vetsoapfan

Rauch did not become executive producer of OLTL until a while after Courtney was dropped, but I have always wondered if ABC planning on hiring him at the time, so they decided to axe Courtney while paving the way for his arrival. Yes, that was my suspicion too: ABC fired JC for Rauch. Vomit. And the brawl between Dorian and Karen took place in Larry's office, where Karen found Dorian changing the locks of Larry's door, in preparation to kick him out of the hospital. Karen whupped her ass, LOL.

I'd love to hear from those other actors whom you mentioned too!

Vomit. But Ellen Parker would be mooooooore than welcome. And although was always the "fake, morose, listless" Ed Bauer to me, I wouldn't mind hearing Peter Simon discuss his time on the show. His boredom and contempt were well known.

I'll be there. During quarantine I've been immsersed in vintage soaps from the halcyon years (which I consider to be from the 1950s to the early 1980s), so these reunion specials fit right in with my current viewing habits.

That would be awesome. Kim Zimmer is always everywhere, so I don't need to see her again, per se, but now that the show is long gone, I'd be happy to hear her spill some real tea about all the turmoil TGL went through during its decline. Lord knows, the stupid storylines by TPTB really destroyed Reva and left her as a hollow, cartoon figure. No one was able to write for Zimmer effectively except Pamela Long.

Really? I had not seen him listed in the original announcement. That is so cool. Thanks for the update. I'm actually getting a bit misty-eyed, just thinking about Garrett and ver Dorn talking about TGL and their iconic characters.

Ohhh, Courtney and Strasser in a sparring match! Those two had extraordinary chemistry, and I loved watching them on both AW and OLTL. Whoever made the bone-headed and inexplicable decision to drop Courtney from OLTL, citing "lack of storyline for the actress," made an egregious error...particularly considering she was just at the beginning of a MAJOR storyline that would have pitted Pat and Dorian against each other on a regular basis.🙄

If they do another ATWT reunion, I would love to see Eileen Fulton on camera, giving an uncensored, no-holes-barred account of her years on the show...particularly during the final era, when she was marginalized and basically ignored/slapped in the face by TPTB. You KNOW she'd have some things to say about Goutman, Sheffer, and Pissy! I also want to see our beloved Kathryn Hays, Patricia Bruder, Marie Masters, Elizabeth Hubbard and Larry Bryggman. I may be in the minority about longing to see all these "old folks" again, but...the STORIES they could tell! As for TGL, and I thrilled beyond words that Maureen Garrett is coming to the chat! Now if we could also get Jerry ver Dorn , my life would be complete!

Most of my favorite actors have passed away, alas, but I'd love to see the following people as part of a reunion special: Maureen Garrett Mart Hulswit Jerry ver Dorn Nancy Curlee Millette Alexander (I know I am dreaming in Technicolor!)

I imagine TPTB chose to air it AGAIN (sigh), primarily because it's already been butchered (I mean...trimmed) to fit in into an hour broadcast. There are many more commercials crammed into a 60-minute program now than there were during the 1980s. We'll be deprived of seeing the Brooks sisters' reunion once more. CBS must have been too lazy to choose another episode to hack up.

During these hard times, it would be such a joy and comfort if we still had our soaps and beloved characters to keep us company. "There is a destiny that makes us brothers: None goes his way alone: All that we send into the lives of others Comes back into our own. I care not what his temples or his creeds, One thing holds firm and fast That into his fateful heap of days and deeds The soul of man Is cast." Rev. Ruthledge Destiny.mp4

Agreed. Some claim that viewers would not want to watch episodes featuring unfamiliar characters/actors, but if that were true, every single brand-new series on TV would be rejected by the audience because they don't "know" any of the people on screen yet. But...we GET to know them as we watch. I'm always fascinated to check out vintage material from my favorite shows, regardless if I know any of the characters/actors featured or not. I'll become familiar with them as I view the eps. And most importantly, the first five years of this show were brilliant; William J. Bell at the peak of his talent. His mesmerizing scripts alone would lure anyone in!

He was also very good and charming as Bucky Carter on Ryan's Hope...in 1975.

They are starting with episodes from 1950, 13 YEARS after "the beginning," LOL. And not to be critical, but the new "actress" playing Meta is dreadful and robotic.

Thank you for the information. So many US-based streaming services are blocked in Canada, so I imagine this will be too, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. When the site is actually up and running, I'm sure I'll be able to tell if Canadians can subscribe.

Is this service region-blocked, i.e. only available in the USA? And what are the payment options? Can I use Paypal? If anybody knows, please drop me a line. TIA.

I always love stuff like that. Thanks for posting.

Lemay's accusations about Courtney--that she was "always" looking down so that she could read the lines off the cuff of her nurse's uniform, and that she sobbed in scenes so that she wouldn't have to be bothered actually learning any dialogue--are clearly absurd, dishonest and gratuitously childish. But that was Lemay. Once he decided to dislike an actor, he set out to annihilate them. As for Dwyer being responsible for Marlowe's trouble with dialogue...ha! That is a laugh. There came a point in the 1970s when Hugh Marlowe really started to forget, flub and mangle his lines regardless of who his scene partner was. He was always "going up" and glancing at the teleprompter. This became more apparent when the show went to an hour. Indeed, after Dwyer was fired, Marlowe's stumbling got significantly worse, and you could tell that although he would be featured in scenes, his lines were kept to a minimum while everyone else around him did most of the talking. Blaming Dwyer for his own issues was probably Marlowe's way of saving face. Lemay bought into it because it served the writer's own vindictive purposes to denigrate Dwyer, but ANYONE else who watched AW in the 1970s and early 1980s could see Marlowe was the one having trouble. Still, I wanted to see him remain on the show, even in a limited capacity, because he played the patriarch of the Matthews family, and I had a feeling that when Marlowe finally left the show, Jim Matthews would cease to exist and not be recast.

