vetsoapfan

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.

What about that period alienated you in the long term? I'm curious. From everyone's disappointed comments about the present incarnation, I have no doubt the show is "even worse" now, alas. Dingles AND a horde of kids would kill me. I agree; I am sure I'd loathe it, particularly since most of the characters I actually cared about are gone, and the family I cannot tolerate is center stage. The show never did much to commenorate the death of Annie Sugden, I presume. I did not hear about any returns of flashbacks. I'm at the point where I'd rather have my once-favorite soaps laid to rest, rather than seeing them butchered year after year. What's happened to Days of our Lives is a travesty. Just end it already.

The last time I had regular viewing access to Emmerdale was during the Gavin Blyth period. Since I have missed out on having to endure all the damage done to the show in recent years, my memories of the village are still fond. I wonder how much I would hate it if I watched the current incarnation. I was curious to see what characters whom I knew were still on the canvas in 2022. I was AGHAST to see that the show is still so overrun with DINGLES. 🤮 https://emmerdale.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_longest_running_characters

Franco needed to die (the sooner, the better), but killing off Karen and Logan was short-sighted and stupid. Josh Duhon actually looked like he could have been Scotty's son. I heartily agree that the way GH marginalizes and sidelines its beloved vets is shameful.

When Days moves to Peacock Plus, there will be a huge backlog of episodes left to stream; episodes already "in the can," produced under the present punitive, cheap conditions and written by the dread RC. As it is, such a small number of people watch this mess for FREE; how many viewers are going to search it out on a streaming service and PAY to watch it? A new writing team and production format should have been in place for the launch on Peacock, to give old and new viewers an incentive to tune in. Six more months of the same old crap won't cut it.

Particularly with Days shooting 27 episodes a week, LOL!

It really collapsed quickly, alas.

I enjoyed Lois and Clark the first season, but then TPTB downplayed the relationships and characterization, and the show turned pedestrian and campy. IMHO, of course. I did not make it through the second year.

Of course, no one HAS EVER announced the certainty that "the P&G soaps will ever see the light of day." Not "en masse," anyway. Posters express their "It would be so great if...." fantasies about seeing more vintage material, and their hopes that additional treasures from the past will be unearthed one day. But no one on this board expresses delusions about significant amounts of classic P&G material being released. It's been widely accepted for decades that the company wiped the bulk of their videos up until the late 1970s. The delusions about delusions are non-existent.

Carl, the actress in the Stove Top commercial is K Callan. Here she is in a clip from All in the Family.

No. Her name is skirting around the very edges of my memory, however. She was a charactrer actress who appeared in various sitcoms back in the day.

Thanks!

Thank you, Carl.

Yes. I'm not negating the dumping-in-the-river story because, as you say, it allegedly happened 50 years or so ago, but I'd like to have more than one person's (Adams') word for it, just like I'd want to have confirmation about the wiping of P&G tapes from more than just Zenk. Of the two stories, I would give more credence to Adams', however. I'm not old enough to have watched Dumont's programming, but it saddens me how little of it is reported to survive, no matter how the rest of the archives got destroyed.

True. The story about about Dumont's video archives being dumped in the river has always sounded somewhat peculiar to me, which is why I used "allegedly." Stories with only a germ of truth in them get told and retold and distorted often, but end up being accepted as fact. Doing some quick searching right now, it's said that the story about Dumont's material being thrown in the river originated from Ernie Kovac's wife Edie Adams, during a hearing on television preservation in 1997. While I may have some doubts about the accuracy of her claims, Adams' account of the fate on vintage TV material, as transcribed below, is very interesting. (Well, to me, LOL!) https://web.archive.org/web/20070927072638/http://www.loc.gov/film/hrng96la.html

It's suspicious to me that the facebook page in question has no information about the founder, and various messages responding to his posts hawking his DVDs are not visible. And where are the chatty messages from among members/followers? Red flags, galore.

ITA. It would be an arduous waste of time and effort to wipe all the material that still existed. I could see them just throwing everything into the garbage before going through all the trouble of wiping it. The legendary Dumont Television Network produced more than 20,000 hours of programming durings its 1946-1956 heyday. After the network folded, their archives were allegedly destroyed; dumped into New York's East River because no one wanted to store the material any more. I don't believe P&G could legally do that to the environment these days, but dumping soap tapes into the trash would still be more logical than trying to wipe them all out of existence. Ideally, P&G would donate their archives to UCLA, Paley, the Museum of Broadcast, the Library of Congress, wherever.

I'd start off by asking for a DVD, or maybe two, as a test. Do not send an unknown (unfamiliar to you or to trusted sources) sellers a significant amount of money at first. If you ask around, many traders have been lied to and ripped off by dishonest vendors over the years. I once had someone tell me he had a collection of The Guiding Light episodes from the 1970s. He wanted $2000.00 upfront. Um...that was a big NO.

In a Daily TV Serials magazine interview from 1974, Jacquie Courtney said that she had had copies made of many of her episodes of AW. I've often wondered what happened to that collection after she passed away. Viewers would be orgasmic to see vintage episodes that Courtney valued enough to preserve.