Videnbas

Another random thought that hit me while watching the old episodes (I'm halfway through 1991 at the moment) is how one crucial type of interaction was present then but is largely missing from today's show. I call it the "window to the soul" relationship. That is, a character who acts as a (sometimes therapeutic) sounding board for another character's thoughts and feelings, so that through this interaction we get to know what goes on inside that character - a window to their soul. This relationship's main (or sole) purpose is to deepen the characterization of one or both characters, because it allows us to hear the characters' inner voice spoken out loud. This "humanizes" the character (at least, to me it does). And a character who doesn't have this kind of relationship just seems less relatable. It's usually either a close friendship or a close family relationship. NOT a romantic relationship because the romantic relationship is often the thing being talked *about* in this type of relationship. It's a relationship based on trust and honesty - there is virtually no lying in this kind of relationship, and if there is, it is immediately called out. There are so many good examples from the early years of the show: Ridge helped us get to know Stephanie because she showed her most private side to him (and only him). Sally and Macy were built entirely on this trope (in their case, it went both ways). Mike helped us understand the motivation behind Sheila's madness because she confided in him. Even a peripheral character like Blake Hayes had his random encounters with Margo that served solely as a way for two rather lonely characters to get an opportunity to speak (tell the audience) about what was going on inside them. Both within the Forrester and Logan families, there have been seeds of these kind of relationships between siblings, although the constellations of trust have not been as permanent. Interestingly, Taylor is the one major character that comes to mind who (as of 1991) does NOT have this kind of sounding board. And as a result, she comes across as kind of enigmatic.

That is wonderful news! Hope all is well with the Videoland Angel! Are these episodes from the new Angel also complete and in good quality?

Yeah, I'm not saying he is or he isn't a Trumper, I just meant I haven't been able to find anything definitive beyond certain indications that could go both ways. I get the impression he is eager not to alienate anyone on either side of the political spectrum, so whatever his views, he is deliberately not very vocal about them. Anyway, I agree the plastic surgery is not what I'd call botched, but not completely natural looking either.

I agree there is a certain visual resemblance! On a side note out of curiosity - are you sure about the politics thing? I kvow Ingo has been pretty vocal about his views but I don't see Jeff stating his political views anywhere. A web search says he is a registered Democrat who did Trump impersonations, and he also appears to be in a long-term same-sex marriage/relationship.

I don't think the singing was the reason for the recast - I remember reading that Thorne singing was Trachta's idea when he was already on the show. But I have to say in retrospect I'm glad the recast happened when it did because I don't really think Thorne/Macy would have worked without it (Norcross and Eakes didn't really click in their one scene together).

I think the character Thorne should be on the show, but I don't think I could accept yet another recast after the last one failed. So if they do bring back Thorne (and it seems Winsor is no longer an option) I would like it to be either Clayton Norcross or Jeff Trachta, depending on what storylines the character would be involved in.

I believe episode 503 has already been reuploaded with sound. Not sure about ep 429.

The similarities lie mainly in the starting point of the stories, and the personalities and backstories of the characters. As the story goes on, the two plots diverge more and more. So it’s basically the premise that is the same, or the very beginning of each character’s story arc. For example, Ridge/Don Giovanni is a playboy who routinely and casually seduces women and then leaves them. He keeps a record of ”his” women in a little book that he carries with him. He is wealthy, arrogant, charming, irreverent and hedonistic. His arrogance is probably his greatest flaw and fatal weakness. Margo/Donna Elvira is introduced to us as one of Ridge’s/Don Giovanni’s past conquests. She fell in love with him but he dumped her and she is filled with anger and bitterness towards her past lover, but also has a soft spot for him and is on some level still attracted to him. She tries to keep new women from falling into the playboy’s trap. Bill Spencer/The Commendatore is the powerful and protective father of Ridge’s/Don Giovanni’s latest conquest, the noble Caroline/Donna Anna. He is a commanding and intimidating man. He finds out that the playboy is after his daughter and this results in violent animosity between the two men, where Ridge/Don Giovanni gets the upper hand at first. But shortly after, the father gets his revenge by bringing the playboy down as a result of his own immoral actions. Brooke/Zerlina and Dave/Masetto are ordinary people who are about to start a life together when Brooke/Zerlina becomes starstruck with the seductive and worldly Ridge/Don Giovanni and immediately forgets all about her intended husband, who is not nearly as glamorous, when the playboy awakens her sensual side. Rocco and Leporello also share some similarities. They are both basically the playboy’s comedic sidekick/employee, ”lower class” although they dream of having the same kind of status as their master/boss themselves one day. And they sometimes get their boss out of trouble. But Leporello is a lot more disillusioned and less enthusiastic about his position than the much younger Rocco is. Oh, and there is also the part of the story where Ridge/Don Giovanni quietly sneaks into Caroline’s/Donna Anna’s room at night to seduce her and she at first mistakes him for her spouse Thorne/Don Ottavio, who swears vengeance when he finds out about it. At a later point, Thorne/Don Ottavio pulls a gun on Ridge/Don Giovanni. (And it remains ambiguous throughout the story whether or not Caroline/Donna Anna was taken advantage of or whether she actually consented to being seduced by Ridge/Don Giovanni.) End of thesis, lol!

