vetsoapfan

Thank you @SoapDope78 for the post, and @DRW50 for the tag.

Thanks, @DRW50. The Jingles the Clown story on Somerset, as penned by the great Henry Slesar, was great. I wish you could have seen it. It tapped into many people's very real fear of clowns.

Ahhh, there are so many moments, so many relationships, so many stories that stood out on TEON. Let me put my thinking cap on for a bit!

Thanks, @slick jones.

How many volumes of the encyclopedia do you want, LOL?🙃

I thought it was a small lighthouse which the Whitney family owned, but if Reynolds confirmed it was only a tower, I won't argue the point. I saw it in a few episodes, 55 years ago, and minute details tend to get cloudy. I appreciate the clarification and the link you provided. The synopsis of the Jonah Lockwood storyline was great.🙂

The entire story went on for months, and built slowly. It was unsettling at first, then unnerving, and ultimately terrifying. Writer Henry Slesar gave us so many twists and turns, so many surprises, so many heart-stopping moments, no wonder the ratings were so high at the time.

Hi there, how are you doin g? I originally saw the episode with those scenes live, back in the day. I know that the ep was floating around in fan circles, because my friend Mark had it on video and sent it to me. Sadly, after 40 years and two moves, I have no idea what became of that tape. For my own satisfaction, I want to find it and watch those scenes again, so if it has survived and I can locate it, I will tell you ASAP. I've never come across it on Youtube, but there are scores of 1984 episodes of TEON on that site, so with enough digging, we might be able to uncover it there. (I looked last night, but to no avail.)

Yep, I agree that the actor playing a cop in the Charmin commercial is definitely Bill Quinn.

One of the Top 10 Stories in soap opera history, IMHO. It was brilliantly written (Henry Slesar was a genius) and surprisingly scary. My heart was in my throat during the conclusion of Jonah Lockwood's reign of terror, when he cornered Laurie in the light house. EEK!

I've never seen Emily Prager act in anything other than TEON, but I would have liked to see what she could have brought to SNL. Her success mainly comes from writing. She is 77 years old this year. Yikes! I feel so old! I also found Linda Cook touching her scenes at the tail end of TEON's run. Her somber approach to the role felt more appropriate at the time, since the show's termination cast a dark pall over everything. Reuniting Laurie Ann with her parents was the only thing mediocre writer Lee Sheldon ever did that made TEON feel like its old, true self, if only briefly. I loved the scenes with Nancy and Laurie reminiscing about her childhood friend Sarah Louise Capice and her step-grandfather Winston Grimsley, both long-unmentioned characters in Monticello. It would have been amazing for Doug McKeon to make a surprise cameo as Timmy one final time, so viewers could rest assured that his character had not died in the attic and decayed into a skeleton like Bobby Martin did in Pine Valley.🫢 It would have been a nice gift to the fans, too, if beloved vets like Bill and Martha Marceau had popped in for a visit. But none of the long-running P&G went out with style and grace, alas.

@DRW50, regarding your inquiry about my opinions on the various actresses cast as Laurie Ann Karr on TEON, my favorite by far was Emily Prager. The children who had played the role before her were fine as child actors go, but Prager was the first young-adult Laurie and quite well cast. Her Laurie was sweet but did not fall into the trap of being a passive and simple-minded ingenue who was a perpetual victim. Her Laurie was bright, confident, and had some backbone. Lou Grant would say she had "spunk," LOL. I found Prager's Laurie to be refreshing because young heroines back then could be written and played as simply "good girls" with not much personality. When Prager left the show, Laurie was not seen for several months, and when the character did reappear, viewers were treated to a new Laurie who was markedly different. To me, Prager could easily have passed as the daughter of Teal Ames, who had played Laurie's birth mother Sarah Lane Karr. Ruskin's Laurie looked more cultured and refined and lacked the earthy spunkiness Prager had brought to the part. Ruskin struck me as more self-contained than Prager, and not as warm. She was a decent actress and I accepted her overall, but I never got over calling her "the new Laurie." (Peter Simon was "the new Ed" to me for 27 years, LOL!). Ruskin's replacement, Linda Cook, restored Laurie's vulnerability and warmth, but to me, the character swung too far back into the sensitive and emotional direction. Granted, a lot of this could have been due to the writing, but Laurie really lost her strength and spunk, and became oversensitive, dependent and (IMO) weak. It was hard to see the character turning into a nebbish, so I was never able to see Cook's version as the "real" Laurie, either. I do want to say that, with the material they were given, both Ruskin and Cook showed talent. The character just kept changing to much for me to feel comfortable with the drastic personality swings. Laurie felt like three separate characters, just using the same name, as different actresses took over.

