Mitch

Ah, the last summer the show was "on fire," before it went to hell for several years really until the Curlee era. Never understood why the successful formula of the Bauers, Reardons, Chamberlines, Spaudlings and Lewises all mixing it up with a dose of camp, mystery, romance and goofy family schmaltz had to be thrown out for Infinity and constant Reva and the Lewises. During this summer the show hit number one and in the fall a radically different GL took over and the ratings dropped. Did Long or Kobe hate Brown? The Cabin Mystery had Nola written all over it and it should have gone to Quint and Nola instead of Tony and Annabelle and then Fletcher and Claire of all people involved. Loved the flash of cute Rick Bauer in the credits and then hottie Tony Reardon (Frank Cooper who???) I did notice the start of it falling apart. Loved Reva married to H.B. and bugging the [!@#$%^&*] out of Billy, and the rest of the society "fat cats," but notice Vanessa sitting there saying nothing. This was after they defused Vanessa and she became really boring and would cow tow to Billy instead of slapping the [!@#$%^&*] out of him like she would do later.

Which is so weird as they were so hard trying to modernize the show, Lisa and Kim are more vital and interesting then either of the Stewart girls and they dressed both of those girls as frumps chasing after a slummed should Brad (yes, I have a hard time seeing Lisa in that cramped little bookstore and you are right, it looks like Wheeler designed the damn thing in the CBS studio storeroom she housed the goody 7-11 set..but then I could never see Lisa with a book unless its "110 ways to get your man,")

MOL had work done? Big mistake as it was BAD. I remember up until really the time Abby left him he was still looking cute. Matter of fact, the Abby leaving episodes have him running around in some tight jeans with his shirt off and he looks great (obviously MOL had recently slimmed down, buffed up and wanted to show it off) so I always wondered what happened. As a fellow big Irish guy I know he probably has the same thing I do, when working out I build great but if you let it go it can turn to fat, and it looks like MOL really let himself go. Speaking of Abby, why did they let her go. I think those two worked as the nice couple in town, kinda normal but cute. Hated Rick with cold ass Mel. Rick and Claire did have a one night stand, she "pop his cherry," so to speak. It was played for laughs more then anything, with Mindy finding out and then locking him in a closet at Cedars to protect him/harrass him about it when Darcy was going on her rampage. I remember when Mindy married Phillip and they went on their honeymoon to Cross Creek or the Bauer cabin, and Mindy starts crying because Phillip doesnt make burgers like Rick does!! I hated that scene with Rick and Mindy in the fountain as it came out of nowhere and was just a plot point to move him toward Roxie. Kurt was a duller Rick, it was weird that they even did that. They aged the FM's way too fast, but I think that came about when they recast Phillip with an older actor. One day they are all in college, the next Phillip is 35 and running Spaulding and married to India, etc. The Rick Meredith thing was weird...Meredith had all the charm of a turnip and how either one of those guys like her...

I HATED the Roxie character, as there were just too many damn Lewis/Shaynes in too short of a time. I really hated her as they used her to break up one of my fave couples Rick and Minday (no one watching later on would believe me that MOL was cute as hell in his younger years and he and Terseu were just a cute couple together.) Not that I didnt think that R & M could break up, it just was a quick switch from Rick accepting and actually liking Mindy with all of her quirks, to him being totally in love with Roxie and hating Mindy for being vain, etc. Plus that dumb ass story they gave her of having a split personality...sorry, the actress was cute and had a nice warm personality but she could NOT act more then being cute, young and nice. Giving her heavy emotional scenes was ridiculous. I thought Long was still there for Andy Ferris and Infinity right? It doesnt seem like her though???