To me, that is like asking me which star in the constellation of Orion is my favorite. They all catch my eye, some shine a bit brighter than others, but what really gives them meaning is their relationship to the other stars, and the pattern that emerges when you look at all of them together. For me, the characters of early B&B were like stars in a constellation. They all work together to tell a story and paint a certain picture. It's impossible for me to reduce that complexity to a competition between teams.

LOL, yeah, that would be a dead give away! Yes, it was Ridge's obvious similarities to Don Juan that took me down the rabbit hole (especially when the show started repeatedly mentioning his "little black book"). And then as I was preparing a lecture om Mozart I revisited a couple of scenes from the opera and I suddenly started seeing B&B characters in all the roles and it was an eerily good fit.

This may seem a random question, but... is anyone else here interested in opera? I remember a discussion a while back about character archetypes in B&B, and the other night when I was watching clips of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (Don Juan), it suddenly hit me. Early B&B of 1987-1988 features EVERY SINGLE ONE of the characters in Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni (high social status, playboy, arrogant, charming, keeps a list of women in a little book) - Ridge Leporello (low social status, employed by Don Giovanni, loyal to his boss but dreams of being his equal in status, knows about the little book) - Rocco Donna Elvira (was seduced by Don Giovanni and then dumped by him, is fiercely bitter but still attracted to him) - Margo Donna Anna (high social status, Don Giovanni snuck into her room at night and seduced her, it is unclear if this was with or without her consent) - Caroline The Commendatore (high social status, Donna Anna's father, very protective of his daughter, Don Giovanni's nemesis) - Bill Spencer Don Ottavio (high social status, Donna Anna's fiancé, loyal, gentle and supportive of her) - Thorne Zerlina (low social status, starts out as a happily engaged and innocent young girl but is seduced by Don Giovanni and dumps her fiancé in order to be with him) - Brooke Masetto (low social status, decent man who gets dumped by his fiancée because of her fascination for the attractive and rich Don Giovanni) - Dave Of course, the opera has a different story, but the characters and several plot points are very similar. This is probably not intentional, but it's interesting nevertheless because it proves the archetypal nature of the early B&B characters.

I am glad it's not just me having issues with the development of Taylor's character. Where I am right now (mid 1991), she has been on the show for over a year, and I STILL don't quite feel like I "know" her the way I feel like I know the other characters. I keep waiting for that feeling of familiarity to come but so far it hasn't. It's like she still hasn't been given a POV - we see her almost entirely through the eyes of others - Storm's eyes, Ridge's eyes, Brooke's eyes, Blake's eyes. But we haven't yet seen her perspective and what we do see is contradictory. She "tries out" Storm's engagement ring while continuing to date Ridge. Then she ends it with Storm but is dating, and sleeping with, both Ridge and Blake. And it's never quite clear how she feels about that (apart from when she educates the men on how they should court her). It's almost as if she is upstaged by her own beauty.

I am currently watching episodes from summer 1991, and one thing just struck me. In the history of B&B, we have several times had a storyline where a woman wanting to wait until marriage to have sex, or "save herself for the right guy", is seen as a sign that she has morals/values/character strength/whatever. The same expectations have never once been expressed for any male character. But these episodes in 1991 is the first (only?) time I've seen the other side of these gender stereotypes. Jake and Felicia are actually breaking up because of Jake's inexperience! The story goes that since Jake hasn't been with any other woman besides Felicia (due to his childhood abuse), he has actually missed out on important developmental milestones, so both of them agree that he needs to go be with other women in order to become a whole, healthy person (even though he loves Felicia and has a sexually satisfying relationship with her). And it just hit me - what if the genders were reversed? Would anyone on this soap EVER advise a woman to leave a fulfilling stable relationship with a man because she needed "more experience"? I have a very hard time picturing that happening, even today.

Yes, thank you so very much for the new uploads! It's so exciting that we are so close to having all of 1992!

