's Rachel that married Ted and Victoria Wyndham's who divorced him. What were Alice and Steve doing while Rachel was with Ted?

Born in 1949. And the character he was playing wasn't a child, Chris Chapin was a doctor. The only reason he was considered young was because he had to be suitable to date Nancy who had only recently finished high school. For context, Victoria Wyndham was born in 1945. Scardino was 10 years older than Vincent Irizarry and Michael E Knight who were in the same category that year. Jon Hensley was younger, born in 1965, and Brian Bloom the youngest, born in 1970. I don't want to give actors too much grief for playing characters outside their real age, but the nomination in the category doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the thing. I gather the Daytime Emmys changed the rules later so that a "younger" performer had to be no more than 25.

I don't know about pull -- Lemay had quite a few complaints about the sponsor and the network preventing him from telling stories the way he wanted to tell them. Corporate fear of the audience is going to carry a lot of weight. If Swajeski didn't want to go as far as having Jake rape Marley (in order to give her a motive to shoot him and in order to give Victoria a big dramatic reaction scene), what would she have done instead? It's hard to think of any lesser betrayal that would give the same dramatic result. I would find it easier to believe that Swajeski opposed the story If she had presented the alternative that she would have written instead. Otherwise it sounds more like she regrets being given grief for redeeming Jake later without having him properly deal with what he had done.

Oh, I always think of it as Marley being crushed to feed Vicky. Jake cheated on Marley so that he could be in Bay City alone as an antagonist for Vicky. Marley drifted through Bay City so that Vicky would have an opportunity to impersonate her. Marley had fertility issues to raise the stakes of the custody of Steven. Jake raped Marley so that Vicky could utterly lose it when she found out about it. I don't know whether I would exactly say that Jake was ruined in the same way. It's true that he was originally essentially a good guy in order to be worthy of Marley. It was only when he came back in 1988 that he started to become actively bad -- but on the plus side at that time I felt the audience had permission to see him as bad. But they started to try to make him a good guy with Paulina and then ultimately made him Vicky's final true love without regard for Marley. I agree that Grant as played by Mark Pinter was less sympathetic than Dack Rambo. If I weren't at work I would be trying to compile a survey of AW's villains and their levels of depth and humanity. Was Carl actually the longest-running villain the show had? He and Reginald were I think the most international supervillains the show had, sometimes to a ludicrous degree. Carl was given more opportunity to have human emotions than Reginald IMO. I don't remember Olive very well but reading the synopses she comes across as completely wicked with no redeeming features. Rachel and Iris seemed more rounded but again maybe that was also because they had more time to develop.

Watching the earlier promo however, the voiceover asks if Marley will give in to passion, but the visual looks as if she is petrified rather than wishing that she could be intimate with her husband even though he had cheated on her. It absolutely looks like Jake would rape Marley. And so would nasty pissy Jake who treated mentally ill Marley so harshly in 1999. And I understand that at that point he was reacting to the fact that she had recently taken Vicky hostage and he had been afraid for Vicky's life but that didn't make him seem less capable of being abusive or threatening. You have obviously watched these more recently than I have, but I thought that Jake was pretty clearly a villain from his return in 1988 until after he and Paulina fell in true love in late 1991 or early 1992. He had cheated on Marley, tried to take custody of Steven from Vicky, blackmailed Paulina, and did whatever else he did to make it plausible that most of the women on the show would have been justified in shooting him.

Thanks very much. I am too big a chicken to have actually watched the movie, even for research.

Do you know whether it is mentioned in the movie as well? @mikeaw1978 in case you want this for the AWHP -- I don't think I have seen it there.

I don't think we should read too much into the use and reuse of a plain English-sounding name like Matthews. On the Another World side, Lemay made several disparaging remarks about the lack of ethnic diversity in Bay City. We have talked a little bit in this forum about how he wasn't allowed to explicitly identify Sylvie as Jewish. He also mentions that he wanted Elena de Poulignac's maiden name to be Strauss but a producer changed it to Carter.

On the one hand we can't really put too much weight on any date in a soap. Time just isn't moving at a logical pace. Some annual holidays like Christmas line up with airdates, but children age rapidly and adults age slowly within the storyline. So I wasn't very bothered by the misalignment of the Cory 25th anniversary under the circumstances. However they could also have decided to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a specific division or publication within the company if they cared about avoiding comparaisons to, say Dennis' age. The Red Swan as it played out felt like it was a delaying tactic. I don't know how much of the plot might have been the same as what was originally intended. I have always imagined that Douglass Watson was motivated to look fit because he was supposed to have a romantic interest in the planned storyline.

