China Jones

7 hours ago, robbwolff said:

A week later, the synopses say Matt came back with Matt's records that showed he didn't graduate from Northwestern. 

I swear I remember a conversation where Iris mentioned that Mac had gone to Dartmouth!

4 hours ago, Mona Kane Croft said:

And if there are Q&A sessions, I hope they plant some questions for these older actors, to make sure they don't feel left out.

Excellent idea! 

15 minutes ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

I'm one of those people who believe any role can be recast but not every role should be.

Another World's MacKenzie Cory is that type of character. I'm pretty sure a recast wouldn't have been able to play Mac with the same and warmth and charisma as Douglass Watson did.  

3 hours ago, Jdee43 said:

The actor Jordan Charney did play other soaps in the mid 70s, including OLTL. 

I remember him from the 80s on General Hospital. He played Heather's psychologist Dr. Sy Katz.  

1 minute ago, Dan said:

I have no interest whatsoever of the current soaps

I couldn't agree more!!

5 minutes ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

But, I thought James Harmon Brown wrote an AWFUL MEAN-SPIRITED story.

Don't leave me hanging, spill! If you don't want to get into it, please give a brief clue and I can probably research it or figure it out for myself. I didn't watch GL that much the last ten years. Thanx!

1 hour ago, danfling said:

Johnny left town also, and I seem to think that Laurie Ann was committed to a mental institution.   Johnny left with their son (Mike's grandson)

I do remember that Laurie Ann, after she returned home for the show's final Christmas, asked her parents to help her locate her son so that she could reconnect with him. But yes, he could have been utilized all those years that Laurie Ann was institutionalized.

13 hours ago, Vee said:

My long, long binge of the Nola Madison saga is leading up to her return though.

Wasn't that arc great? I remember EON hyping the fact that the show had secured screen star Kim Hunter for the role of Nola. (I was young at the time, so I was unfamiliar with Ms. Hunter's work.) I really enjoyed Nola and Owen as well as Page and Brian. 

1 hour ago, Spoon said:

If they couldn't have gotten GA back, they should've made a call to John Bolger.

While I respect the fact that some people liked Bolger, please no!!! For one thing, he would have probably looked way too old next to his on-screen father. 

33 minutes ago, Vee said:

and then when he does show up he is mostly fine!

I assume that the writers would have addressed his mental fragility in the future but shifted course and went with the physical illness to wrap up his storyline once they learned of the show's cancellation. His return is the whole reason I recently chose to watch those final seven months of the Peapack era.

2 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

To most people, GL was a show their mother or grandmother watched, and not something still on the air in 2009.

Yes, I guess you're right, considering the fact that even I wasn't watching in 2009: I recently viewed the Peapack era on YouTube. The thing is, I used to watch GL (and the whole CBS daytime line-up) with my grandmother, so it was kind of tough to see one of the shows we looked at together go out like that.  

13 minutes ago, TEdgeofNight said:

Peapack!! Worst idea ever!!

I agree! While I'm glad that the actors and crew got to work for another year-and-a-half or so, I have to wonder if the end result was worth it. Maybe it would have been better to be unemployed than have your name attached to the inferior product that Guiding Light became during the Peapack era.

53 minutes ago, Mona Kane Croft said:

Convening a panel of fans to monitor continuity would be cumbersome and inefficient, and I don't believe that has ever been done.  

Yes, I understand. I just wish writers could have at least asked their grandmothers or old babysitters or anyone they knew of that had watched these shows if they remembered anything useful.

1 hour ago, Mona Kane Croft said:

This was while Harding Lemay was head writer, and he's the same writer who wrote the scene in which Rachel said she used to walk past the mansion on her way to school.

I know this is nitpicky, but wouldn't the mansion have likely been located farther out of town and in a more rural area? (Afterall, there was acreage enough for horses and stables, right?) But we're to believe that Rachel had to walk from her lower income neighborhood and past these countryside estates on her way to the public high school which was, presumably, in the center of town.

On 12/18/2023 at 7:09 AM, Mona Kane Croft said:

I'm surprised Lemay didn't have access to character histories.

Do new writers ever bother to ask the actors about the specifics of the history of their character? Can actors feel free to chime in when they see that an egregious error is about to be made regarding backstory or the personality of their character or would that be considered bad form or insubordination? I know the actors have a lot of lines to memorize each day, so do they even remember things that happened with their storylines years ago?  

Why can't writers assemble a panel of dedicated viewers like the people on this board as consultants? We seem to recall just about everything, LOL.

52 minutes ago, j swift said:

A character moves to town, and years later multiple people from their past happen to move to the same small town.

This is along the same line I think: a character such as Cass Winthrop has a sister like Stacy who moves to town and leaves. Yet, years later when Cass's brother Morgan shows up, did either of them mention their sister Stacy? (If they did, I apologize, I just don't remember it.) It's as if Stacy and Morgan existed in different universes.

Something similar happened on Matlock: he had a daughter named Charlene when the show started and many years later, he had a daughter named Lianne. But I don't recall Matlock saying he had two daughters or ever mentioning the earlier daughter when talking to the latter daughter.

3 minutes ago, Mitch64 said:

 Who was her almost brother? 