I think the Marland critiques really come as a backlash of the "Marland is genius," group, but it also comes from the fact that Marland is so good, that you actually CAN take a critical look at his work without condemning it totally as I would Sheffer, Kreizman, Weston. Marland WAS good but he had a particular distinctive style which had it quirks..at least on ATWT...(I dislike that his characters are SO damn polite, the sex scenes dont sizzle, his tendancy to cast some pretty plain people in some roles, which is fine, ATWT was like real life, but when those plain people would become supermodels and people would rave about how beautiful they are, and of course, the tried and true homoerotic stable boy/farm hand/mechanic in tight jeans in love with a woman who was not half as pretty as they were.) Other things I do love, his focus on history, and the little quirks of characters (love how he revives the Lisa/Ellen feud, without making it a big deal, they would simply snipe at each other with no reference to the past no big scenes, they just reacted to each other as anyone would with that history) how everyone had something to do, even poor Ellen Stewart with no family in town, etc. Its almost like some of my favorite popular authors who I really really like and can read and be entertained by and I am invested enough to take a step back and critique the work. The only other soap writer I can say that about is Pam Long, who I have a love hate relationship with her work and what she did to GL. The Jay actor was simply let go during the Dobsons, and was referred to for months as just being in the next room while Carol flirted with greasy Steve Andropolous...until they finally killed him in the silver mine cave in and his death had no impact as we didnt see him for six months. The Wade Bookstore thing was bad in a way, it was kind of like Company was to GL during the last 20 so years, always there and people converged to talk and gossip and overhear each other. Some of my earliest memories was Lisa holding a stack of books, etc. I can see them transfering the bookstore to the hospital as it would include Lisa in shenanigans at the hospital but it never panned out and the set was ugly as hell. During the youthifying of ATWT the Dobson tried their first time, they should have made the bookstore a coffee house bookstore, maybe had one of the younger characters take it over and it could have been a spot for the younger people to hang out while carrying on the tradition.

I stopped watching ATWT at that time, but do remember her occasional appearance. ATWT had gotten so boring and I thought unweildy at that point. Marland broke what he fixed when he first came on, trimming the show down to be about the Hughes family at the center, and everyone swirls around them, with the Snyders as their rural counterparts. All of a sudden these extraneous characters are running around, like Aunt Mary and her stupid coffee shop!

That was actually more like Irna's Nancy Hughes. A bit cold, with tougher standards. Marland turned her into a softer grandmother. But remember, Marland's Kim, while certainly warm and loving, was not one to mess with and could kick ass with the best of them, so it kind of makes sense that Nancy would mellow as the years went by and then Kim took over as matriarch. Always wanted Nancy to at least give a nod to her past and council either Kim or Lucinda in the error of over meddling in your kids lives. Funny that when Wagner came back to the show, Lemay was writing or at least consulting for the show. He always considered Nancy Hughes to be the prototypical Irna matriach...judgmental and contolling. He hated Mary Matthews because of that, and killed her off and created Liz Matthews to be his take on the meddling matriach, instead of everyone viewing her with respect, they were annoyed with "Aunt Liz." So he actually had Nancy act more like Irna's Nancy.

I always thought that Marland should have made Sabrina an all out slattern drunk bitch...kind of like Moniz Dinah on GL...the atithesis of everything the Hughes stood for. I think both the Hughes and the Bauers on GL suffered when Marland was not writing them as there was no internal conflict for them. When Irna was writing it was Lisa, which actually was pretty brilliant. Lisa was a family member and mother of a Hughes so Nancy went back and forth from keeping her in line (right up to the end..I love the line, "Lisa dear you are NOT helping!") to protecting her. The Bauers were always more edgier then the Hughes as Bert started out as a money grubbing nagging housewife, Ed an alcholic, Bill an alcholic who had affairs etc. During the later years they needed some internal conflict (which I though a son that Ed had with Rita would fit the bill.) Otherwise both families were considered "boring," by less imaginative PTB. Would love to see Bob and Kim having coffee in the morning and Sabrina stumbling in the back door. "Ello loves, could use a spot of coffee after the rogering I got from young Dusty Donavon. Dont mind if I smoke do you???"

LOL, now that is a LONG intro... I didnt realize they took the same music and lyrics and "updated," to that discoey version of the 80s (and really the one I love the most as that is when I started watching it.) One of the things I first liked about my partner of 17 years is that he knew the lyrics to the Edge theme song, (yea, I know, I am dorky but that is pretty quirky for a staid finance investments kind of guy.) My mom lurrrved Edge when I was a kid, so that and ATWT (and Dark Shadows though my mom didnt watch that) were the shows I remember most and picked back up when I was a teen. I remember a location shoot involving some woman being chased by a maniac, up the stairs of the lighthouse and the maniac falls down the stairs and dies. Also, they were trying to Gaslight Chief Marcel's wife and someone poured blood in her closet but off course, cleaned it up when she screamed and got some one to look at it. It was pretty cool stuff for a kid! Though my ultimate fave EON plot was probably reviled my most on here, it was the Isis Building. I LOVED the wheelchair guy, his sister, their incestuous relationship and the mind control of Monticello (leave to Raven to be the one to pick up on something being weird and always throwing a coat over the Isis statue so the creepy crippled guy couldnt watch her.) It was so stupid it was GREAT!!