In the Joy commercial, the actress who plays the young woman returning home is Jeanne Ruskin. She replaced Emily Prager as Laurie Ann Karr on The Edge of Night and played that role from 1973 to 1975. I don't recognize any of the other actresses.

So many PTB are too lazy, indifferent and incompetent to do their homework and get to know the history of the shows they are being paid handsomely to handle. This has been a major problem across the board on soaps for decades. I look back with respect and even awe at writers like Agnes Nixon, Pat Falken Smith, Claire Labine and Douglas Marland, who CLEARLY studied the new shows they took over quite thoroughly.

Yes. Once all the master writers (who were both gifted AND understood the heart and soul of the soap opera genre) left us, daytime TV collapsed. Micro-managing and clueless suits started inflicting their idiotic mandates onto the soaps, and allowed/encouraged inferior scribes to take over. It was a lose-lose scenario. The soaps and viewers paid the price. To me, the problems arise when writers (and other PTB) who simply do not understand the essence of soaps, or who seem to deride the genre itself, refuse to adhere to any of the principles that work; ignore the principles which had kept the soaps hugely successful and beloved for decades.

I agree that the problem exploded in the 1980s, but some soaps like ATWT and Y&R were able to hold out and continue producing good material. But by the mid-1990s, most (if not all) of the soaps had collapsed, and daytime became a wasteland.

There are some performers who just have an undefinable but undeniable presence/charisma/magnetism to which the audience responds. IMHO, Courtney was one of them. I agree. I've seen other actresses whom I deemed weaker (hello Charity Rahmer, LOL), but being "less bad" than someone else is not a ringing endorsement of anyone's talent or appeal. "Uneven" is the word. Some casting choices were spot-on while others were truly painful. Of course, this is true for all soaps, not just Rauch's AW.

I know that there are fans who considered Borgenson to be at least adequate as Alice, and others who deemed her to be Jacqueline Courtney's best replacement in the role. Having watched the show for so many years, however, I found the dismissal and replacement of JC to be...sacrilegious, like replacing Mary Stuart as Joanne on SFT, Deidre Hall as Marlena on DAYS, Susan Lucci as Erica on AMC, or Genie Francis as Laura on GH. Some actors just cannot be replaced IMHO. The only Alice I wanted to see on-screen was Courtney. Runyon did not strike me as a strong actress (Cathy Green had been so likeable and good), and the Pat-Brian pairing strikes me as a "we don't know what else to do with these people so we'll push them together" plot device.

Thanks @slick jones.🙂

Yep. I sound like a broken-record and crusty curmudgeon when I say this, but overall, the soap genre has been in the toilet for 30 years. How OLTL, TEON, AW, TGL and ATWT ended up will always be painful for me.

It's natural for die-hard fans to clamor for more and more vintage episodes to come to light, but you are 100% right: we are truly lucky that so much classic material is already out there. I started video trading (by exchanging Beta and VHS tapes via snail mail) long before Youtube and other sharing site existed. The mountain of soap goodies we have today is like a cornucopia to me! And most often, the quality is at least acceptable if not downright good.

I am one of the people who loathe when soaps focus heavily on the mob and glorify degenerate criminals as romantic leads, so I had no interest in watching GH at the time. That being said, I do know numerous fans who have praised the Metro Court stuff. I noticed a major drop in quality on B&B after Bill Bill stepped down as head writer in 1993 and his son took over. I was sorely disillusioned by the soap medium by that point (except for Claire Labine's GH and Nancy Curlee's TGL), so I missed the Taylor-returns story as well.

Thank you, @Maxim, for alerting the community to these episodes. And as always, @DRW50, I appreciate your tagging me about such things which I might otherwise miss. It's true that I was disappointed in AW by 1981 and couldn't stomach watching the show live, but a break of 44 (!!!) years makes me less bitter about the show's destruction, and just seeing folks like Jim and Pat is nostalgic and touching. I'm looking forward to watching these eps.

I appreciate being tagged, as always. Thanks, @DRW50.

Thank you very much, @DRW50 These shows are new to me, but I am always interested in hearing about and listening to vintage radio broadcasts.