vetsoapfan

The Dingles being the alleged new core of Emmerdale is as egregious as when the Shaynes became such a focal point of TGL in the 1980s. Or Sonny, Jason, Roger Howarth, and The Mob taking over and infecting General Hospital. Or the Rappadorks descending upon OLTL.VOMIT!!!🤢💩 I'd be happy to see Andy Sugden return for the anniversary. If we could have Diane, Andy, Victoria, and even Robert gather together, discuss the family history and share flashbacks, that would be a poignant gift for longtime fans. Of course, I'm not holding my breath. Over the years, TPTB have inexplicably slaughtered so many Sugdens, I doubt the clan can ever be rebuilt. How the show dealt with Annie's death shows they don't don't care about the original core family anymore, alas.

As far as I recall, Katherine Justice only played Hope for a few months in 1977. She replaced Robin Mattson. To be honest, I found both Mattson and Justice to be rather bland in the role, as was Tisch Ray, who had played Hope for a bit before Mattson. TGL didn't have luck casting the character effectively until Elvera Roussel took over in 1979. Hope was written as a bland, colorless "baby girl" heroine who was, IMHO, pretty tedious. Thank heavens for Roussel and much improved writing in the early 1980s.

That number of contract characters would never happen on an American soap of only thirty minutes in length. Even the 60-minute ones generally don't have over 60 regular characters. General Hospital (60 min) has a staggering number of characters if you combine both the contract and recurring actors, but that's the exception rather than the rule. If Emmedrdale has a total of 86(!!!) contract and recurring characters, combined, their budget must be huge. With the miniscule budget of US-based soaps, 30-minute shows usually have between 18-22 contract players and then a few recurring ones, used as needed.

I'd say three eps a week would suffice for the UK soaps. I wish the American shows had returned to a 30-minute format a long time ago. It would be strange to have them airing only three days a week, perhaps, but even chopping the running time in half might force them to eliminate all the dead wood from their casts, and maybe allow them to focus on quality over quantity.

Even the classic, original film version of Lost Horizon no longer exists in its entirety. Judy Garland's full-length A Star is Born is gone too. Both films were chopped up after release to shorten their running times, and the excerpts got destroyed. Yes, efforts have been made to restore these classics, but they are still not 100% complete. Poor Colleen Moore must have been devastated upon learning that the films she had donated for preservation had been handled carelessly and ended up destroyed. From what I understand, several of her films still do exist, but a huge number of them have been lost. ARGH! I was pleasantly suprised to discover that the complete run of Little Orphan Annie newspaper strips had been archived. The copies are pretty good too, considering they begin from 1927 prints. I wanted to continue buying the hardcover books, but they became too expensive. I just have accept the fact that I cannot find, get and collect everything I want.

Six? That's insane. No wonder the quality is said to be suffering. At least it's still a 30-minute show!

Thank you so much for taking the time to send me those links, @DRW50. Aren't many episodes of even classic Dr. Who missing, because the BBC was careless/indifferent/stupid and didn't archive them all? I keep reading about the continued hunt for that series' "lost" episodes. I don't even watch the franchise, but the situation infuriates me, LOL. I would have started watching if long ago if all the episodes were intact. I hate missing huge sections/periods of TV shows. It's tragic, too, that so many classic films have been discarded, lost, and/or left to rot and are now lost forever. https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/04/10/the-lost-films-hitchcock-gatsby-and-oscar-winning-movies-that-vanished/ Since finding a treasure trove of newspaper comics (from the 1930s-40s) in my grandmother's house years ago, I've been avid to read vintage strips like Mary Worth, but nothing seems to be available. I know Little Orphan Annie was preserved, because hardcover books have been released, with strips starting from LOA's debut in 1927. I've bought the first six. I wonder if Judge Parker, Apartment 3G, Rex Morgan, and other soap opera newspaper strips have been saved. It's a bummer that The Archers' history is lost, but it doesn't really shock me. Complain as fans are wont to do, we are very lucky that soaps like Dark Shadows and The Doctors have been kept AND made available to us.

How many episodes a week does Emmerdale produce these days?

Do you know from what year a more consistent batch of episodes may be available? There's not a lot out there of TGL from 1937-1949, but A TON of material exists from 1950.

I've never actually listened to The Archers, and know very little about it, but after enjoying a plethora of old-time American soaps on radio, I've been toying with the idea of searching TA out and giving it a try. I wonder how far back available episodes on the internet go. Ideally, I'd like to start from the beginning, but I doubt I'd have much luck hunting down episodes from 1951.

Exactly. Clips only make us salivate for more!

As the matriarch of the decimated Sugden family, I would be happy to see Diane, especially if she was used to introduce significant flashbacks featuring beloved characters. (I know, I know, that's me dreaming in Technicolor. Sigh.) The show seems to love Danny Miller/Aaron, so technically TPTB could create some new storyline fodder for him, but...would it be riveting and worth following? To me, the gold standard for anniversaries will always be the 30th anniversary celebration for As the World Turns. That was beautifully done. I loved the 10th anniversary of Another World too. I also grudgingly gave credit to TGL for putting on a good 70th anniversary episode (when they flashed back to the show's radio era), even though the overall show was painful to watch at that point. Even Search for Tomorrow's 35th anniversary satisfied me. More often than not, however, anniversary eps fall flat. (All My Children's 20th anniversary show was just weird.) I'm at the same point. My patience has run out, and with nothing but incompetent production for certain series in the forseeable future, the end needs to come sooner rather than later.

