Kane

Absolutely, lots of interesting stuff in these videos. I recall that a few years ago that channel had some similar videos with mixes of different shows that included footage from the short story where Trisha and Trucker are taken hostage by an escaped convict. That story is from the summer of '91, so they potentially have a treasure trove of years' worth of material that hasn't been seen in decades.

Thanks! I live in optimism that more episodes will find their way online, but until then I'm happy cataloguing various other aspects of the show. I think Cecelia had more mileage left as a character, particularly considering her relationship with Rick, who was on the verge of being revealed to be an Alden. Instead of breaking them up, the show could have built them up as a couple and then when the Aldens find out about Rick, he could have felt pressure to break it off, partially because of Cecelia's past with Trisha, and partially because his desire to "fit in" with the family drives him to seek out a woman from an upper class family. The conflict between them could have also created conflict between Alex and Ava (not that they necessarily needed extra conflict since Egypt was on her way to Corinth).

My first soap memory is from Y&R, when Victoria was hiding in a closet and saw Ryan having sex with Nina. I was waaaaay too young to be seeing that, but Grandma wasn't about to turn off the TV just because she was babysitting.

I think Laura Wright had a baby at the end of 1998, so that's probably why she isn't on much in early '99. I'm in January/98 in my own viewing and as much as I like Wright on Loving/The City, I'm finding Cassie kind of annoying and tending to side with Dinah in the Dinah/Hart/Cassie triangle, even though I've never been much of a Dinah fan and she's done some pretty offside things. Of course, I'm also finding myself rooting for Annie because Cynthia Watros is so entertaining now that Annie has gone completely off the rails. Can't wait to see her grand finale.

She and Alec Baldwin were on The Doctors together. I hope you post your thoughts on the book as you have been on the show. I've thought about giving Zimmer's book a read for a while, but I've never gotten around to it.

It wasn't that altruistic. He made Tangie a substitute for Blake and was apparently so creepy about it that Tangie spent the years in between getting away from him and running into him in Springfield believing that he had purchased her to be his child bride. It was only when she got to know Blake that she realized that she realized his feelings for her were paternal and suddenly she and Roger became friends.

It turns out to be much dumber than that. The purpose of this little side adventure was to introduce the mystery man, though I believe the original plan for the character may have been different from what ultimately ends up happening.

I'm pretty sure Lucy and Bridget never even have another scene together for the rest of the time they're both on the show. Bridget isn't even invited to the wedding! The lack of community feeling and continuity of non-romantic relationships during this period is very jarring. Characters suddenly only seem to interact with a handful of other characters, rather than characters across the canvas. I'm deep into 1997 in my watch right now and find that it's even stranger because the show goes back and forth between ignoring history in order to manufacture some kind of separation between characters (for example, at one point Amanda refers to the Coopers as a family that the Spauldings "barely know," despite her and Alan spending the better part of 1996 going to war with Buzz over 5th street, and Alan has absolutely no reaction when he finds out about something bad that's happened to Abby, which seems pretty out of character given how close they were in 95/96) and ignoring history in order to create a sense of community that doesn't quite fit (characters who couldn't stand Amanda are suddenly acting all buddy buddy with her). The wheels really feel like they're coming off in 1997 (although I know some would argue that the wheels started to come off years earlier). Watching the Marcus/Dahlia romance again from a 2025 perspective is so weird. Marcus is a full grown man who must be at least in his mid-20s and he's dating a teenager who is not only still in high school, but is still fully a year away from graduation, and no one says anything about how creepy that is. I feel like the buzz around Marcus gave the illusion that the show was more invested in him than it ever actually was. Even during his "big" story where he's arrested for Cutter's murder, he actually doesn't appear on screen very often. He's imprisoned, Griffin is brought on, other characters make a fuss about trying to get him out, but there's a long stretch of time where he doesn't appear at all. I've been keeping episode counts while I watch and between Cutter's death in mid-November of 1995 and the end of the year Marcus/Mambo only appears 7 times (and of that only twice in December).

