vetsoapfan

Yes, but not as tight as Rick Moses' jeans.

I have never been a fan of the "spurned lover turns psycho and tries to murder a romantic rival" storylines, simply because so many of them are contrived and cliche, and come across as easy gimmicks rather than true, heartfelt drama. Unless I am mistaken, it was Tex and Irving Elman who killed off Eunice, and their writing was always pretty bad, anyway. A good writer can make most stories work, but the Jennifer-kills-Eunice plot was unnecessarily damaging to the core of the show, did not lead anywhere, and not well written.

He was sexy as hell on GH (and infamous for wearing the tightest jeans in television history, LOL), so seeing his "after" pictures is a shock.

The science-fiction crap temporarily brought mainstream-media attention to the soaps, and an influx of young, fly-by-night viewers, but I have always believed that it destroyed the genre in the long run. The mainstream media never understood our shows to begin with, and their celebrating the campiness and stupidity of the fantasy plots was akin to internet bloggers, who had never watched or appreciated DOWNTON ABBEY, cheering a stoner producer's story about Mary conceiving a child after a drunken night on a space ship with the Great Gazoo. Strangers to a show might love watching it be destroyed through ludicrous and insulting storylines; long-time fans did not. And all those kids and fly-by-night viewers who tuned in to laugh at the space aliens and clones disappeared shortly afterwards, anyway. Soaps are simply not their cip of tea. So the shows' integrity was destroyed for nothing. The storyline was based on human emotion and interpersonal-relationship conflict, so it worked quite well.

Right. Considering how enormously popular Courtney was on that show, they should have heralded her return. Imagine Susan Lucci coming back to the revamped AMC on Prospect Park, and the commercials that week only exclaiming, "The newbie teens go shopping at a mall...this week, on AMC!" The yawns from the audience would have been heard in jJapan.

Different people enjoy different types of entertainment, and although I personally loathe low-brow camp/science fiction on soaps., there is apparently a market for that. But for me, most of daytime dramas' true, treasure-worthy moments involved dynamic interpersonal-relationship material played out among three-dimensional, complex characters. Most of this happened before the shows started being archived, and is now lost forever. The only good thing about my being so old is that I was around the see soaps' best years.

Yes. Even if I had not been watching at the time, the event was heavily promoted (the commercial showing her crashing through the glass was shown for several days beforehand), and I would have tuned in just to see it.

I doubt their work on SFT directly lead to the Corringtons working on TEXAS. P&G often recycled writers from show to show, regardless of their success or failure on previous soaps. (Some things never change.) True, in the early 1980s, soaps were jumping on the sci-fi/fantasy/adventure bandwagon, thanks to GH's painfully awful Ice Princess story, but it did not do any favors to old warhorses like SFT. One writer, Don Chastian, later admitted in the press that TPTB kept forcing the show to copy what GH was doing, no matter how wrong or destructive such material was for SFT. You just don't try to turn THE WALTONS into SHARKNADO, you know? No, that was a few years before the Corringtons arrived.

Those more recent pictures of Moses and Robinson are...well, you know.

Yes, it's her, "UGH! This murder is going to be sooooooo inconvenient!" look, LOL,

I think too much action (over characterization) and cartoonish elements are what destroyed the soap genre, actually. I have never seen "outlandish" material presented well on daytime TV. It has, IMHO, been painful and embarrassing to watch. Mind you, I do not hate the Corringtonsas much as I loathe other scribes; I just think their style was not a good match for SFT. Or OLTL. The Corringtons were much better suited to over-the-top films like OMEGA MAN and THE KILLER BEES. (Seriously.) Back in 1977, SFT's ratings were strong enough to save it, I believe. The network probably would have cancelled a low-rated game show or LOVE OF LIFE first, had Bell's second show been ready to go at that time.

The entire plot point was...pointless, along with (years later), the show revealing Logan to be Scotty's son, only to kill him off. Why even create ties to legacy characters, and them severe them almost immediately? The only "child" of Scotty's whom I WANT them to get rid of, and never mention again, is Franco.

