Jdee43

I like Brooke Kerr. It's unfortunate the choices they've made for her character and who they pair her with.

With Ariana, she says in the YouTube comments for her first clip, when someone asked, that it was her mom who got one of the earlier versions of the VCR and was taping these clips in 1975. I would guess blank tapes back then used to record were expensive and probably held only an hour of material; which is why I doubt full episodes were taped; which is why they probably only taped her clips, when Ariana came on.

Guiding Light's Ross had some charm and a bit of underlying humor that allowed him to get away with being with a mother and a daughter at the same time. Drew has neither. Not sure the actor has the acting chops to prevent his character from seeming like a total creep and bad guy.

Episode 125 (1/23/85) has Cruz tell his spy boss that being a cop "is a hell of a lot more important than the assignments I've been getting from you people the last six months!" These assignments were barely shown on screen! Even Cruz can admit that the first six months of Santa Barbara have been pretty lame 🤣 The show is definitely more watchable in January 1985 than it was in 1984. But it's still being let down by poor casting choices. Episode 125 finally has a pay-off to the Mason/Veronica/Lionel story, and it's so lackluster and disappointing, mostly due to the poor acting of Andrea Howard as Veronica. Howard is a very beautiful woman, but she can hardly act her way out of a paper bag. She's totally incapable of giving her character any interior life. It's impossible to tell who she genuinely cares for, Mason or Lionel, as her reactions are all the same, blank and bland. Episode 125 also points up the failure of the Joe recast. New Joe and Cruz have none of the buddy chemistry that Joe and Cruz had with Dane in the role. They've even dressed up Mark Arnold in one of Dane's old denim outfits, and he just looks silly. Mark Arnold has no charisma; he just comes across as a bully to Cruz, Kelly, Peter, anyone. With the recast, it was probably for the best to kill Joe off, as he seems to have no purpose or appeal anymore; he's just shrill and has chemistry with nobody.

It's also hard to figure out the preemptions. For example, on the site, there is no 12/19/68. Is that a missing episode, or is it a preemption? If it's a preemption, is the preemption on the right date? The Another World Home Page says Another World was preempted on 12/24/68. Maybe that's the right date for the preemption of The Doctors too? I think there was at least one preemption for The Doctors in April 1968, but again, not sure of the exact date of it. The Another World Home Page has Another World being preempted on 4/4/68 and on 4/9/68. Maybe the Doctors, which aired right before it, was preempted those days too? But then the realgoodtv site has episodes for those dates. Again, it's confusing.

Episode 124 (1/22/85) has Cruz joining the police force. After almost 6 months, the show finally has a cop among its long-term contract players. It still doesn't have a doctor though! Very rare for a soap not to have contract players who are cops or doctors! I wonder how much of that was an oversight. Cruz was introduced in episode 11 as a worker on the oil rigs, an expert in fires and stuff. Then around episode 50, it's revealed he is really some sort of spy. But that goes nowhere; he has no real spy adventures. Now, all that's out; he's going to be what he always secretly wanted to be, a cop. Talk about rewrites. I wonder what the original plans were for Cruz. He's pretty much a background character throughout 1984. What was the point of making him a spy?

Shame he never made it back to Kelly's.

When one character just blurts out their long held secret to another, I think that's usually a sign that the writers are just over it 🤣 I dread watching the actors who play Drew and Willow try to rationalize their out of character actions. I doubt either actor is up to it. Thank goodness for the fast forward button 😅

Yeah, they should have hired Mulcahey as a script writer or perhaps even story consultant. But as head writer, sorry to say, he's not the answer.

Mulcahey's GH feels very dated. He's great at character, but his sensibilities on the issues and times feels very early 1990s. The actress who plays Blaze is not very good and has very little chemistry with Kristina. Is it really that hard to pair Kristina with someone she has chemistry with? Very rarely has that happened on this show. Since there seem to be so many obstacles to playing Sonny as the SOB he is, why not finally change the character and get him out of the mob? That way he can be the cuddly wise uncle that everyone looks up to without any of the hypocrisy.

It's interesting. Early Lemay and Raunch (1971-1974) seemed to be more in keeping with the early years of the show. It was only in 1975, when they expanded to an hour, that the two decided to do their own thing and throw out a lot of what came earlier. I wonder what role the network played in all this, if in 1975 they were encouraging Lemay and Raunch to revamp the show. A lot of the failure of the 1975-1979 years to have long term impact was in the constant recasting. If that was done for cost control, isn't the network dictating that? You'd think with the high ratings, the network would give them the budget to keep more of the cast.

It's so much easier to destroy than it is to build. Lemay's/Rauch's Another World is a prime example (Guza's General Hospital is too). While it was entertaining to see Lemay and Rauch dismantle and destroy what Another World had built up from 1964-1975, what they put in its place paled in comparison to what they got rid of. AW was extremely lucky to limp along 20 more years, 1979-1999 on such skimpy, depleted foundations.