I can't help but think that Mick was always intended to be a short term character who served as a catalyst for other characters' development. I think he was cast exactly with this plot function in mind, and left when that mission was accomplished. The way I see it, he had two main roles: 1) To break up Clarke and Kristen in a way that would make Clarke the injured party (in spite of Clarke having been the "bad guy" in the relationship up until that point). This gave Clarke a motivation for being bitter towards the Forresters and drove him firmly into the Spectra camp in the upcoming Spectra/Forrester feud, as well as freeing him up to marry Sally. 2) To flesh out Macy's character and strenghten her bond with Sally. Macy was an entirely new and unknown character at the time who needed to be developed in order for the viewers to get invested in her (in anticipation of the Macy/Thorne storyline). Her being led on by Mick and having her heart broken accomplished that, and put her in a position where pairing her with Thorne (who had also recently been dumped) felt organic. It was also the final push that made Macy develop her characteristically close (almost symbiotic) relationship with her mother.

I have to say, watching these old episodes again, I have got a whole new appreciation for Dan McVicar's Clarke! He manages to play a completely amoral and self-centered character who routinely lies and cheats and only cares about his own career, and still he remains charming and funny.

Those final scenes at the beach were beautiful though. Possibly the most beautiful death scene B&B has done. Especially ironic since he had just given her about three years' worth of storyline compressed into six months. No wonder he ran out of fuel. And yes, Thorne, Macy and basically all of the Spectras have all been in the same boat. Brad Bell seems unable to write for them because they are not his favorites. And yet I have always preferred that group of characters over the ones favored by Brad Bell. Which is kind of discouraging when their story goes something like: Macy gets her head bashed in by a random chandelier and dies, Darla gets her head bashed in by a random car and dies, Aly gets her head bashed in by a random tire iron and an even more random rock and dies... (Aly was my favorite in the young generation but she was related to the Spectra gang so I guess I should have known.)

I did a quick web search and this was what I found on BE's transition from B&B to AMC: https://www.soapcentral.com/all-my-children/news/2003/1020-eakes.php This article is from Oct 19. Checking the recaps, I found the chandelier incident happened on Oct 3 and BE's last air date was Oct 22. The mention of "oh yes, and by the way Macy died" was on Oct 29. But other than that, it seems just about everything else in the writing is more consistent with Macy just remaining in a coma, rather than her actually having died. So it makes sense that the coma storyline was Bell's original intention and when BE left, he just changed as little as possible in the scripts, which led to the nonsensical off screen death. But the way I interpreted the article, the chandelier coma thing was written first (because Bell supposedly ran out of ideas for Macy) and BE's choice to audition for AMC came as a reaction to that.

I agree with both of you! It was unnecessary, short-sighted and poorly written. It almost felt like they decided to kill her off after she had already left the show and then they added in some random dialogue about her being dead to explain away her absence. There was zero emotional payoff (I even thought at the time there was an episode missing because I couldn't believe they just killed off a major character between episodes). And since she was already in a coma, it would have been so easy just to have her remain in that coma off screen. No need to kill her off if they weren't going to show her death on screen anyway. But really, I think the biggest mistake was speeding through too much storyline with Macy too fast after her return from the dead. In less than a year, she returned from the dead, married Lorenzo, left Lorenzo, reunited with Thorne, had Thorne cheat on her and get her best friend pregnant, had cancer, had a hysterectomy, divorced Thorne, almost fell off the wagon, met Deacon and married him, took part in Deacon's battle for custody of Little D, helped Eric get control of FC back from Brooke, restarted her singing career, had a chandelier drop on her head, and supposedly died again. It would have been so much more compelling if she had just stayed with Thorne and the truth about Aly hadn't come out until after Macy had adopted her. With Macy they severed the strongest link we could have had back to the original Sally Spectra.

I agree wholeheartedly! To this day, there is a huge Sally-shaped hole in the fabric of the show. It is such a shame that the Spectras were completely written off the show. Sally's legacy could have been kept alive through Macy and CJ.

Unfortunately, Bell always seems to default to one of two default storylines: the secret or the triangle (and sometimes it's both at once). Every storyline that it set up eventually gets simplified into one of these formulas.

That's wonderful to hear! Have a great New Year! 🥰

Just watched today's episode. The choice of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata when Sheila swapped the labels on the bottles was unintentionally hilarious. I have to wonder what they were thinking. Was it Sheila listening to that piece of music (if so, when did she develop an interest in classical music? in prison?)? Was it supposed to be just part of the background music (which literally never sounds like this on B&B, so it was quite a jarring break)? And the result was this tragic mood while the camera panned the motionless champagne bottles submerged in water. I honestly felt like those poor bottles had drowned.

Brooke's alcoholism has never quite seemed believable to me. We have never really seen her struggle to stay sober. She just drank too much for a while and once she realized it was too much, she stopped. It never seemed that difficult for her to stay sober. Her drinking never truly seemed out of control. It was not like with Macy for example, where you truly felt that she might literally drink herself to death.

Does anyone know if there has been any recent change in the writing/directing team at B&B lately? It just seems to me the writing and plot structure this past month or so has been somewhat less abysmal.