Lujack4Ever

No. There was slender wiggle room. Lujack was in his hospital bed and shouts out BETH! The allege moment of him dying. When they came back from commercial he's not in his bed anymore and everyone is grieving and I was like...wait he's dead?! So...the wiggle room is anything a writer could imagine could have transpired off camera when he was taken out that room. He could have suddenly rallied and for whatever reasons a good writer could come up with his family and friends were led to believe that he died. It was entirely possible for Lujack to come back from that in the right hands. Just ask his grandfather and namesake Brandon who died on screen but turned up alive and well enough to be cavorting with an island beauty his one true love of his life as we were told. Also about Jackson Freemont-they rinsed and repeated with him being up against Phillip for Beth's love but after she "died" it was Jackson chasing after Phillip's woman Chelsea Reardon. Guess they were out of ideas. Then they made him a villain, then he reformed and had him driving trucks for Sampon/Lewis at one point (talk about not knowing what to do with a character-from international music producedr to trucker)and then he disappeared back to London. Name dropped when it was time to write Chelsea out and she left to join him there.

Hey what's the name of that Facebook group? Sounds great. Ah, Simon Hall and Jessie too. A desperate attempt to recreate Lujack and Beth to disastrous results. I had to laugh when they had Simon in Lujack like clothes. So transparent and he's his half brother! For all his flaws he at least deserved ONE mention when Nick and Eric showed up on the canvas...nothing. All unnecessary as clearly Vincent was amenable to eventually come back but they had shot themselves in the foot with the death. Inexcusable really.

Thanks. Well unfortunately we wouldn't get the flashbacks but Beth Chamberlain worked well with others like Grant and Tina so I think it could have been convincing having her play off Vincent's returned Lujack. (the closest we ever got was Beth Chamberlain's Beth telling Reva Johnathan reminded her of Lujack-to which I say NO WAY!)

Today marks the 40th anniversary of my all-time favorite Guiding Light character’s death. On December 2, 1985, Brandon “Lujack” Luvonaczek breathed his last at Cedars after being caught in an explosion on the tanker Infinity. RIP Okay so I’m going to now go on a tear with my issues about the handling of Vincent Irizzary, Lujack and Nick. First off killing off Lujack huge mistake. In a SOD interview co-head writer Jeff Ryder said instead of sending him off on a world wide tour of the OUT IN THE STREETS video killing him would catapult those around him into the next chapter of their lives. SPIN…I’m sure I’ve hears somewhere it was Gail Kobe’s sour grapes for VI not renewing his contract to explore a film career. So the character was done dirty and we got to see Beth back with Philip after explaining the last two years why she had moved on and couldn’t /didn’t want to be with him anymore. Now we come to Nick. They went through gymnastics to bring him back as a long lost twin only to pair him with…Mindy! The entire time he was on the canvas they never brought Beth back. That would have been an epic story. After he finally left again he came back for two episodes at Christmas and they did not even write a scene where Phillip who was on the canvas meets Nick. Ball fumbled at every possible turn with Nick. My hope bloomed when FINALLY Vincent left ALL MY CHILDREN. This was their chance to get him back AND if I could only have been on the writing staff not I had a scenario for his return not as NICK but as LUJACK. How? He died on screen? There was just enough wriggle room (especially given all the outlandish back from the dead and other things like clones etc.) to make it work. Remember Infinity was a powerful crime organization. The government could have been investigating it all along and never got anyone even close to it. The explosion of the ship sets off alarms. They found out a critically injured Lujack was aboard. Did he see something value regarding Largo and Infinity. They had to make sure he lived and didn’t want to trust Cedars. Louie Darnell, I believe was the attending physician when he died (can’t have Ed not save Lujack right?!) Long story short they pressure Louie in to doing something that simulates his death after he cried out BETH and apparently died. Remember, when they came back from commercial, he was gone and everyone was greiving. That was when he was spirited away by the government and eventually into witness protection. He chose not to come back because Beth and Alexandra moved on. He was tempted when Nick came but he stayed away. All this is revealed by a dying Dr. Darnell who wants to go out with a clean conscious. Alex and Beth, who were on the canvas at the time begin a frantic search and low and behold ...they find LUJACK. It was doable with a scenario like this. So I voraciously scoured the soap mags for any information on where VI would wind up, fingers crossed….I would have even taken Nick if he could have gotten a Beth/Nick story but no…he went to YOUNG AND RESTLESS as David Chow. When Chow got killed off I prayed he would come back since VI is east coast based…but no GL did not bring him back…every chance wasted and eventually it became too late and the show was cancelled. So yes, the minute the execs decided Lujack had to die they committed a self-inflicted gunshot wound the show would never recover from. This was Lujack we are talking about, a legacy character not some throw away like Kurt Corday or Detective Cutter and they learned nothing from this debacle when they killed off a certain Bauer.