That's peculiar to me because one of the things that I liked about Cali's Paulina was that even when Jake was blackmailing her she wasn't submissive. She wasn't afraid to tell him off and she worked to keep control and improve her position as much as possible. And of course she did shoot him. But if she was unhappy backstage and the producers were unable or unwilling to make her happy then I guess it was the best thing for Cali to leave.

I don't think Judi was married yet (Wikipedia says she married Michael Luciano in 1993 -- never mind, found the reference to her previous husband Robert Eth; but wasn't she also engaged to an AW producer or director while she was on the show?) and her Paulina actually aired slightly before Jensen's Vicky, but it makes sense that she could have auditioned for Vicky and been hired as Paulina. (Anne Heche's last airdate according to the AWHP was July 1, 1991. Jensen started on July 25th. Cali's last airdate was July 16th and Judi's first was July 18th.) I'm also trying to think of why Cali would have been disgruntled about Paulina being Mac's daughter instead of another character's. She mentions being excited to work with Victoria Wyndham but also a competitive backstabbing atmosphere. Did she feel like she was fighting for storyline herself against other young blondes, or was it actors in other demographics she found toxic?

That's very interesting where she says that her character had been supposed to be someone else's daughter. I know we have speculated here before about whether Paulina would have been Felicia's daughter.

Thank you. Based on the AWHP synopses I suppose this is from August 5, 1969. I have seen it mentioned but if he supposedly threw chairs on other sets I can't be confident how true it is. These kinds of stories have a tendency to pick up additional details as they go around so maybe an incident on one soap gets told as happening on another, or about one actor gets attributed to another more famous one. Incidentally, in Eight Years in Another World, Lemay mentions an unnamed drunk actor who threw a chair on set one day. He was fired. Whoever he was, he was not the actor (Nicolas Coster?) mentioned in the same paragraph who was fired for habitually not knowing his lines.

😅 This article jumped out at me because of the reference to Alexis Carrington where I normally think of Krystle for obvious reasons. Not actually misinformation in context but it made me laugh.

Here's a [mis]take I have never heard before, from an October 1999 column:

He was on in 1977 so she would have been only 9 or 10 years old.

One thing I found interesting was that she describes RKK's leaving the rôle of Sam suddenly as his decision. Maybe I am mixing up all of the stories of his bad on-set behaviour but I thought that AW had eventually fired him ... or did they just move Sam out of Amanda's orbit when Sandra Ferguson refused to put up with his chair-throwing, and then he quit of his own accord? It was nice to hear that Alice has been friends with Anna Holbrook for a long time. I don't think I realised that she had also known Brent Collins before she was on AW. I assume the Amy she mentioned in passing who was at the same play where they ran into Alan would have been Amy Carlson. She mentioned that she had filmed an episode of Doc with Molly Parker, I assume upcoming in season 2. I haven't watched the series but will look out for it. I was very confused when they started talking about The Handmaid's Tale and Madeline. I don't know Madeline Brewer and have no idea how or why Alice or Alan know her. I also don't remember having heard the story about Julia Roberts recognizing her as Frankie when they met on the Murphy Brown set. A nice interview, sometimes could have used a bit more background explanation but somewhat less painful than other Locher Rooms I have watched. Yes, that was lovely. And funny not only that Alice paid absolutely no attention to the story but also was able to calculate that Constance Ford might have been the only actor who would have been on when her grandmother watched who was still there when Alice was hired.

Thanks for clarifying. I can agree that this is more of a metatextual issue. And I think you are generally more attuned to issues of style that would completely pass me by. No, not at all. I was struggling to interpret @j swift's point but now I am up to speed. I admit I was partly influenced by my own thoughts on the question of what surname female characters choose to use and how easily that can detach them from their maternal roots.

What do we really know, though? Ralph Camargo is described as Mexican but as far as I can tell he was born in California and his parents were also US-born. One set of grandparents were born in Mexico. He does appear to have been brought up in his Mexican grandparents' household in California. But the paternal side is only half the story as well. Wyndham's mother (Florence Skeels) was born in Montana and I don't see any reference to a Latin background on her mother's side.

@slick jones also looks like an uncredited Adam Lefevre about 12 minutes in as a hotel employee.