Abby becomes a speaking character and stays on the show until about 2000. She's one of my favorite characters of this era and I find her evolution over her first couple of years very compelling. Quite a bit of that will happen in 1996. I'm currently in July '97 and can report that Holly/Fletcher will remain MIA, that Nola will be criminally underused (although I know that she has a story coming up), and that Bridget gets quite a bit of story in 1996 but it's terrible and leaves you wondering who had it out for Melissa Hayden behind the scenes because of how insultingly Bridget is treated.

She and Ava were friends. Cecelia lived in the Rescott house for a while after her father died and before she and Steve got married, and Ava was her confidante when she was scheming to hold on to Steve, which put Ava in an awkward position since she knew Clay (Alex) would be angry if he knew she was helping Trisha's rival.

Love it! Hope people keep 'em coming. This sounds about right. DTJB only ended up appearing in 3 episodes from January-March, 1993, so they must have decided a replacement wasn't necessary. Realistically, even Maggie herself became less necessary once Hannah came to the show and Dinah Lee's friendship with Ava was established. Dinah Lee didn't really need a recurring character as a talk to at that point. Albers is my second favorite Curtis, as I felt like he came the closest to Marcantel's version and I thought he had really good sibling chemistry with Noelle Beck. I think that the Curtis/Rocky/Todd triangle was okay (although I'm mostly basing that on reading it through SOD recaps and the clips that Albers posted ages ago), as it seems like it was at least a little bit balanced, but following it up with Curtis/Rocky/Rio, where there doesn't seem to have been a sense that Rocky was in any way torn, was a mistake. If they had to move Curtis and Rocky into another triangle together, it should have been with Jeff. The show had the set up for him being redeemed during his time in Dunellen and establishing a bond with Rocky while she worked there, which could have transitioned to her trying to help him reestablish himself outside the institution and developing feelings for him, but feeling guilty about it because of everything he did to Trucker and Trisha and sticking with Curtis (for a while) as a result.

That's Hamp, played by Vince Williams. He was introduced as an old friend of Billy's and was married to Gilly for a while. I believe he was still contract at this point, though he didn't appear often after he and Gilly divorced and his daughter, Kat, left town. Williams passed away in 1997.

It's funny that there's all this talk of Ceara's demise, as I actually just wrote the recap for that episode of Loving. I totally agree with this. I'm 42, started watching soaps in '93 (although I have some memories of seeing soaps before that, thanks to my mom watching Days and GH and grandma watching Y&R) and watched pretty religiously through the rest of my teens and the '90s is always what I gravitate to first when I'm looking to pick up a new soap playlist. I know that it's because Collins and Kiberd had chemistry, but I've always found it kind of strange that after building the Jeremy & Natalie pairing for years, on and off, they finally made it official and then split them up with no question of ever returning to it.

Brace yourself because 5th Street becomes a whole story in 1996. Raines was the only Alan I ever saw and I thought he was okay, though I never really felt like he sparked with any of the love interests he had during the time that I watched.

I really like those scenes. It feels very authentic that Lucy, inexperienced and still struggling to process what happened and reconcile what she thought she knew about Brent with what he did to her, would second guess herself as she talked it out. Really nice supporting work by Melissa Hayden as Bridget tries to guide her towards seeing it for what it was. There's a similar discussion a month or two later between Lucy and Nadine as Lucy continues to come to terms with it. I'm watching the Blake Marler channel.

My thoughts exactly about bringing them back after Jack's death. As you say, the cast was full then, however, I think room could have been made to play out a short story arc. I mean, there's a stretch of time in the summer of '92 where it feels like the only two stories are the Giff saga and the haunting of 35 Maple.

Just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying reading your thoughts on 1995. I recently did a watch of that year myself, having not seen it since it originally aired. The Brent Lawrence story was the one that got me watching GL, having previously been a total loyalist to the ABC shows. I've been steadily making my way through '90s GL and am currently in March '97 myself, which is just about the time I stopped regularly watching the show in real time. I often refer to this timeline: https://www.anybrowser.org/soaps/gl/timeline.shtml, though it only goes as far as the summer of 1998, as I understand the clone story was a bridge too far for the writer.

