vetsoapfan

Oh cool, thanks for the heads up! We can never have too many Horton memories!

The best of DAYS (and all the remaining soaps, sadly) may be in the past, but we are fortunate that so much pictorial and video material has survived.

Yes, that was our Jacquie Courtney, who did some commercials for Porcelana cream back in the day. I though her hairdo for this ad was a little too poofy on top, but at least it was a million times better than the awful, butch style she had for a while during her 1984 return to AW

It's my pleasure, believe me, to remember the good old DAYS!

Remembering Days of Our Lives' first family: the Hortons. Today, Tomorrow, Forever!😁 More of the beloved core family:

@DRW50, you are not putting me on the spot at all. I can't say if you have seen the clip before, but I know I have. I remember Phil's comments about the vintage scene from when I watched the Donahue episode originally.

Exactly. It's...curious to proclaim that a viewer is jealous of a fictional character in the first place, but advocating for the stabilization of the core family should not precipitate anger from viewers who prefer other characters over the Hortons.🤨

That'll tell 'em. 😉🫢🤣

The idea that the Horton family became irrelevant after Alice died is not just true. Yes, short-sighted decisions by incompetent PTB have led to many important family members being written out, killed off, or just disappearing over the years. JER's idiotic decision to let Susan Seaforth Hayes go was just par for the course for the enormous damage he inflicted on the show, but all is not irreversibly destroyed. Using Julie as the matriarch, the family could be rebuilt by using familiar characters and their descendants from the past. I wonder how the audience would react to seeing the popular Stephen Schnetzer return as Julie's brother Steve, to introduce some of his descendants. Sandy Horton could also be brought back quite easily, with adult children of her own. Jennifer, Melissa, Scotty, etc., there are several legacy characters who could be woven into today's fabric. My point has always been that the show keeps introducing random newbies to the canvas, anyway; people whom we initially neither know nor care about. Why not tie some of them the show's core foundation and have them related to the Hortons? We'd warm up to Horton newbies as quickly as we would to any other new faces. Dismissive viewers who don't care about DAYS' legacy wouldn't be affected either way, but the rest of us would love and appreciate the nod to history and continuity. UGH! Watching the Bauers being gutted in the early-mid 1980s on TGL was hard to endure. Producer Gail Kobe and writer Pamela Long clearly did not understand the show, and did not care about its consistently rich cast of characters. I cringed when Pamela Long was quoted in the press as saying that one of the first things she and Kobe had to do was "get rid of the dead wood" among the cast. In a very short period of time, 2/3 of the existing characters were axed, in spite of their continuing story potential. We had just lost Mart Hulswit as Ed Bauer before Kobe and Long took over, and it was no one's fault that we lost Bert, but the new team killed off Bill and Hillary Bauer, and wrote out Hope and Mike Bauer. Being left with a new, fake Ed was just not the same. Soaps never learn, alas, and keep making the same mistakes ad nauseum.

In general, I am not a fan of back-from-the-dead stories. They weaken the impact of the original deaths, and ultimately (if a show uses this hackneyed plot device over and over) just become predictable, unrealistic and ridiculous. DAYS is the prime offender in this regard. When hack writers go on a killing rampage and slaughter multiple beloved characters, however, the egregious and sophomoric writing mistakes must be rectified. If not, the stability of the show itself would be crippled further. Atrocious writing is bad enough, but losing the characters whom the audience is invested in the most would be fatal. History shows us that viewers do not take kindly to the combination of bad writing AND the loss of many fan favorites. All this to say: sometimes reviving "dead" characters is the lesser of two evils on soaps, and should be done even if it's a stretch. It would be significantly worse and audience-alienating to let writing blunders stand. This is particularly true when the original death/murder plots were done purely for shock value, and were badly executed to begin with.

