vetsoapfan

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.

And of any actor, TGL needed Zaslow on canvass to give the show a vital, much-needed shot in the arm and sense of continuity. Knowing Roger and Holly were back on made me start watching TGL again, even though I had sworn off it during the painfully awful mid-1980s. Nowadays, I don't mind Trusel popping in every few years or so, but back then, I always wondered why the show kept such a tepid, colorless actress.

ITA. Its radio years were astonishingly well done and mesmerizing! Every soap fan should listen to 1950's run of Meta Bauer's trial for murder. The on-screen "tribute" to Bert Bauer after the character died was badly written in the first place, but the entire situation was made significantly worse by the fact that the show did not bring back any of the actors who had worked closely with her. M O'L was there, but he was one actor among so many irrelevant newbies gathered at the Bauer house. I must say, however, that the interview just linked for us brought tears to my eyes. Who among the audience did not love and cherish Bert?

Mac and Iris were together in the hospital on the day of the big reveal. As soon as he started crowing with joy about Amanda, Iris started jumped in, demanding to know what Mac was talking about. That shocked him out of his euphoria, and he then told her that she was not his biological daughter, but that he had always loved her just the same. Iris fell apart and ran off, sobbing in the elevator. Dave Gilchrist arrived in Bay City in the fall of 1974. You're right: he never did much. His most memorable scene, to me, was when he went to Alice's house with Russ to tell her that Steve had died. She fainted dead away, and Dave and Russ carried up upstairs (and off-screen), where we heard her utter a guttural scream. The first 90-minute episode of AW was in March of 1979. Lemay was replaced as headwriter in May of that year by Tom King. I don't recall Mike Bauer crossing back over to TGL while he was on AW, either. When the character left TGL and went over to AW, I was happy to see he was still being played by Gary Pillar, whom I had liked. After Mike moved away from Bay City in 1967, I don't think we saw him back on TGL again until Don Stewart took over the role in 1968. Lemay acknowledged he was burned out, and was being heavily pressured by TPTB to write more melodramatic "stunt" stories in which he had no interest. Although I felt his material had weakened over the last few years, the writing of AW really collapsed upon his departure.

It was painfully stupid, and such a drastic deterioration in writing quality from the decade of BB and PFS writing the show.

Right.

I wanted Gerald Anthony to remain on OLTL, but Marco's pretending to be a doctor strained credulity, even though we did see him reading through medical textbooks. Neil was supposed to be an internist, and the idea that the imposter had practiced medicine and presumably written prescriptions for many years was ridiculous. Samantha passing herself off as a psychiatrist? No way. Obviously, the two women were twins, but they were easy to tell apart. Bad, bad writing that depended on the audience being morons.

The WORST, most asinine story ever devised for Neil was when the writers devised a convoluted mess about Neil Curtis not actually being Neil Curtis, but an imposter who had stolen his identity. Never mind that the "real" Neil's father had seen him and would have noticed something was amiss; a stranger passing himself off as his son. It was illogical, poorly thought out and total garbage...and then abruptly dropped. Neil became Neil once again, and no one ever mentioned him being the imposter ever again. The plot was just erased from history. I do not recall anyone mentioning Neil in decades.

Poor Amanda had an ectopic pregnancy, which was a sad story to watch. I had to roll my eyes, however, when she was wheeled into surgery for a brain tumor, wearing blue eye shadow, LOL. As far as I am concerned, Amanda's best love-match was with Neil Curtis. When she was moving out of town, Neil came to say goodbye and admitted that, "No one has ever touched me the way you did." It broke my heart. As for Leslie Jordan, he strikes me as a bit of a sh*t-disturber, to be honest; someone who would start rumors just to stir the pot and get attention.

It's true that the character's latest major story was winding down, but DAYS was insane to let Alexander's contract expire. She was one of daytime's biggest stars, and one of the most popular actresses by far on the show. It was hard adjusting to her replacement. Bennye Gatteys might have been fine playing another role, and she was an adequate actress overall, but she lacked the intensity and charisma and star appeal that Alexander was blessed with. It was like watching Linda Borgenson on AW, Victoria Mallory on Y&R or Daniel Pilon on TGL: they simply did not live up to the original actors in their roles. Susan Martin never regained the popularity she had had when Denise Alexander played her. The character started being seen less and less, and then disappeared completely, without even a write-off scene. IIF recall correctly, the last time we saw Susan was at Doug and Julie's wedding in 1976, after being MIA for months. It was a disappointing way to discard a character who had once been hugely important to Salem. I know this will sound caustic (I honestly don't mean it to be), but who the heck is Lesley Jordan, and why should we give credence to this person's assessment of Frann's character? I've honestly never heard anyone bad-mouth Frann in the last 50 years, LOL. (On the other hand, there are some actors who have been rumored to feud with people regularly.)

I wonder if Bell resented the fact that she jumped ship in the middle of a major storyline, with so much focus on her character, to go to GH. But after she left GH in 1984, it would have been wonderful to see Alexander back on DAYS, on Y&R or even B&B. She was legendary!