vetsoapfan

Right. I agree that the book is fascinating and a must-read, but his petulant and gratuitously nasty swipes at certain individuals reveals Lemay to be quite unpleasant, often hypocritical...and not terribly honest or accurate in some of his accounts, if you actually watched the show during the time period in question.

I have been given links to the Y&R vault a few times, but every time I try to return, I get a message saying that I need to sign in with a password. I just tried to access the vault right now and I got a notification which said the page might have been moved or deleted. Google Drive might indeed be our best option. I have friends who use it and it seems to work well for them, although I have never downloaded any of my own stuff there yet. I'm going to start looking into that now that my USB drive is dead. If I downloaded 64 GB of stuff to a second USB stick and that died too, I'd be murderous, LOL.

Well THAT article was grim and scary. You know, I still have tons of ancient material on DVD-R, VHS and even Beta (!!!). A lot of it still plays, but my decades-old videotapes are now hit-and-miss. I've copied hours and hours of vintage shows and sent them out to friends, but even when they have uploaded those tapes to the internet, the uploads often disappear without warning. The stuff I've transferred to USB is now corrupted and lost. How are we supposed to save all our treasures? Videotapes wear out, USB keys get corrupted, internet sites delete precious stuff. We can preserve video and audio on our laptops, sure, but once our computers die, as they are all wont to do, the material is lost to us from there as well. It's so disheartening. I know, I know: "It's only old TV shows." People tell me this all the time, in a dismissive manner. But I LOVE classic soaps, and once these episodes are gone from among collectors, they will be lost forever. I'm going to be so depressed if I cannot find that 1974 Alice/Rachel/Aunt Liz confrontation scene again. Sigh and grunt!

I don't know what's going on with the internet lately. Friends tell me that their Twitter and Facebook videos are suddenly being removed--sometimes after years of being left alone--for copyright violations. It's been reported everywhere that the infamous pornhub.com has deleted MILLIONS of its vids. Soaps are disappearing from youtube after being available for years. That's why I decided to check my "Favorites" USB key with all my classic TV content. I was horrified to discover it won't play anymore. I have no clue about how to repair or retrieve data from a USB device. I may have to start saving all my stuff privately, "in the clouds," as they say.

I've been discouraged recently to see so many videos being censored/deleted from the internet. I had saved many old soaps to a massive 64-GB USB device over the years, but it mysteriously become corrupted and unplayable this week (all the file names have turned to gibberish), so all my rare old soaps are lost forever. I am bereft! I went to youtube to find and re-download certain things (like the famous 1974 Alice/Rachel fight from AW), but they have been removed.😪 Seeing vintage soaps like this GH episode (even if it's incomplete) is a treat.

OMG! Thank you sooooo much!

At least Grand Hotel did not butcher the memory of a beloved 40+ year old soap. That's why a butchered version of AMC would be "worse" and more disappointing to me. I'm keeping my fingers, toes and eyes crossed that the proposed Pine Valley would be a great success. (Ken Corday and Bradley Bell prove conclusively that just having icons' kids on board does not mean much of anything.)

I have hope too, but I just don't want to be as bitterly disappointed as I was by the awful 90210 reboots.

I loved AMC and will support and watch this proposed program with excitement and an open mind. That being said, I would not get too excited until the proposed revival actually makes it onto the air. A "heightened tone" and a "relationship to soaps"? What does that even mean? It makes me think of the highly-anticipated reimagining of Beverly Hills 90210 which aired last year. What fans hoped it would be, what fans were eager to watch, bore no resemblance to the awful "heightened" new version that we ended up getting. Fans ran away from it in droves. And why not get the great Lorraine Broderick on board as writer? She knows Pine Valley inside and out and various cast members have said she was one of the best scribes AMC ever had. Leo Richardson? From the failure Katie Keene? That does not sound promising. And a cast of "mostly" newbies may be tolerable, but if at least some beloved characters from the original show are not featured regularly (Susan Lucci being only one), fans will be disappointed if not furious. Let's hope for the best but still...brace ourselves.

Alan would not let her dish. He would interrupt her and censor her and go off on irrelevant tangents any time she was in the middle of an interesting anecdote.🙄

Yes, Courtney's returns in 1989 saw Alice being more Alice-y, IMHO. And her hair was back to normal, thank heavens.

Mary Ellis Bunim had decimated ATWT while she was there, so at least she did not get the change to do the same thing to AW. The cdecline in AW's quality might have been even worse than it was. Me too!

Right, and what TPTB have often failed to understand over the years is that the audience does NOT care about age as much as "the suits" think we do. No matter how much Susan Lucci, Erika Slezak, Kathryn Hays, Deidre Hall, Jess Walton, Susan Flannery, etc., aged over the decades (as we all did), viewers continued to want to see them front and center. Perhaps not five days a week, 52 weeks a year, but we wanted them to be tent-pole figures on their shows. The same with Courtney. You don't bring a major star back to her show and then keep her in the background with lackluster material. Over the years, however, poor Wyndham had worse hair styles! True. Maybe that's what they were doing with Courtney's hair and "look" during the year she returned full-time. Wyndham's curly perms were truly awful. Yikes!

