vetsoapfan

Be careful! I had never heard of that site until now, seeing you refer to it. I just tried to go to and open it, but my virus software blocked the site completely. And thank heavens, that remained its theme song in the DVD release! Ahh, Disney Plus, yet another service I do not have. (I don't subscruibe to cable.) Well, Singer did become a somewhat recognizable name thanks to The Beastmaster and V. He became very popular in MY house for looking so sexy in a loincloth and tight jeans, LOL!

You are being fair, because you are being truthful. The Chromakey was dreadful, and we were NOT interested in watching strangers playing once-beloved characters, particularly Linda Borgenson who was painfully bland and nondescript. Borgenson and Canary had no chemistry at all. There was no reason to care.

In Canada, neither Hulu nor Decades are available to us, unfortunately. I am a complete and abject failure at internet technology. I could not get this app to work for me when I desperately tried to install and use it months ago. I'll give it another shot. It couldn't hurt. Thanks for the reminder. If St. Elsewhere were also available in Canada on the CTV app, I would move heaven and earth to make it function for me. But...Family alone is enough incentive. I did not "get" the appeal, either, and I was still watching TGL "live" in those days. Then again, I never really wanted Reva on the show in the first place, considering how much airtime she hogged. Her histrionics just made me grimace. Actually, that's not a bad price for all the seasons combined. I'd pay that. And Jeff Kober, Dodger on CB, is now on GH, to add another soap connection.

I think by that time, Lemay was pretty much burned out. I found much of his work during his first three years on AW to be brilliant, even though I found fault with some of his choices, but even by 1975 there were issues with his writing. The problems continued to grow over the next few years. I agree. But I suspect they would complain about anything which they felt was too slow moving; not flashy enough. Tennessee Williams, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harper Lee might have also incited their wrath. Many folks today (particularly some of the ones on Twitter, LOL) have the attention spans of gnats. She certainly was "down there," wasn't she? I wonder what would have become of the revisited Alice/Steve/Rachel triangle with a capable writer at the helm, and a return of Jacqueline Courtney and George Reinholt. What ended up on screen, under Jacker's pen, was a disaster. Sadly, a lot of tedious repetition was foisted on the audience then.

When characters like Scotty, Bobbie, Monical Mac, etc., are available to them, TPTB's insistence on focusing on Sonny, Jason, Carly, and Howarth's 800 characters boogles my mind. GH needs a total overhaul. I'd write out 2/3 of the current characters if I could. I think the China Beach DVDs are out of print and hard-to-find/very expensive now, but trying to hunt down an affordable set is well worth the effort. Dana Delaney cannot be praised enough for her work on this series.

Ahhh, yet another anonymous "soap writer" elaborating on past work that cannot be verified. 🙄 When you attempt to get specifics out of them, these alleged writers suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke. Color me sceptical, LOL.

The DVD boxset for China Beach was truly an astonishing accomplishment. To be fair, I've also seen "labor-of-love" DVD releases for film gems like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, but for beloved TV series that only attracted moderate popularity among the general audience, nothing beats China Beach. (The one-season release of St. Elsewhere was not even remastered, had grainy video quality, suffered poor music changes and was such a disappointment. Now, only a good set of St Elsewhere and seasons three, four and five of TV's Family--starring Sada Thompson--are on my dream DVD wish list. Well, along with collections of vintage soaps, of course.)

Was that the same insider who revealed that Phyllis Diller was Robin Strasser's and Susan Lucci's mom? 🤔🤣 The tidbits we find on the internet can often be just as entertaining as anything we see on TV!

Yep, and then a few years later, Paul Rauch (🤮) came aboard and decimated the cast. Who fires the likes of Ellen Holly, Lillian Hayman and Al Freakin' Freeman, Jr???

The show did start cutting back his lines. By 1979 or 1980, Marlowe would be included in scenes but have little dialogue to recite. An example of this is the episode (available on youtube) in which John Randolph dies. Jim Matthews is in scenes with Aunt Liz and Dan Shearer, but remains largely quiet while the other characters do the majority of the talking. He does get a few lines, but nothing close to the number of everyone else's. "Ouch" is right. Lemay had been introduced to work by people like Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon and Henry Slesar, and in his opinion, they only knew what NOT to do? Pffft! Those legendary scribes ruled the roost!

