vetsoapfan

I have no memory of Bert going to a sister's funeral in 1983 at all. Thank heavens we can all pool our memory resources. Watching the show every day, I'm annoyed I could have missed/forgotten a fact like that. I believe Lisa's mother's name was Alma Miller, not Elsa.

I wish I could remember for sure if the comment did indeed come from Lucci. Maybe another poster will remember better. The same person also criticized ABC for giving the writer almost two years to gut the show, and then Agnes Nixon and Lorraine Broderick a matter of a few months before its demise to repair all the damage.

And didn't someone (maybe even Lucci?) later acknowledge that he had said he couldn't care less about the show's history?

I agree. Some writers make their contempt for and/or disinterest in history quite clear.

I know Soap Central lists Alma Jean Miller as Bert's sister, but that website is riddled with errors, so I always figured this was yet another one. In all my decades watching TGL, I had never known Bert had a sibling. I only knew about her mother. If you heard Alma Jean being verified on-screen, however, I trust you.

Well, Allen had worked on The Secret Storm, which was filmed in New York, so you never know! I did want Stewart to be rehired, but was open to a recast, as long as it was better than the ones we endured for some other characters. TGL had written Bert out of the show by saying that she had gone to Florida to care for Meta, who had had a stroke. Bert passed away in Meta's home the next year, when the show finally addressed Charita Bauer's death. It would have made perfect sense for Ed to have asked Meta to come back to Springfield at that time, so he could keep an eye on her. There was no word of Meta's final husband, Bruce Banning, and what had happened to him. As far as I know, however, TGL made no mention of Meta again until they hired Mary Stuart to take over the role in 1996. I can't find any acting credits for Demming after TGL, so I imagine she was retired, although that is purely speculation on my part. In the mid-1980s, she was only 64; not too old to return to act on the show if they had asked. Heck, even in 1996, she could have returned. Many folks in their mid-70s are still healthy. I'm not sorry we got Mary Stuart, of course, but for nostalgia's sake, I would have preferred to see Demming again. I adored her. It ended up being too top-heavy on the "new" version of TGL from the Reva years onwards for my taste, alas.

Thank you, @DW50! I love Trish Stewart so much!

Just to clarify, I loathe Ron C as much as I loathe Pratt, and give neither one of them a pass. 💩🤮

I guarantee you, this viewer would not. I have loathed everything of Pratt's that I have ever seen.🤮

Gay guys don't have muscles? ROTF! (And yes, MC briefly played Tina Clayton Lord on OLTL.)

God love closeted gay actors; they wanted to protect their jobs and careers. I imagine the same folks who bought that Liberace was straight accepted JWS was as well.

I fantasized about Jed Allen taking over the role of Mike Bauer after Don Stewart was let go. I would have been satisfied with him as Mike, Mart Hulswit returning as Ed, and Ellen Demming being lured out of retirement to play Meta Bauer in whatever capacity she was up for. Now that I think about Raines, however, I also would have preferred him playing Mike instead of Alan. BTW, have folks seen this?

Aside from the fact that he is a gleeful, unrepentant troll, he seems to be intellectually limited and riddled with mental issues. All in all, a bad combination.

Lorraine Broderick. Please God, keep that hack, Chuck Pratt, away from the project.

The character of Lesley Ann Monroe was unbearable. You're lucky you don't remember her. Maybe you blocked her out. Traumatic repressive amnesia, LOL!

I would have been (grudgingly) mollified with only Don Stewart appearing on screen as Mike. I could believe that M O'L had had rapport with Charita Bauer, and Frederick was Bert's grandchild, so I was fine with him being there. But with an atrociously-miscast Ed representing the long-term Bauers, the service was a debacle. I would have preferred an hour-long tribute to Charita/Bert, filled with flashbacks, perhaps hosted by someone like Ed Bryce. If the show were resistant to devoting an entire 60 minutes to such a thing, what about 30 or even 15 minutes? When Emily McLaughlin passed away, it infuriated me that General Hospital had her legacy character, Jessie Brewer, just disappear from existence without mention or reason. Still, I think it might have been less annoying than watching TPTB pay lip service to a beloved veteran by trotting out a limp, half-hearted memorial service like we got with Bert.