The day of her return in May, 1984, I agree: her hair was modern, chic and appropriate. Jacquie Courtney herself had joked that as she got older, having long hair made her look like "an aging cheerleader," LOL! It was only later, her hair got significantly shorter until it became a hacked-up, ultra-short Peter-Pan hairdo. There was one scene in the Matthews' living room, when she was playing with her grandson, and her hair looked both way too short (like a chemo patient) and plastered to her head, as if it had been heaped with grease. Yuck! I was happy to see her and George Reinholt reunite for that special (and screamed in delight when the show aired a long-thought-lost flashback of Steve and Alice from 1974!), but that hair? Good grief! If she had kept the pretty, short-but-not-too-short style, color and length she had had when she first came back to AW, I would have preferred that. When Courtney later returned to AW in brief guest appearances, she never again had frightening hair issues.

Overall, I do agree that the show had improved. That's why I was excited to return to Bay City full time when Jacquie Courtney returned in 1984. While I appreciated various other aspects of the series, I just could not figure out what the writers and producers (not to mention the hair and wardrobe departments) were trying to do with Alice. I think Gary Tomlin was irresponsible and/or lazy not to study up extensively of Alice's history and relationships. If Susan Lucci returned to AMC after a 9-year absence, I'd expect the writers to read up up who Erica Kane was, dress her fabulously, and create some exciting stories for her with a dynamic leading man.

I did not mean that TPTB literally botched the character's opening scenes upon returning in May, 1984. I did feel, however, that once Alice was back in Bay City, the show failed to use her properly. The romance with Mark was a bust (IMHO) because even though the actor playing him was competent, there was no fire; no chemistry with Courtney. Mark was bland, not a leading man. More than being a supportive ear for Sally, Alice should have had a strong story of her own. Plus, she was given a hideous/butch haircut and dressed in ugly mannish clothes that were inappropriate. Writer Gary Tomlin later said in an interview that he did not know much about Alice's storyline history and her relationship with Rachel, so left that unmined. (Although AW finally did use a bit it when Rachel got amnesia and grilled Alice about their shared past, but it was too little, too late). I felt that the show made one bad decision after another, so the entire return ended up a failure.

Next Jim Jordan will proclaim that if drivers are told not to drink and drive on New Year's Eve, then children across the country will be banned from telling their parents that they love them. Sigh.

It is quite baffling how much TPTB TOTALLY botched Jacquie Courtney's return to the show. They completely screwed it up. I'd love to know what was going on behind the scenes at that time.

Hauser was atrocious; by far the worst of the men recast as Greg Foster. Kerwin was nice looking but totally bland, so I never cared for him one way or the other. McGillin was cute (in a boy-next-door kind of way), sweet, and a good actor. I was starting to think that he would work out...and then the show dropped him.

I thought Stephen Brooks as Joshua was solemn yet magnetic; attractive in a subtle sort of way. I was unhappy with his replacement, however. The show recast Todd Chandler too, with an actor named Paul Keenan, who was gorgeous and had very good chemistry with Stephen Brooks. Alas, Keenam did not last on the show, either. Most of Laemmle's characters (and the actors who were cast) tanked.

God, yes. It still makes me cringe that I actually forced myself to watch DAYS, out of loyalty to beloved characters, long after the show had fallen into the toilet. He would be off-screen and go unmentioned for looooooong stretches at a time.

I did not know Zippi was on Instagram, so thank you for the information. I watched The Secrets of Midland Heights too, but preferred King's Crossing. I had these recorded on tape back in the day, but at the time the cost of blank videotapes was so high, I recycled many tapes and recorded over the eps of both these shows. Grunt.

Daniel Zippi was soooooo cute. That's all.

Borgenson was as limp and lifeless as a wet noodle and had no chemistry with anyone. God knows how she was ever cast. The only worse Alice was Wesley Pfenning. Thank God the show finally wised up and brought Jacqueline Courtney back, even though they even screwed THAT up after just a year.

No one except writer Harding Lemay has ever alleged she was "difficult," and Lemay caustically denigrated people left, right and center. He simply hated the actress for his own unfathomable reasons, and was out to get her. (Along with others, BTW.) Maybe the alleged incident at the 1971 AW Christmas party is true, who knows? If you read Lemay's book and watched the show at the time, JC's supposed "crime" was to...um, play her scenes as he wrote them, and Lemay thought they were too melodramatic. After Courtney passed, producer Paul Rauch was quoted in an interview saying that Courtney was "a great gal" who was always a pro on AW and "gave great performances." A huge number of his colleagues have confirmed that Reinholt was a nightmare to work with on both AW and OLTL (Erika Slezak said he "was crazy," LOL), but no one has ever claimed that about Courtney. Susan Flannery has been called rude and imperious for her alleged behavior on B&B, but aside from the time she slapped Susan Seaforth across the face, I have never heard other negative accounts of her behavior on DAYS. She did, however, admit she was bored and unchallenged by the show by the time she quit. Anyway, my original point was that no matter how beloved a performer and his/her character are, no one is safe. Except...maybe/probably Susan Lucci. I cringe when I think how poorly TPTB have treated Genie Francis, even though she was hugely popular. TGL axed Mart Hulswit, ATWT dumped Helen Wagner (!!!) at one point, GH fired Rachel Ames, OLTL got rid of Ellen Holly and Al Freeman Jr, for heaven's sake. ABC even dropped Agnes Nixon from her own show. The list is endless. I don't know if DAYS would have kept Laura around in the 1970s, even if Flannery were still there. TPTB eliminated Edward Mallory and Bill and Susan Hayes at different times, all of whom should (IMHO) never have been fired. Sigh. If only *I* could run daytime TV! HA!