In my opinion, Ann Marcus gave the show its last, great period. A few writers who followed her, like Peggy O'Shea, were pretty good. Mary Stuart claimed that O'Shea's team was the best set of writers SFT had ever had, but that comment might have been colored by her extreme dislike of Marcus. Of course, Henry Slesar and Harding Lemay both brought their skill to the show, but O'Shea, Slesar, and Lemay did not last last enough for their efforts to have a long-lasting, noticeable impact. Poor viewers got stuck with a revolving door of hack writers: Irving and Tex Elman, Robert J. Shaw, Linda Griver, etc., and eventually drifted away from a show they once loved. Yes, but I do believe that the ratings' decline was a result of endlessly bad writing and production choices, along with the switch from CBS to NBC. Better material still might have lured viewers back in, but...we never really got it.

You are too kind. Thank you.

I will take both of the Wednesday boys, please.

Beautiful eyes and lips.

Don Briscoe was so handsome. Just saying.

There are many soaps available on youtube, spanning several decades, and apparently their copyright owners don't care too much. God only knows why Y&R and B&B material is targeted for deletion so relentlessly. I agree that even the more "recent" stuff gets taken down too, but episodes from the early years comes and goes in the blink of an eye, no matter how well they are hidden or uploaded with obscure titles. Even uploading "private" videos doesn't keep them safe forever. What was the Y&R video that got you into hot water?

People have indeed uploaded vintage Y&R to youtube, but for some reason, as soon as any material from the 1970s pops up, it gets tagged for copyright infringement and deleted. We see more scenes and eps from later decades than we do of the show's very best years: the 1970s. I don't understand this.

Eww, the dubbed voice is not nearly as nice as ASH's own.

I believe both Wheeler and Goutman were incompetent producers, for various reasons, but I do believe that Wheeler WANTED to do a good job. She just did not have the skill or the insight or the budget to do so. She NEVER should have been hired in the first place. Goutman just did not give a damn. Both producers decimated their shows, but at least ATWT had familiar and comforting faces on screen up until the very end. I appreciate TGL's attempts at bringing back some past characters in the final months, but it came across as if the show's history only went back to the early 1980s. All TGL's best decades, ironically, were ignored. And for me, I wanted the final scene to be with the Bauers in their kitchen, not Reva. Many of the characters featured on the last episode did not deserve the airtime.

Melba Rae (I loved her!) died in 1971, and Billie Lou Watt joined the show in 1968, although of course not as a love interest for Stu. SFT had enjoyed strong ratings in the 1970s under writers like Ann Marcus (who was awful on some other soaps but well-suited for SEARCH). In 1974-5, the show had a 9.4 (!!!) rating and was very entertaining. By 1981, however, it had plummeted to a dreadful 3.4. We had had to endure terrible writers like Tex and Irving Elman, Robert J. Shaw, the Corringtons, Linda Grover, Don Chastian, etc., and the audience just could not sit through their horrid material. My memory is fuzzy about the plots that were playing out in 1981, specifically, because the awfulness of the late 1970s and early 1980s all runs together in my mind. Pointless newbies like Sylvie Descartes, Zack Anders, Garth and Max Taper, etc., came and went very quickly, without much fanfare at the time. Those were not good years for our beloved show. Decades of watching soaps has taught me that what may look good (or at least decent) on paper, can be completely destroyed by incompetent execution.

I think this was just one of many bad, infuriating decisions made by incompetent PTB that turned fans off. Now, all the soaps are in the toilet, but way back then, there were still viable alternatives, so when one soap tanked, viewers could still find something better to watch.

The problem was it came out of nowhere, with no build up, with no rational sense. Imagine one day you are watching Olivia Walton at home with her and family; cooking, cleaning, laughing, and being the loving wife and mother she's always been. Then in the next episode, John-Boy announces that she's run off with a clown from a traveling circus, whom she's supposedly been having an affair with for years. That's the last we ever see or hear from her. It would be like, "WTF?!?" It was totally out of character, totally stupid, and came across as a slap in the face to the audience from a "writer" who just did not give a f*ck, and who thought destroying a show's core for fun was hilarious. It made a lot of viewers angry. Actually, she was on the show for 13 years, from 1968 to 1981, and as you say, there was nothing in her behavior or attitude that suggested she would ever do such a thing, or even consider leaving Stu. Bad, incompetent, callous writing.