I agree. With the notable exception of Y&R, which phased out the original Brooks and Foster families in favor of the Abbotts and the Newmans, the majority of soaps begin to weaken and suffer upon the elimination of the core families who helped garner the soaps' highest audience loyalty in the first place. Broad proclamations that "no one cares" about the descendants of the Horton family, that no one cares about Julie, or that any one specific character is the show's star are personal opinions (which, of course, are fine to hold and voice). If we know anything about the world of soaps, however, opinions and tastes vary widely. For all the viewers who are disinterested in one set of characters, there are others who feel those same characters are vital for the health and growth of the show. Diversity is the spice of life.🙂

The lack of body diversity in soaps is unacceptable, but sadly, it goes hand in hand with the soaps' (and television's in general) lack of representation in many areas. When I was growing up, it was rare to see plus-size people on TV, but it was also rare to see members of racial, religious and sexual-orientation minorities too. The excuse by TPTB was always that the audience wasn't ready for it or didn't want to see it. Representation has widened on television nowadays, so that we see more people of color, more people from different faiths, and more LGBTQ+ folks on screen. Hopefully, more actors/characters with varying body types will also follow suit. BTW, just for clarification, Mike Horton on DAYS was always presented as heterosexual. One time, under severe stress, he was unable to perform sexually with Trish Clayton, which upset and confused him. He quickly boinked Linda Patterson, however, and his sexuality was confirmed. He could have experimented with men later on, or expressed some interest in doing so, but almost 50 years later, nothing of the sort has ever come to light. Being temporarily impotent at one point does not make Mike "almost homosexual," IMHO.

Classic The Doctors, Dark Shadows and The Bold and the Beautiful (on youtube) have been made available, and I believe they are doing fairly well; certainly well enough to keep on airing. What I really want to see again, though, are Days of our Lives and The Young and the Restless from the beginning. I was thrilled when CBS re-aired the first two episodes of Y&R from 1973 (although edited, which was a travesty).

I grew up watching and loving soaps, and would love to have a well-written and intelligent one to watch on a daily basis again. I do acknowledge that there are good shows on primetime TV and streaming services to enjoy, but nothing beats a great soap! It's my personal conspiracy theory that the owners of surviving soap archives are not allowing the vintage years to be streamed anywhere, because the golden oldies would put the modern product to shame, LOL.

I have been saying for decades that the network suits have to hire the best potential writers they can, and then back off enough to give them space to BREATHE and WRITE. I remember both Henry Slesar and William J. Bell saying in vintage interviews that they had to present storyline outlines to the network, but they were generally allowed to do/write what they wanted. Harding Lemay said this was true for him as well, when the ratings were stable. From what I remember, they were good enough (although my memory is foggy about which writers wrote what specific material back then. Everything is sort of mixed together in my mind.) I do recall that the writing was awful during the "married couple" regimes that followed: the Hollands, the Pollacks and the Elmans. Then Douglas Marland came aboard and saved the day.

Right. Certainly, the boys were not the worst-possible writers for the show, but what we need now are writers who are actually GOOD; who make the audience excited about tuning in. If the new team including Mulcahey doesn't cut the mustard, either, then TPTB will have to try again to find someone with a winning formula. At least we have reason to believe/hope that the chances are on PM's side. The situation with Young was curious. I enjoyed his tenure into the 1970s (the early part of that decade was good), but then the show took a nosedive around 1974-75-ish, and it was hard to watch for a few years there. Heaven knows what happened backstage.

And it really started the downfall of this soap. I was putting up with GH in the mid 1970s, when it hit its first nadir. To me, Douglas Marland's miraculous resuscitation of the show was the first sweet spot, and Pat Falken Smith only added to the glory. After the wasteland of the sci-fi stuff in the 1980s, I was pleasantly thrilled to see what Labine did with Port Charles, and her tenure became the next major sweet spot. Right, they weren't good headwriters, and made bad choices, but to give them an ounce of credit: they weren't Ron Carlivati and Thom Racina bad (damning Chris and Dan with faint praise, I know.) It goes back to a comment I made earlier: soap fans are a hardy bunch and forever hope for the best. It boggles the mind that there are NO executives out there who can recognize the problems, and will take constructive steps to fix them. I've followed soaps for over six decades, and in the past, obvious and egregious issues on soaps would be remedied (or at least attempts would be made at remedies) in a timely fashion. But for the last few decades, the same crippling flaws have been allowed to fester on the soaps endlessly. Frank Valenti has been with GH for 12 freaking YEARS!

