vetsoapfan

Thank you for the mention @slick jones.

My recollection of the music used on soaps before the 1980s was that it was primarily classic standards, but there were occasional exceptions. An episode of Dark Shadows in the 1960s had an instrumental version of a Beatles song playing in The Blue Whale. This surprised me when I watched the episode on DVD, considering all the hassle music rights causes for official TV-show releases. In the 1970s, Brad and Leslie Brooks Elliot on Y&R had Bread's If as their theme song, and it was used a lot. The song had been released just a few years earlier, in 1971, so I would classify that as more of a "Top 40" title as opposed to a vintage standard song. Steve and Alice had Softly As I Leave You on AW, but that song had also been released in different versions and sung by various artists, years earlier. I would say that using Top 40 titles became more of a practice in the 1980s than it had been in the 1960s and '70s.

I just found it weird that a teacher of English Literature would refer to the legendary writers being studied in class as JRR, William, or Charles. In a serious, professional setting, it's not appropriate. It's like a foreign politician referring to Queen Elizabeth as "Liz," or referring to Barack Obama as "Barry" when talking publicly about their lives' work.

LOL! When I was in college, I studied English Literature with a teacher who would do that all the time. --"The principle message JRR wanted readers to grasp...." (Tolkien) --"William was rightly famous for his masterful use of dialogue...." (Shakespeare) --"Charles knew how to keep his readers begging for the next chapter...." (Dickens) It kind of came off as pretentious. (To be fair, I'll refer to someone with their first name and an initial, if I don't know--or care enough to check--how to spell their last name. Case in point: "Jean P.")

IMHO, the writing had been declining for a while at that time. This was a disappointment, since I thought 1973 and 1974 had been some of the very best years of the show (which I began watching in 1964). I've always believed that many fans will remain loyal to their favorite soaps, and stick with them through periods of poor writing and decision-making, if an emotional investment in the characters remains. Once a show's quality deteriorates, and my favorite characters are axed, there's neither quality nor emotional investment to keep me around. So I bail. This is what happened for me with AW. Back in 1975, I was already overloaded with a plethora of soaps to follow, so being able to dump one that was turning me off was actually a relief. On the other hand, I continued to watch ATWT until the bitter end (albeit fast-forwarding A LOT in the atrocious Sheffer/Goutman/Jean P years) because with Nancy, Bob, Kim, Lisa, Susan, John, etc., it still felt like my show. Thinking of it now, the vast majority of the soaps I abandoned drove me away by decimating the core characters and bastardizing the shows' roots. Many years ago, actress Carol Roux (Missy Matthews on AW) gave an audio interview which was available on line. She spoke about her experiences on AW and SOMERSET, and acknowledged there had been negative on-set issues, claiming that some PTB had not be nice to her. I posted about Roux's interview and comments, figuring that other long-time fans might be interested in hearing her first-hand accounts. Unwittingly, I enraged one fan, who refuted the idea that there could have been problems back-stage. He said he had a magazine article from 1970, in which the author had supposedly visited the studio and "confirmed" that it was a very happy environment with a family feeling. I asked him why a magazine writer's perception of the atmosphere would, or could, negate Roux's first-hand account and feelings of her OWN life. The poster just got mad, said the was no validity to the reports of on-set tension, period, because it contradicted the magazine. All this to say: you are right. There are fans who are easily influenced, and just assume what they choose to believe is true. You can't force them to look elsewhere if they have blinders on.

My acknowledging that personal, subjective interpretations and opinions are not akin to subjective, empirical facts does not diminish anyone's lived experience. "My god is the only one, true god" may be a person's lived experience, but as a fact, it is unprovable and cannot be taken as empirical truth by everyone else. Saying, "I saw with my own two eyes that John Doe shot Mary Smith" is an eyewitness testimony that may carry some weight. Saying, "I saw John Doe shooting Mary Smith and I believe he was thinking about how ugly her dress was at the time" is a subjective opinion, nothing more. (Of course, you have the right to hold any opinion that feels best to you, but again, opinions are just opinions.)

You've got that right. It's painful to endure people who take the attitude of, "Well, if *I* don't know this fact or that fact, it just doesn't exist! I stopped watching AW on a daily basis in 1975, after the cast massacre, but seem to recall that Mac had a serious riding accident in 1975. Since this happened a few years before Matthew was born, because it contributed to the problem. Sandy was definitely a sex worker at one time. Cecile was desperate to be with him sexually at one point, and a dismissive Sandy taunted her with, "I used to do this for a living. What will you pay me for tonight?"