Oh wow, there was actually a small pay off to something the new writers set up? How about that! The set up to it was clunky, but a little less clunky than how the old writing regime would set things up. The show needs more payoffs, more drama.. It's so boring. There are literally no stakes.

There are some great comments on Ariana's videos on YT. The show definitely went recast crazy in the mid to late 70s, with so many characters getting recast, and the recasts often inferior to the original actors. One of the many reasons AW declined so badly into the 1980s. Ariana implied it was ultimately cost saving measures. Perhaps it was also egotism from the producers getting out of hand; anyone is replaceable?

Let's get real, nothing is going to improve the ratings. At this point, the best they can do is produce the show with some dignity and artistic integrity. I haven't seen anything like that going on 12 years now.

I'm not that excited by this. I always thought he was a little bit overrated, especially as an adult. I'd rather see them bring back a female character. How about Amber Tamblyn as back from the dead Emily? Has she ever expressed interest in returning? She was on the 60th anniversary special in January.

I remember when he was on in 2009-2011, the canvas was so decimated that there was no one to pair him with. They had to invent new characters for him to date, all lame. Will the same thing happen this time?

Bill and Missy are an example of how a spinoff can ruin popular characters from its mother show. It's a shame Bill never came back from the dead, and that Missy never returned after Somerset. Both were forgotten after playing such a big role on the show in the 1960s. Killing off Lee was definitely ridiculous. I wonder if Carol Roux (Missy) and Barbara Rodell (Lee) might have any footage of their years on P&G soaps. I'd imagine also that younger actors, teens, who appeared could have footage too, for the memory or if they wanted stuff for their reel.

I don't know if there's a list anywhere. I tried to compile one, but it's difficult. There are some episodes that aired on Retro that aren't on the site. There are also episodes that are on the site that never aired on Retro. The Oct. 31, 1968 episode never aired on Retro during its first run. When they revamped the site last year, they did add a few episodes that aired on Retro and weren't on the site: Feb 14, 1968, Aug 1, 1968. But there are a few that still aren't on: like 1 from April 1968, 6 at the end of June 1968, 8/5/68, the real 9/25/68. Who knows if they'll ever fix that now with the free site. They haven't changed anything since last year.

The domesticity in these scenes from 1975 are amazing. There's a real family feel, a sister, a brother, a mother, a father. You wouldn't see this sort of thing on this show again. It became about best friends creating artificial families: Cass, Felicia, Donna; and whatever families there were, were damaged in some way. To see Pat in these clips and then what she is in the 1980 shows -- wow, they really did a number on her. And Aunt Liz has dignity here, not the joke she was in the later decades.

What Ariana Muenker is doing is great! Nice to know that some old footage is out there, in the hands of former cast members, and finally is seeing the light of day!

The Dobsons pretty much jettisoned the 4 family structure that they started the show with by January 1985, a little over 5 months after the premiere. They came up with a serial killer storyline to revamp the show into something different, the white carnation killer. The story came out of nowhere; it was set up in one day, and then dominated the show for 2 months. The Perkins family was pretty much destroyed when Dane left; the same with the Andrade family when Ava Lazar was dropped. I guess the Lockridges were kept around a bit since the characters of Lionel and Augusta were so strong; and the Capwells, since the Capwell children were strong in spite of the recast CCs. In any event, the show had a very limited foundation after the revamp. Dane and Ava really were the heart of the show starting out, and it felt a little hollow with them gone.

I just finished Summer's murder in my rewatch. They should have just had all Peter's murder victims be random day players that ran into Kelly. Summer's murder felt petty, like they were killing her off only because she was a bad actress. It also felt misogynistic; having left town to deal with rape trauma, Summer returns just long enough to be raped again and this time killed. And given the character's connection to Warren and Gina, it was also a waste. She should have been kept alive off screen, and returned down the line recast with a stronger actress. Perhaps in 1991, Nina Arvesen's character could have been Summer? The murder of Summer started a long pattern of this show needlessly killing off female characters in the most ridiculous ways: Mary, Amy, Hayley, Elena, Andrea, Sasha, Nikki. This was one of the reasons why the cast stayed so small, and perhaps why the audience did too.

I wish they would just put everything up on youtube. That would be so much easier than navigating their glitchy site.

I think the last time GH was overall great was 1996. Unbelievable that the show has had varying levels of poor quality going on 28 years now! The 1997 spin-off had a lot to do with starting the ball rolling. Spin-offs always hurt the mother show; just look at Another World. All the hospital stuff was given to the spin-off, with GH left with the mob stuff and "adventure" stories. I remember the moment the show started to fall: the December 1996 primetime special where they showed Laura had faked her death. The start of poor writing that never went away. Maybe they should have killed Laura off for real; that would have brought the show more organically to the dark place they wanted to go to anyway.