It was still pre-internet so its hard to say what everyone was feeling at home however anyone rooting for them would have gotten their first sign of hope when they were in Acapulco together and were getting along. Everything that came after started there.

1. i knew Nola was the stalker the minute she showed up hanging out at the lunch counter in Wheels & Meals Diner...a place she never frequented before. The whole storyline was a joke...why GL wrote that Buzz was some irresisitable hearthrob I will never know. He was a ill tempered loudmouthed lout. 2. Never warmed to Cassie. To self righteous and it was just plain silly that Sarah too had a secret child. 3. Unfortunately that left zero wiggle room for Maureen ever coming back. Once you start passing out body parts even the most talented writer or producer could never ever be able to figure a way to fix it once the fan backlash started. Painted into a corner.

My take on the Holly/Roger thing was....the writers should have QUIT while they were AHEAD. I can't tell you the year but I remember a particular scene. Roger and Holly were snooping around the Spaulding mansion and were caught by young Ben Reade who tells them the Spauldings hate their guts. What stands out about this scene was Roger and Holly were totally in love and working together....they overcame every dark and twisted thing from their past and were at last happy. They beat the odds and overcame and were finally a true couple. That was how they should have remained until one or both left the show but no...not long after the writers and producers tanked it all and put Holly with Fletcher....a fatal mistep as neither of the characters really clicked with anyone else ever again.

LOL and he wasn't even dead! As far as fake funerals go when they thought Beth was dead they turned in a pretty decent one as I recall as they even brought back I.Q. and Tanya We even had Jackson showing up telling Phillip if Beth had gone with him she'd still be alive.

It could well have been. Its been so many years I don't recall exactly just that it stuck with me that the writers went there. Speaking of Vanessa and funeral services with poor writing the one that stuck out to me was the reading of Henry Chamberlain's will. The horrid version of J no dot Chamberlain actually groaned out loud saying, "Can we get on with this!" The Vanessa I knew and loved would have tore him a new one for being so disrespectful to her father instead of sitting there silently saying nothing.

I was talking quite a bit about him as he's in my top 5 characters. Loved his romance with Leslie Ann...she was so much better with him than Floyd. As I mentioned earlier dumping the abysmal Paul Valere murder on him was such a cheap trick. Still he had one of the best exit lines ever as I remember it to this day. "If this were a Greek tragedy, I would have been the hero." Regarding Amanda...anyone remember the article somewhere that Toby Posner was taken aback how the writers were taking shots at Amanda's hair having Alex make jokes about clogging the tub and wooly mammoth and Posner was to paraphrase" its the Amanda character but its MY hair." The timing is right that this would have been around the time MZ was disrespected as well. Not their best era.

I can't bag on Mark Evans because I saw a LOT of him when first started watching the show religiously due to my crush on Maeve Kincaid. At the time she was squiring him around town. The thing about Mark is (well I was going to say the protype but there may have been more like him long before I started watching) he represents a character type GL would become VERY fond of in the coming years: the seemingly normal man and potential love interest for the ladies who is secretly...evil. Let's see we have: David Preston, Will Jefferies, Daniel St. John, Edmund Winslow, Brent Lawrence and probably a host of others I've forgotten or missed during those horrible Peapack years when I barely caught an episode.

Ooh that's juicy. I had no idea Andy was brought in to replace Roger in the villain department. I've seen so few clips of him but I've always been interested in him due to his connection to Trish Lewis (my favorite Lewis). Holly's saintly mother must have been crushed when her son was busted and sent to jail never to be seen again.

Recently I saw some episodes featuring my favorite Warren storyline...his romance with Leslie Ann Monroe. It was wonderful when he realized he really did care for her when she tried to off her self with pills and they married. I was so mad when they killed her off. They deserved to be a happy couple for a lot longer before the Dreaming Death got her. RIP Warren Burton-he was amazing in that role. As for Eric they should have done more with him. When he was on not one person especially Alex mentioned his son Simon Hall half brother to Lujack and Nick.

Carrie made out better than most. She got to continue on the show. In the 80's it seemed once the writers felt they had used up all the story potential for a character they pinned a murder on them. The great Warren Andrews written off for the murder of a stupid useless villain character intead of having it actually be the alleged heroine Christine that nobody cared about and also it turns out Floyd Parker was obsessed with Beth so he had to go and kill the guy that blinded her. Warren was one of my top 5 characters and I hated they did this to him.

Agreed. That was a total misfire. Why not put him with Lillian now that there would be no scandal or if that was too much for Michelle bring back Claire. Susan Pratt seemed to be willing to pop up from time to time. Maybe she could have come back full time...but Eve? Someone who looked like she could be his daughter?