There was an interview posted in an on-line soap-opera website once (the name is not coming to me), in which the ill-formed interviewer was asking Claire Labine about her past work on Love of Life. He wanted to know the details of how she handled Ben Harper's victimization in prison, when thugs tried to rape him. The thing is, that storyline happened a long time after Labine had left the show, and she had nothing to do with it. If the interviewer did not want to do his research, why couldn't he have simply asked, "Ms Labine, were you at the show when Love of Life tackled the issue of sexual assault in prison?" Why start with the premise that she had been involved, when you have no clue?🙄 So wait...she wrote that Bay City was originally set in Michigan, AND she wrote that Ryan's Hope was the first soap to be set in a real locale? Didn't AW debut in 1964 and RH in 1975? Isn't Michigan a real place? Bay City is an actual city in that state. I guess Nancy Karr was introduced on The Edge of Night after Mary Ryan debuted on RH. UGH. I can understand newbies making obvious errors like this, but MdL should not. (Alan Locher is terrible with facts, too, which is why I have trouble watching his interviews on youtube.)

Right. The same applies to Harding Lemay's book. So many fans take it as gospel, yet it is filled with one man's subjective opinions, nothing more. (That's not to say it is bad for someone to interpret situations and people subjectively in his own memoir, but it just does not equate to universal, subjective truth.) ITA. Often people read something somewhere that completely contradicts what viewers witnessed first-hand, on screen. In my experience, newer viewers (who never watched the material in question) tend to disbelieve folks who actually did see the events as they played out on screen, if it contradicts other reports from second-hand sources.

Actually, yes it was. Bay City and Somerset were both said (on air) to be in Michigan. On a talk show years later, when she had found success on primetime TV, Audra Lindley also referred to Bay City as being set in Michigan. This is why I was so annoyed when AW suddenly started to refer to the town as being in Illinois. TPTB not doing their homework (or making arbitrary changes for no fathomable reason) is egregious to me. Throughout the decades, I have found historical inaccuracies posted and printed everywhere. It's frustrating, of course, but trying to combat the problem is like trying to prevent the tide from rolling into the shore...with a spoon, LOL. What did MdL say about Ryan's Hope that was wrong? (I did not see her piece about that show.)

No, Steve did not appear at Morgan's wedding to Kelly. The actor/character had drifted into oblivion before the wedding took place.

My interest in most soaps dried up with the sci-fi and camp period of the 1980s (I prefer naturalistic soaps with multi-dimensional characters and plausible storylines), but I am always happy to chat about vintage soaps from decades past. I've always maintained that the 1960s and (particularly) the 1970s were the golden years of daytime drama. If by some miracle I stumble across the AH/PP Daytimer articles, I will notify you ASAP.

There was a monthly columnist in Rona Barrett's Daytimers for a time, named David Johnson, and I know AH was interviewed/quoted in at least one of Johnson's pieces. I remember this specifically because Johnson made the erroneous claim that Pam Peters had been completely absent from the episodes surrounding Jennifer Brooks' final days. Not true. Peggy was in an episode when Stuart and Jennifer celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary, and then in another one when the Brooks girls were gathered in their parents' living room talking about Jen's death. At the conclusion of that ep, we saw Peggy running out of the room in tears. When the action picked up on the next episode, Lorie announced that Peggy couldn't take what was happening and had fled. David Johnson criticized the show for supposedly not including Peggy in any of this story, but Johnson was the one in the wrong. He obviously had failed to see the few times Peggy had appeared, and then lambasted the show for her "absence." I do remember this and AH's comments about PP walking off the set, which lead to the termination of the Jack/Peggy storyline. I just don't recall if the various tidbits came from one issue of Daytimers or two. Unfortunately, this was 4.5 decades ago, and while my memory of my favorite soaps is generally good, I cannot say for certainty what quotes appeared in what specific issue(s) of the magazine.

I don't recall AH specifically mentioning Pam Peters' spotty appearances during the rape trial; that was my own remembrance from watching the show daily at the time. I found it so weird. AH did acknowledge the incident of PP just walking off the set one day, and then later being told by Bill Bell that he was ending AH's story and run on the show.

Granny Matthews was written out with the on-screen explanation that she went to be with her niece, who was going to have her first baby.

Yes, that's a main reason why I ever considered getting an all-region player: because there have been some shows and films I wanted which were only available in other countries.

I will NEVER abandon physical media. Films and TV series are wont to disappear from streaming sites for a variety of reasons, but when you have your own, physical copies of your favorites, you can cherish them forever. Plus, all the special features and commentary soundtracks can be a blast! I've been thinking of buying an all-region player, and you're giving me more incentive to take the plunge and do it! I've never seen Hunter, but I do remember hearing about it when it was being produced. Certain pearl-clutching conservative types wanted it taken off the air because the actor's pants were supposedly too revealing.🙄 God, YES! A French-Canadian company (Imavision, I believe) originally had the rights to release Little House on the Prairie, and their DVDs' quality was atrocious. First of all, they cut out the opening and closing credits of the episodes (WHY???), sped up the film (WHY???), and then on top of it all, offered butchered, syndicated cuts of many, if not most, of the shows. Each one should have had a running time of about 46-47 minutes, but huge chunks of some eps were missing, leaving their running times at 37 minutes. Imavision had a disclaimer on the INSIDE of the packaging, claiming that "every effort has made to include all existing scenes." So you had to buy and open the DVD sets before finding out the eps had been butchered. Of course, years later, Lion's Gate re-released the entire series and had the full-length episodes intact and remastered, so Imavision's spin about complete eps being hard to find was bullsh*t, borne out of laziness, cheapness, and/or dishonesty. The first season of Rhoda had primarily syndicated versions as well, cutting out a lot of the funniest material.