His own words convict Lemay where Dwyer is concerned. In his book, he heaps scorn on her, and is clearly infuriated, because she dared to edit and rewrite the lines he wrote for Mary which Dwyer felt were out of character. She rephrased her dialogue to be more in line with how Mary had been conceived, written and played for the previous 7 years. At the same time Lemay was raging about Dwyer's trying to keep a through-line with her character, he praised his pets Victoria Wyndham and Constance Ford to the skies for doing THE EXACT SAME THING. He applauded Ford for slashing reams of dialogue that Ada simply wouldn't be likely to say, but when Dwyer did it, he went out of his way to diminish her role on the show and belittle her personally. He purported to be able to read her mind and thoughts, and attributed negative motivations to her real-life behavior; motivations that he could not possibly have known to be accurate, and which Lemay was clearly inventing in his own mind out of petulant contempt for the women.

I was watching the series "live" back then, and the scene in which Mary found out about Rachel's treachery--and then went berserk--was chilling. Her rage was explosive, and if Rachel had walked into the room at that moment, blood would have been shed. Virginia Dwyer really knocked that scene out of the park. The stupidity of keeping ancient material in storage, but never bothering to transfer it over to a format that can be saved and viewed, boggles my mind. Why even hang onto vintage episodes if you KNOW they are just rotting away in the basement? Either do everything you can to upgrade and save them, or auction the episodes off to fans who WILL do the work to save them from disintegrating. UGH.

There was A LOT of badly-researched "reporting" at that time. Once Gail Kobe and Pamela Long took over the reigns at TGL, history and continuity were completely butchered. This was egregious and irritating, because throughout the preceding decades, the show had been remarkably consistent and stable in its storytelling. We had watched Brandon Spaulding die ON CAMERA years earlier, so the character could not possibly have still been alive. Bringing him back was stupid. The story that purported all the families' patriarchs were fishing buddies was also 100% impossible, and contradicted many years of established, on-air history. (As @zanereed pointed out, only Bill Bauer might have realistically visited Springfield at that time, during one of his business trips.) From this point forward, clueless/incompetent producers and writers made endless mistakes in terms of history and characterization. Amanda suddenly being Alan's sister instead of his daughter-- which was also completely impossible in terms of established history--was one of the most baffling and offensive. Springfield prior to 1983 ceased to exist, more or less. Decades of history were chopped off and TPTB did not care to reattach the severed limb. That annoyed me too. Josh told the young Rev Ruthledge, "Your grandfather is a legend around these parts." Pffft. The original John Ruthledge never lived in Springfield, so unless he traveled there doing missionary work and performed legendary deeds that continued to be spoken about for decades, Josh's comment could only have been attributed to a lazy script writer who did not bother studying the series' history. And as you say, @Khan, Mary Ruthledge Holden's children would not carry her maiden name, unless we discovered that her husband Ned had died and Mary and her kids had then decided to change their family name back to Ruthledge. But realistically, why would they do that? When viewers know more about the show and its history than TPTB, it is not a good sign.

As far as anyone knows, that material no longer exists in the P&G video archives. The company routinely wiped/erased all their soap episodes up until the late 1970s. In an interview back in 1974, Jacqueline Courtney (Alice) mentioned that she had had kinescopes made of her most important episodes of AW, and I imagine that the engagement party "reveal" would have been a highlight that she wanted to keep. We have no idea for sure, however, and with Courtney's passing, the existence of any kinescopes she had ever had remains in question. Several years ago, AUDIO-ONLY clips of that episode surfaced and were put out on CD by Eddie Drueding, who runs the AW Fan Page. I'm afraid that is all we are going to get.

Actress Lisa Figus was hired to play another nurse named Georgia, not Jessie Brewer, when EM was unable to work. By that time, Jessie was basically being used as day player whose nondescript lines could just as easily be recited by any anonymous nurse. Figus apparently did a good enough job that GH kept her around and still used her occasionally even when EM was up to performing. But if EM was absent from work, Figus got Jessie's lines.

Unfortunately, TIIC never learn. They continue to make the same bone-headed mistakes over and over again, year after year...or decade after decade. Daytime TV needs a massive transfusion of fresh blood; creative, energetic PTB with vision, who understand that characterization and relatable human emotion are the foundation of successful serialized storytelling. Of course, at this point, it appears to be too late. The soap opera genre as we know it is on life support, slowly-but-relentlessly butchered by those who understood neither soaps nor their core audience.

I must strenuously disagree about DAYS and OLTL. The wretched sci-fi/fantasy plots did not work for them either, IMHO. Such material may have engendered attention from the press, and even resulted in temporary ratings boosts, but in the long run all the traditional shows were severely crippled by the nonsense. Even GH couldn't sustain the sci-fi camp model, and (IMHO) only survived because Wendy Riche and Claire Labine were miracle workers who salvaged the carcass and returned GH to its traditional roots. As soon as the Ice Princess/Freezing the World dreck began, I knew it would ignite a negative trend on daytime TV and ultimately destroy the genre, and alas...it did.