James Spaulding is the son of Beth Raines and Phillip Spaulding. However, he was conceived while Beth was married to Susan Lemay's adopted father Jim, after whom James is named. So, during GLs last year, Susan aka Daisy was sleeping with a boy that would have been her half-brother had he truly been Jim's son. (I realize Susan was Jim's adopted daughter, but still...)

7 hours ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

This is from a blog I wrote with permission. It's from an essay in a book that most fans aren't going to have access to.

I also want to thank you for this excerpt, Donna! A very interesting read.

13 minutes ago, Mitch64 said:

Ha..not to mention...de-aged Susan (such a vanity cast for Ehlers)

Wait, what? You're saying that Daisy/Susan was reverse SORASed because Ehlers didn't want to be portrayed as old enough to have a 24-year-old daughter? Why bring back Daisy/Susan at all only to have her sleep with her almost-a-brother (on a blanket, in a field, with the whole Hee Haw gang looking on.)

Was Jim Lemay ever mentioned again or did this erase his existence?

On 12/5/2023 at 12:19 AM, Khan said:

RB and LD would have been too young to play Alan

By the time of the Peapack era, I didn't really buy Ron Raines as being old enough either. Alan was a wealthy businessman with the resources to arrange a baby switch when Phillip was born. Yet, when I recently watched the show's last months, I couldn't detect much more than 15 years difference in age when father and son stood side-by-side.

18 minutes ago, Khan said:

Once you got past the accent, Joan Collins was not bad as Alexandra.

LOL, I forgot the accent! Yes, it did take some suspension of disbelief to accept that.

3 hours ago, Liberty City said:

I think, had it been a different place and time, the Peapack era could have worked. Invest in building permanent sets

This is what confused me at first, Liberty City. I thought show taping was moved to Peapack because, obviously, it was less expensive than New York. I believed it was going to be business as usual with traditional camera work and the construction of permanent sets. It wasn't until I recently viewed the finished product that I realized the show must have been flat broke and needed to film in the cheapest possible places i.e. outdoors because the park was public, and air is free.

38 minutes ago, Khan said:

I respectfully disagree.  I think JC was capable of handling the material and the workload, but I don't think MADD was all that enthused with her.

I agree with you, Khan! Much of Dame Joan's short GL stint has been posted on YouTube and I loved what I saw! I think Ms. Collins handled the role in a mischievous slightly comedic way. A couple of examples include Alexandra's takedown of Olivia at the Thanksgiving dinner table and Alex's playfully ribbing Alan about faking his heart attack.

51 minutes ago, Khan said:

The only thing missing from "Springpack" was a shot of Ned Beatty running through the woods in his skivvies. 

LOL, Khan, once again I totally agree! Whenever I saw an overgrown field, I practically expected Grandpa Jones, Lulu and the rest of the Hee Haw gang to pop up!

Some posters on this board have said that Peapack is actually quite lovely, and I bet the residents thought it was a great idea to have GL tape there. However, the camera work did the town such a disservice that it will probably take the Chamber of Commerce years to undo the damage.

All this talk about messy family trees leads me to another topic: why must everybody in soap land be blood kin? It seems like every time new character is added, the writers find a way to make him or her part of a core family. Why can't people just have good friends like old college roommates, sorority sisters, or former co-workers with whom they remain close?

I know this is the AW thread, but the way this family messiness gets even messier was exemplified on GL. I wasn't watching at the time, but I've long read about Reva finding a long-lost son. This discovery wasn't made until after the young man had gotten romantically involved with her niece. Did the writers make him Reva's son before or after he started dating his cousin?

21 minutes ago, j swift said:

Matthew wants to hang out with Mitch, then he learns the circumstances of his conception, and he briefly rejects Rachel.

Okay, so this rejection of Rachel is not the same as the time Matt rejected both Rachel and Mitch after he learned that Rachel was responsible for the death of Janice Frame? I saw a clip on YouTube where Matt had moved out of the Cory mansion and in with his big brother Dr. Jamie Frame. There was a touching scene where Mac urged Matt to come to terms with the situation and reunite with his mother.

LOL, after I typed the name Frame twice, I realized that Rachel killed her son's aunt! Another example of those messed up family relationships.

6 hours ago, j swift said:

It felt as if when Matt and Amanda were SORASed they became immune to the troubles of the past, with the obvious exception of Mitch, but even that was a minor blip that was quickly resolved. 

I don't remember if I knew it at the time, but watching some clips of AW on YouTube made me realize that Sam Fowler was Mitch Blake's half-brother. So, Amanda was married to her half-brother's uncle, making little Ali Mitch's niece as well as Matt's niece. I swear, the family relationships on these soap operas were pretty messed up!

BTW, how was the Mitch blip resolved?

4 hours ago, Khan said:

No.

I'm fine with regular, on-location shoots for primetime (network/cable/streaming) shows, but daytime drama is a different animal.  For many, it's the closest we'll ever come to watching live theater (four-camera sitcoms notwithstanding).  

I agree with you, Khan! It's not that I can't accept change, but I'd grown so accustomed to the indoor setting of soap operas that I found the outdoor shots too jarring. And because just about every scene was now outside, it was overwhelming!

I don't know how these things work, but I've often wondered if GL could have partnered with a real estate company that could have granted the show access to empty houses and buildings it was listing, and with HGTV to stage them with appropriate furnishings like a spacious hospital lobby, a larger office for Alan Spaulding, etc.