Thank you for the clarification. I had completely erased Pickering from my memory bank, LOL. Kind of like Margaret Impert's version of Rachel on AW!

JMHO, as someone who watched it all live, but I found the Brooks sisters' rivalries to be riveting when Janice Lynde played Leslie. Not so much when Victoria Mallory took over the role, because then the competition became unbalanced: Lorie was still fascinating but Leslie was colorless. I also felt Trish Stewart was exceptionally gifted as Chris, and thanks to her talent, she could make anything work. To me, 1973-78 were the most engrossing years of this show. Lynde said she quit the show? That's interesting. Y&R issued a statement at the time saying that "for reasons too complicated to go into," they did not renew her contract. Later, when asked about it in an interview, Lynde declined to discuss the specifics of her departure.

"Crap" describes it perfectly. Compare this to Papa Bauer's memorial service. Sigh.

While I adored characters like Ross and Vanessa, they were not as close to and as important to Bert as several other characters (and actors) who should have been there. Michael O'Leary's Rick was her grandson and had had a good relationship with Bert, but I felt no major emotional connection between Bert and Mindy (for example)...and Warren Andrews??? Yuck. It annoyed me to see him at the Bauer house when Meta, Trudy, Peggy Scott, Steve Jackson, Sarah McIntyre, Mike, Hope, etc., were absent. Of course I knew the show would not bring back everyone, but they should have AT LEAST made an effort with Mike and Hope. With Richard Van Fleet filling in for "the real Ed," LOL, the only on-screen character whom I truly felt sorry for was Frederick. The entire sequence just left me cold and annoyed.

Yep: Labine tried to write for CHARACTER and bring depth and nuance to the show, yet reportedly Tony Geary did not like it. I'll never forget him saying that after the divine Pat Falken Smith was replaced by the hack writers who followed her that he did not see any difference in the quality of their work. OMFG! It was like going from Masterpiece Theatre to Beavis & Butthead, LOL!

I think outlandish stories like GH's Ice Princess and Marlena's Possession can create short-term buzz, with viewers talking about the shows and tuning in temporarily out of curiosity. In that sense, they serve a purpose. However, history has shown us that stunts like this, while they may create sudden spikes in ratings, don't equate to long-term audience loyalty, popularity and success. I truly believe that these stories alienate far more viewers than they attract, and are ultimately responsible (in a large part) for the destruction of the soap opera medium.

As writers come and go (many of whom don't seem to bother studying history or being concerned about character consistency), many story and character revisions take place. That always annoys me; it seems that viewers know the shows and characters significantly better than the people being paid to produce and write them. As for the possession story, it was the single defining factor in my dropping DAYS completely. I loathe sci-fi, fantasy, camp stuff on soaps. It completely trashes and bastardizes the genre.

Michael Gregory, the original Rick Webber, looked somewhat dorky in still photographs, but the actor was very charismatic and alluring; sexy AF. I always found his replacement to be cold and aloof, and quite uninteresting by comparison. Michael Gregory was HOT. GH kept going through massive overhauls in the mid-to-late 1970s, before Monty and Douglas Marland arrived, but I was sorry that the show eliminated Terri Webber from the canvas. The actress who played her, Bobbi Jorden, was lovely, talented, and very sympathetic; she had major rooting value. Of course, Richard Dean Anderson was sex on a stick back then. I might have been torn between Rick and Jeff when Michael Gregory played Rick, but after he left, I would have dumped Chris Robinson's Rick Webber in a heartbeat and run back to Jeff, LOL.

In the 1970s (1977, I think, under Ann Marcus), Marlena said on screen that she was NOT religious. This struck me as surprising at the time because soaps were quite conservative about God and religion at that time. Later, we saw Marlena praying to God when her sister Samantha was suffering from a life-threatening medical crisis. It did not track at all.