Exactly. Lemay complained that Dwyer changed and edited her lines to better reflect the nature of her character, which allegedly threw Hugh Marlowe off. Ironically (or should I say, hypocritically?), while Lemay lambasted Dwyer for changing her dialogue, he reaped praise on his pets like Constance Ford and Victoria Wyndham for DOING THE EXACT SAME THING. And Hugh Marlowe was clearly having issues by then. He had begun to stumble over his lines no matter WHOM he had as a scene partner, and his flubs continues long after Dwyer left the series Oops, I did not see your well-written post before I made similar comments. Anyway, great minds think alike! To me, the defining moment of Lemay's ego came when an interviewer asked him what he had learned from legenday soap writers of the day. Lemay pompously sniffed, "Only what NOT to do!" That basically says it all. Marlowe was my second favorite actor in the role of Jim Matthews (after Shepperd Sttrudwick). I did warm up to HM, and appreciated his presence, but his inability to remember his lines was obvious his own, and not anyone else's fault. Lemay's just wanted to justify his firing of Dwyer by dragging her into the issue. No one else in scenes with her struggled like Marlowe did. And Marlowe DID have trouble with his lines while performing with other actors. I think HM "went up" more than Jonathan Frid on Dark Shadows, and poor Frid had 20x the dialogue to learn! (I'm not attacking HM, by the way. No one chooses to have memory problems.)

You said that perfectly. I agree with every word. Mary Matthews was created to be, and was, an important and strong matriarch from 1964 until 1971 when Lemay took over. He claimed that people like Mary didn't really exist, and tried to change her into a shrewish harpy. It didn't work, and Lemay became increasingly annoyed at Virginia Dwyer for trying to keep an honest and consistent through-line for her character. Killing off Mary was an egregious error that seriously damaged the show. How deciding to axe Dwyer, George Reinholt, and Jacqueline Courtney all within a few months of each other didn't make someone, anyone, at P&G and NBC stand up to Lemay and Rauch and bellow, "Hell to the NO!" is baffling. Susan Sullivan quit at the end of the same year, we lost Alice, Steve, Mary and Lenore in 1975. IMHO, AW never recovered after that.

I was truly shocked at how well Miami Vice was brought to DVD. Even though the studio could not get the rights to use all the original music, the changes were fine, and (thankfully), all the major, must-have material (like Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight) remained. I must say, however, that the best, most gratifying and rewarding DVD release of a TV series which featured an enormous amount of popular music was China Beach. Time-Life took years, and obviously went through a ton of work, to get everything just right. Only 30 seconds of the original TV series had to be cut out, because a character quoted lyrics from a song that the producers could not obtain the rights to use. But no fan will complain after discovering that the complete collection on disc contains more than 300 (!!!) popular songs from the past. Soap fans who have never seen China Beach should definitely try to check it out. It's more riveting, emotional and addictive than anything on daytime TV right now. (Is that...an unpopular opinion?) https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/61151/china-beach-the-complete-series/ Here's an interesting article about the problems associated with obtaining music rights for DVD releases. https://www.vox.com/2014/11/3/7145231/shows-not-on-dvd-music-rights-wonder-years-wkrp

I had the same thought, originally, until I saw how ATROCIOUS, DESTROYED and UNWATCHABLE the episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 were in their dubbed-over version. Entire chucks of episodes were cut out. Characters sang along to music, supposedly playing live for them at the time, which had been dubbed over with generic musak. It was idiotic to watch the characters "sing along" to tunes that were no longer even there. I had had the first several seasons recorded on VHS (in good quality, too), and was furious that I had gotten rid of them before even realizing that the official DVD releases would be so heinous. I wish a company like Shout! Factory would do a reissue and restore the music, like they did with WKRP (as much as humanly possible; there were still some changes. The original DVD release of WKRP infuriated fans, but the re-release, with so much of the music restored by Shout!, made most people quite happy.

Not that longtime viewers of the REAL General Hospital would know, alas, considering how unrecognizable the new, pod version of GH is from its roots. Sigh.

La Courtney really does look stunning there. Viewers were so lucky back then to have so many stellar actresses in the cast (Slezak, Courtney, Holly, Light, etc.), as well as excellent actors like Gerald Anthony. I'll never get tired watching vintage classics like this.

Compared to the cramped, flimsy pieces of junk soap fans are now used to seeing, this set is at least "good enough," IMHO. Is anybody recording the scenes with Leslie Brooks? If so, please let me know where they will be uploaded. Thanks!

There's that oft-discussed episode in which Rachel marches over to Alice's house, berates her, and snaps, "Where's the child YOU'VE ever given him (Steve)?" Aunt Liz just sat there meekly. The most she did throughout the entire abusive encounter was murmer, "Rachel, you had better go." She should have showed some real rage, and at least tried to drag Rachel out of there physically.

Gary Tomlin, who was writing AW when Alice returned in 1984 acknowledged in an interview that he had not studied the Alice/Rachel history. It showed. Long-time fans, LOL! Yes, but Rachel's egregious transgressions should never have been swept under the rug in the first place. In real life, nobody in the Matthews family would have forgiven her for what she did to Russ and Alice. And Audra Lindley's version of Aunt Liz would have pulverized her.