So nice to see so many clips turning up lately. I was glad to see some of Mike's PTSD story, although I agree with @DRW50 about the music choices, which are more distracting than they are enhancing. I've always lowkey thought that Ann and Mike were the real loves of each other's lives and that continuing Ann's story post-Harry should have involved bringing Mike back (as a recast, obviously, since Kiberd was in the thick of things at AMC). If they'd brought Ann and Mike back in 1992, they could have done a Shana/Mike/Ann triangle instead of having Shana... do nothing for the many months in between the short, go-nowhere Larry Lamont story and the Stacey gaslighting story. I gather from the second part of the Leslie Denniston video that she was playing Gwyneth when she slept with Jeff and videotaped it, which means Denniston's Gwyneth did it, Tudor's Gwyneth spent months being blackmailed over it, and Savage's Gwyneth is the one got punished for it.

I'm not sure I'll ever look at Shana the same way again. It says a lot about McT that she thinks Tad torturing a man until he died merely makes him "complicated" because he didn't actually intend for him to die. Intent is just the difference between manslaughter and murder. Of course this is also the era where Babe was presented as a heroine when she knowingly kept Bianca's baby.

Jolie was pretty chummy with Curtis, so maybe that was the original plan. I could see things playing out with him recruiting her to help break up Rocky and Todd, only for them to fall for each other, at which point maybe events from her past would have come into play to come between them. The episode with Jolie's death was on youtube at one point (it may still be). It's from November 1989.

What a treat, thanks for sharing! That's Dale and Jolie, of Trisha's first "death" fame (and thanks for the tag).

I'm currently working on recaps for episodes about a month into Jeremy's return and I feel like they're testing Jeremy with Dinah Lee, possibly with the intention of going into a Clay/Dinah Lee/Jeremy/Stacey quad. If that was being planned, it got scrapped with the HW change, as Taggart and Guza burned through the gaslighting story in order to end it as quickly as possible and move everyone on. I don't blame them for that, even though things ended up getting pretty cartoonish, with Isabelle taking the blame for Clay's actions and then faking a brain tumor in order to evade being held accountable herself. The story basically ended with a throwaway line of dialogue about Isabelle's medical records being lost in a suspicious offscreen fire so that it couldn't be proved one way or another whether she actually had a brain tumor. The show was pretty much all in on Trisha and Trucker from the summer of '92 until Beck left in April '93. I recall a short interview from around the time Taggart and Guza came on where she gave hints about their intentions for the characters and she said that their plan was to keep Trisha and Trucker together and have them be involved in every storyline (which sounds a lot like them having no story of their own). I always wonder how LeClerc felt about his time on Loving because so many things seemed to just fizzle out where Jeremy was concerned. They tried him with Stacey only for it to peter out after he was cleared of having an inappropriate relationship with Hannah; he and Tess had a bit of a build up during the Dante story only for her to suddenly drop him the minute she thought Dante was dead; he and Ava had a long build up and then finally got together only for Alex to return literally a week later; and he and Gwyneth always felt like a bit of an afterthought.

I can't say I'm surprised at ABC's upside down priorities in casting, but they really lost sight of the forest for the trees where Marcantel was concerned. He was so charismatic in the role and had such a great vulnerable quality that I always find myself rooting for his version of Curtis, even when he's doing something terrible. It was a huge mistake to have him cause a plane crash and write him into a corner instead of going the route of a Curtis/Stacey/Buck/Tess quad.

Thanks for sharing these! Nice to see some clips of the Edy Lester storyline, which is one I've always been curious about. Always nice to see more of Marcantel's original run as Curtis. It's fun to imagine the direction the character might have taken if he hadn't left in 1985 - particularly if he had been in the role when Curtis got together with Ava. Instead of him shifting into a hero, he and Ava could have joined forces as schemers.

This might be the interview you're looking for: https://marcywalkeronline.tripod.com/pages/press022.htm It's an interview with Marcy Walker, but she references Liz Keifer commenting about how GL was wasting her.