Soap fans are a hardy bunch, and persist in holding out hope that their favorite shows will one day improve...even after years (or decades, LOL) of bitter disappointment. IMHO, DAYS has not had good writing since the spring of 1982, when Pat Falken Smith left for a second time. Some subsequent scribes have been mediocre, while others have been heinously bad. (The worst of the worst don't even need to be named, LOL.) Y&R did not immediately crash and burn when William J. Bell Bell left. It was adequate for a while, if not terribly invigorating. But since 1996, when Lynn Marie Latham took over the writing, it's been a mess, with Charles Pratt's, Maria Bell's and Josh Griffith's tenures being particularly weak. Since Thudley took over B&B, it has never been great, but at least comparing it to the writing of other soap scribes, it has not been as atrocious. (Don't get me wrong; a show can still be atrocious, while still being LESS atrocious than others.) To me, the last time GH had great headwriters was way back in 1996, with Claire Labine. While I personally did not appreciate his contribution to the show, I know there are some fans who liked portions of Robert Guza's material. But since he departed, fans of the show have been stuck with the likes of Ron Carlivati and Jean Passanante, and so-so work (at best) from O'Connor and Etten. Certain people decree that I am being too demanding of daytime dramas, and that I should just accept, without criticism, whatever dreck the soaps dish out. They say that because soaps are in danger, viewers would offer nothing but effusive praise at all times, under all circumstances. But to me, soaps are in danger BECAUSE they are so poorly done nowadays. Pretending like mad that the emperor has beautiful clothes is not going to mask his nakedness. There are great writers out there. Maybe they need to be brought in from other genres instead of endlessly recycling the same, failed hacks from soaps' past. I'd rather see a brand-new (to daytime TV) writer get a shot, than have to endure another reign of hell from a Carlivati or a Pratt or a Higley or a Passanante. Knowing Mulcahey has talent, I'm really rooting for him.

Particularly with the oppressive interference of "the suits" on soaps these days, I have a feeling Mulcahey is going to have a fight on his hands in the direction of GH moving forward. We know that's there's no chance of Josh Griffith's Y&R or Brad Bell's B&B offering us quality writing any time soon, and God knows Ron Carlivati is stinking up DAYS. GH is probably the only soap with the potential of now turning around and producing good storytelling. Fingers crossed.

Yes, it almost always (with rare exceptions) takes new writers' material some time to gel to the point where viewers get an idea of how good their work is going to be. I can think of Douglas Marland on General Hospital, Rick Edelstein on How to Survive a Marriage, and Claire Labine on Love of Life as exceptions to this rule. When they came aboard those shows, the writing seemed to turn around and soar immediately. It was almost shocking. Most times, new scribes take at least a few months to settle in. Brenda Dickson was "my" Jill too, and although her talents were modest at best when the show began in 1973, at least her Jill did originally come across as a normal human being. In her Norma Desmond phase (a perfect way to describe that, bravo), Dickson's characterization was more of a caricature; a cartoon. Jess Walton ultimately returned the character to the realm of reality.

This is very well said, and I agree. Various people have told me over the years that they have withdrawn from participating on social media, because of the easily-triggered. Extraneous, "filler" characters are pointless and ultimately counter-productive to the health of a soap. GH has a plethora of them on the current canvas. Mulcahey's skill has been evident in the past, so if we are lucky, he will be given the freedom and support to strengthen the show and downplay or eliminate its weaknesses.

Right. The reactions to any form of entertainment are always mixed and contrary; 100% consensus is non existent, and we have to accept that as a given. That's why I am always baffled when people take different opinions as an inflammatory act of war. I don't want or expect everyone to agree with me all the time about everything. How boring that would be. JMHO. ITA.

I would be interested in picking Racina's brain about his involvement with the sci-fi stuff on GH, and if he ever regretted it, if he was satisfied with how it turned out, what he thought about the audience's reception of it, etc..

Mine too. I love TKAM, but one of my best and longest-known friends friends cannot sit through quiet, character-driven dramas. He finds them painfully tedious, but he literally immerses himself into the other side of the coin, with films like Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens; Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!; Plan 9 From Outer Space, and the like (all titles I only know because of him). It's like some viewers loved Claire Labine's lovely, emotional tales on General Hospital, while other fans much preferred the science-fiction sagas which dominated the 1980s. My friend and I always banter back and forth about we like and dislike, and often end up sampling each other's recommended titles. We understand that expressing even wide differences of opinion is not akin to acts of war, LOL. (That being said, I personally hope Patrick Mulcahey's version of GH is closer to Claire Labine's than Thom Racina's.)

Let's just hope that the new headwriters introduce intriguing new and returning characters whom the audiences grows to care about, played by actors who are worth our attention. Everyone will win! Soaps need all the audience pleasing they can get these days.