Nowadays, before I buy anything on DVD, I always investigate the release's music rights, and see if they have been secured for the DVDs. I've been burned in the past, and left AGHAST at the atrocious butchering of some shows, whose music has been hacked out of the episodes. Beverly Hill 90210, Tour of Duty, WKRP in Cincinnati, St Elsewhere and the first version of Roswell are the worst offenders I know of. (WKRP, after having its music deleted and replaced on its first/cheap release, was later re-released by another company--Shout Factory--with most of the music restored, but cases like this are rare.) Because I had China Beach on both VHS and Beta tapes (two separate, complete runs of this fine show), I was okay with series not being released on DVD because of all the copyrighted music involved. The soundtrack was ESSENTIAL to the quality, tone, and effect of the drama. After YEARS of not being available, Time-Life somehow pulled off the impossible feat of releasing the show on DVD and Blu-ray, with an astonishing amount of the precious music intact. The (few) substitutions the manufacturers had to make to the soundtrack were perfectly chosen and did not diminish the quality of the show at all. I was thrilled. It's depressing that all the music-based problems are affecting streaming rights too.

Yes, the actress in the video you retained in this thread is definitely Sally Stark. I never questioned that fact. The other clip, the one you removed, did not feature the LoL actress, however. (IMHO, of course.) And thank you so much for the tag to this crisp LoL episode. What good quality! I was not old enough to be following the show at that time, so watching this broadcast will be fun!

Vlada Gelman, who is the credited author of the poll/article is too young to have seen AW during the 1960s and 1970s. Even Michael Ausiello, TVLine's founder and editorial director, was born in 1972, so he's too young to know about AW's heyday either. He has written enthusiastically about Santa Barbara over the years, which he could have watched when he was a kid, but never about AW. I think you are right: Gelman probably just googled "popular TV triangles" and culled candidates from wiki articles. Or she had read about certain characters from history books. I appreciate the effort to include a selection of vintage choices, but I seriously doubt the majority of TVLine's staff or even readers know who George Reinholt and Jacqueline Courtney were.

As fun as it was to find a 50-year-old soap triangle like this among the mix, it was still quite surprising. I wonder how many people who responded to this poll were on the younger side, and voted in favor of a character who remained on the show until the very end, and whom the modern audience remembered better. Anyway, the poll brought back a lot of memories.😁

The entertainment website TVLine just uploaded a new poll asking readers to vote for their favorite couples among divisive TV triangles. To my surprise, there was an Another World connection. https://tvline.com/lists/tv-love-triangles/

True, with all the misinformation and myths floating around, it's important to be careful about accepting just anything, from any source, reported about soap opera history. From what I've seen, however, the vast majority of misinformation comes from people who never saw the soaps broadcast on screen for themselves, either because they did not chose to watch specific series at the time, or because they were simply too young (perhaps not even born yet) to do so. Sites like Soap Central seem to fill in the blanks about stories and characters they know nothing about with a LOT of "creative fiction" from unknowledgeable contributors' vivid imagination. The writers of the Soap & Serials novelizations also got many details wrong, despite allegedly using original TV scripts upon which to base their books. Of course, some people trying to offer historical data in good faith may simply misremember details, thereby still getting the data wrong by accident. I would say that the cases of "facts" coming from non-viewers who choose the fill-in-the-blanks-with supposition method are not comparable to the commentary of first-hand viewers who actually did watch the material, who recorded the material, who read multiple articles about the material, and who remember the material in minute detail. But ultimately, people will believe what they believe, so continued attempts to convince them otherwise will be unsuccessful and therefore pointless. (I never did convince one internet poster that Eric Braedon began on Y&R in 1980, because that poster insisted Braedon was an original cast member from 1973. I offered evidence to the contrary, which was rebuffed, so I moved on. I like my drama and strife on television, not on the internet, LOL!)

I give up, LOL.🙄 All I can do is report the facts about an episode which I watched for myself first-hand, which I recorded on audiotape and listened to again later, and which was discussed at length in the soap press of the time (with quotes from Courtney and Rauch). If people who never even watched the show in 1973, and who--for whatever reason--cannot fathom the possibility that original scripts can be altered or revised before taping, there's little I can do to convince them.🤷‍♂️ I'll save myself the energy and stop reiterating the truth as I know it.😝

Over the years, I've always found the list of Daytime Emmy nominees (and even some of the winners) to be quite...dubious, but in a fair world, Nixon's AW would have been drowning in statues!