Well, that doesn't give the audience any confirmation, one way the other. When beloved actors pass away IRL, soaps often leave the fate of their characters vague (Bert--for a year-- on TGL, Jessie on GH, Sally on B&B, etc.) Do viewers prefer to imagine that their favorite characters are "still out there, somewhere"? Or would they rather TPTB acknowledge the actors'/characters' demise? If a performer is too beloved to be replaced, I personally want to see closure for the character and a tribute to the actor, even if that means the character has to be acknowledged as deceased.

Many soaps have completely abandoned their initial identies, and changed their styles, tone and content dramatically. I wonder how many fans of the "original" Home and Away still watch today's incarnation. I'm curious if Pippa would even fit in anymore. It's a shame TPTB didn't really do anything to commemorate Morag after Cornelia Frances passed away. When Alf mentioned her yesterday, did it sound like Morag was dead? In general, I dislike back-from-the-dead stories. Not to make a groan-inducing pun, but this sort of story has been done to death on soaps, with Days of our Lives being the worst offender. But at least Roo's reaction was believable. IRF, anyone would be hurt and furious if their mother had faked her death.

Oh, I do know Marilyn and Roo. I did not think they were around anymore. Of anyone, I'd like to see Pippa return. Well, Morag too, but I believe the actress has passed away IRL. I always found Dodge to be a hunk.

UGH. Fisher was never one of my favorite characters, but who wants to see a grim, hopeless story end like that? No thank you. Are any of Pippa's kids in Summer Bay any more? (Like Emmerdale, I have not had access to H&A in many years, so haven't watched it in a long time.) I think the only character I would know nowadays is Alf Stewart.

That was Kathy Glass, not Jacquie Courtney, who made the remark to Ellen Holly about the ratings. Holly recounts the story in her autobiography. When JC moved to Mississippi, she said she was unnerved and physically intimidated by total strangers rushing up to her on the street, swinging her around, and grabbing her. She acknowledged it made her aggressive and defensive. TBH, I'd lose my patience very quickly upon being mandhandled, too, particularly if I were with my child. I have no idea what Courtney felt about Holly; she never said anything against her publicly as far as I know, but Holly has made her disdain for Courtney, for Slezak, etc., well known over the years. I tend to believe JC's cutting the anniversary cake with JoeStuart was a spur-of-the-moment decision; he called her up to do it with him. I wonder if she would have agreed if she had been approached about it privately beforehand, and had had time to consider "the politics" involved. Yes, Courtney and Stuart were an item for a period of time.

So many other actors would have been great in this part, and made the character interesting/likeable/a success. The one they ended up choosing was just repulsive. I wonder how much the choice was a case of Joseph Stuart wanting to demean Ellen Holly. I'll never forget him asking Jacquie Courtney to take photos with him cutting the cake at the show's 10th Anniversary, when such an honor should have gone to original cast members like Holly and Lillian Hayman. And what was Courtney thinking? The graceful thing would have been to redirect the cake cutting to someone who had been with the series since its inception.

I also send thanks to @victoria foxton, and also loved that era of OLTL. I never missed a day. It was on fire. My only quibble, the actor who played Dr. Jack Scott came across as unbearablly pompous and...icky.

No doubt TPTB wanted to use the huge backlog of episodes they already had in the can, even if everyone knows the show has been garbage for many years. Soap fans' expectations have been whittled down to almost nothing, and many folks seem to accept any content, no matter how putrid, because "it's better than nothing." But...is it? When people say to me that we mustn't rock the boat by criticizing today's soaps; that we must accept whatever crap they give us and still remain "loyal," or else the genre will die out completely...well, the genre is dying anyway. Maybe because today's audience is too willing to passively accept the sh*t, even though it's driving everyone away?

IMO, the last time OLTL exhibited actual quality in its writing was under Malone's first reign (after a shaky start). RIP.

I'm not surprised, either, just disappointed and annoyed at TPTB's incompetent, almost dismissive treatment of the situation. I've loathed the "pod version" of Days of our Lives for the last 40 years or so, but I will give them credit for understanding the deep significance of Alice Horton, and how much the audience loved her. The show put effort into her send-off, and I appreciated it. The classic theme music playing over a photograph (or a collection of photos taken throughout the years) of Mercier would have lovely.

Thank you, Carl. I could have gotten behind a triangle with Pat, Paul and Dorian; the chemistry would have been electric. Courtney and Fuccello oozed chemistry on screen. Phillip McHale was one-dimensional and colorless as Tony (Chip Lucia proved to be even more miscast, ugh), but Pat and Paul ignited the "rooting factor" among fans, if letters to the editors in soap magazines were a good indication of what viewers wanted. ABC stupidly tried to pair Pat with a new character named Adam Brewster, who was stiff, charmless, icky, and (to be brutally honest) fairly homely. WHAT were TPTB thinking??? You don't try pairing Laura Webber with Spinelli on GH. Egads! The strong Courtney/Fuccello pull only made the Pat/Adam Brewster disaster more noticeably egregious.

That's it? That's all the tribute we got on the actual show itself: Victoria spreading the ashes? I admit that that two-minute clip got me teary-eyed, but it was hardly a sufficient send-off to such an iconic, legendary character. They needed some returns and memorable flashbacks. Bert Bauer, the beloved matriarch of The Guiding Light, received a similarly inadequate "tribute" when she died in the mid-1980s. I'm still mad about it to this day. TPTB always fail to understand that core characters are the lifeblood of soap operas, and viewers want them to be respected.

I hold grudges against favorite soaps, too, for similar reasons. I appreciate the response.