James Douglas was reported to have left AW over stalled contract/salary negotiations at that time, so I'm pretty sure it was him.

Alice, Pat, and Aunt Liz all had valid reasons to hold a grudge against Rachel for the heinous actions she had committed against their family, although by the late-1970s, fences were generally mended among them. In a (frankly idiotic) scene, Alice even went over to Ada's house and had lunch with Rachel (who offered her soup) when Susan Harney was playing Alice. Once Pat started to work for Mac, she and Rachel were cordial. Aunt Liz and Rachel even become friends and would spend holidays together (I never accepted that as believable, either.) Lenore left the show in 1975 and really had minimal contact with Rachel after Rachel got together with Mac.

When Rachel was married to Russ Matthews, he finally lost his patience with her atrocious behavior, took her over his knee and spanked her like a disobedient child. That was satisfying too, but when he did it, Russ was stone-faced, methodical and restrained. When Alice went after Rachel physically, she was totally out of control, and might have literally broken Rachel's neck, which...I was kind of hoping to see, LOL.

Yes, videos of Jacquie Courtney as Maggie are on youtube, or at least have been in the past. (As we all know, many things get deleted without warning.) Maybe in the Viki/Clint OLTL playlists; I don't remember where I saw them. BTW, I would say that Justine on AW was even more painful to endure than Maggie on OLTL. The idea that Courtney decided on her own to "improvise" all the verbal conflict with her friends and family, and the physical attack on Rachel, when Lemay had written for Alice to be in a "muted catatonic" state is just ridiculous. When Alice was at her worst, and Lenore found her huddled in the hall closet, did Courtney just run in there by herself, without following any script or directorial advice? 🙄 Of course not. She played the scenes as written, regardless of what Lemay claimed later. I guess the scribe felt when he wrote his book that no one would ever be able to see the vintage episodes again, so no one would ever be able to label his accounts improbable/absurd. Believe me, as a viewer who had waited YEARS for Rachel to get her a$$ kicked, watching Alice finally lunge at her and throw copper pots at her as Rachel fled from the house was enormously, deliciously satisfying. To me, it was one of the most memorable episodes in the show's history.

The problem with Lemay's assertion is, that the way the story and scenes were being written completely validated Courtney's interpretation and performance choices. Alice goes beserk during Rachel's taunting visit, and physically lunges at her? Alice hides herself in the downstairs hall closet when people come to check on her, and then becomes belligerent with them? None of the scenes as written suggested "muted catatonic grief," as Lemay later tried to claim. If he had not wanted Alice to be in the throes of hysterics, he should not have written her that way in the first place. His feeble justification is BS, in my opinion, because he simply loathed the actress personally and he so often looked for any reason to denigrate her. As for Rauch lying, when Courtney passed away, he gave an interview in which he said she was a "great gal," who "always gave first-rate performances on AW." I wouldn't completely trust anything these self-serving men had to say.

ITA that her take on Maggie Ashley was not successful, but I tend to blame the conception of that character and the production end of things for the failure. The clipped British accent, which poor Courtney couldn't pull off...why was that even imposed on her? The awful, fake wig...why? Those frumpy glasses which kept sliding down her nose and made Maggie seem like a caricature rather than an actual character...why? I daresay that a majority of actresses would have failed bringing Maggie successfully to life under those punitive conditions. Ugh. Throughout entertainment history, there have been many actors whose technical skills may have been narrow, but nevertheless, they had a certain something, a certain magic, a certain star appeal that the audience responded to in droves. While I felt they improved as the years went on, I don't think people like Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe or Cary Grant were regarded as the world's greatest thespians...but the audience loved them anyway. I thought Courtney was very good, and very powerful, when asked to play a "good girl" and romantic lead. I didn't care if she couldn't pull off inhabiting the role of an evil twin, because that was simply not the function she was meant to serve on either AW or OLTL, anyway. Lemay changed the personalities of many characters he had inherited. Sometimes it worked, made sense and was justified. Sometimes not. He clearly did not understand Mary Matthews, for example, and his take on Aunt Liz was a complete turnabout from how that character had always been presented. Alice had an acute schizophrenic nervous breakdown in 1974 and practically recovered overnight, which was both absurd and irresponsible writing. Yet through it all, the audience adored Jacqueline Courtney. I liked Coster and Robert Delany as well, as his being let go (along with so many other popular stars in the 1970s and early 1980s) surely contributed to AW's decline in popularity. Still, I loved the show from 1964 to 1975 (particularly from 1966 to 1974), so I had quite a long stretch of satisfying entertainment from it. All soaps go through their ups and downs, and I never expect the "good times" to last forever.