Bev was "prickly," to say the least but that is because she demanded perfection (would love to see what she would have done with the material Conboy and Weston and then Wheeler would present her!!) The young actors were particularly fond of her as she was softer with them as they needed training. You can see that in any scene that her Alex has with a younger person, even if at odds with them a maternal side comes out, one that strangley Joan Collins brought out in Alex but Marj Dusay never did. She and Zimmer had a bumpy relationship in that Bev had the experience and name but at the time Zimmer was getting so much air time and attention. To her credit Zimmer has said she understands now why Bev was that way as she felt that when Watros came on board. I would have loved to see how Zimmer and Ehlers got along in real life. Near the end of her run you could tell that Ehlers was gave off a bitter unhappy feel. I guess the weight loss didnt help (Ehlers face is so sharp that when she lost weight she just seemed to be all points..though those abs were kick ass.) Supposedly Ehlers wanted Bogue fired when he went back to his wife, but they refused. Later, when the Marina/Cyrus relationship was being broken up, despite being well received, to make way for Cyrus and Harley...a report came out that Wheeler saw how good this real life couples chemistry was, that she insisted the storyline be changed to pair them. Everyone thought Ehlers was at it again but even she couldn't make the Cyrus actor switch teams, and it was really Marina/Mallet, as Bruno and Bogue were going at it. Showing how dumb Wheeler was, that she ruined two couples who were working, Marina/Cyrus and Mallet and Dinah, for this mess of the switch couples, which she refused to change around.

This is actually when I stopped watching the show. GL was having an upsurge at the time and it was everything a soap should be, dramatic stories involving several families with some camp and one liners thrown in to break up the "drama." I will give Marland props, he does know this show and there is usually always the saftey net of family and friends there to cushion the blow, (i.e. Lisa calling and going over to Babs house to be with her. LOL...Marland was always telegraphing his stories, but that was actually one of the things I loved about his ATWT, it was a formula but it somehow worked. Tonio had to be the dullest bad guy around. It just wasnt a parody of machisimo, it was like this was more like Marland's masturbatory fantasy of how "butch," guys would act. I don't know, but as I said, this was the time I dropped ATWT from my viewing and never really got back into it for a length of time (which is weird, as I always think ATWT and GL as my shows, and no matter how bad GL got, I always watched it. I This was actually interesting and a good scene and storyline. Finally someone called a "good," character out for their selfish acts. I would have liked to have seen this develop. Zenk is really good at this and the Frannie actress is better then I thought. This scene seems more GL then ATWT, with two people talking and having a convo..ATWT would always have people coming in and out of a scene, though Marland does throw in his patented phone calls into the scene (lets see, my sister just accused me of being partially responsible for her husband's death, and I pick up the phone??? Frannie, let the answering machine pick it up!!! )

Those pictures are good but the "quotes," underneath them are hilarious. LOL at that picture of Fulton, trying to be center stage....(and I dont mean to be mean, but just who in the hell told her she could sing well enough to cut an album...I have a feeling she was easy prey for "producers," looking for money.) And geez, boring old Ellen Stewart's real life husband is smoking hot...( I like me the uptight pretty boys.)

Wait, when was Eddie in a towel????

I couldn't watch the you tubes, as the whole freaking show totally drove me nuts it sucked so bad. The whole,"Let's make Josh a minister, cause you know, thats how the show started with a minster and we will be honoring history," with badnuCassie and Josh running around talking in that quiet voice, and the whole "New Agey" minister thing (just what denomination was it supposed to be anyway???) and Wheeler's office turned church set...god I thought I had gone nuts or something and it reeked of a PTB who didnt have a clue on what to do with this show. But I do like that they had the psycho dressed as an angel.

I wasnt watching at that time, Wheeler and Kreizman and nonstop Jon screaming and Tams simpering made me cut GL out of my daily watching after 30 years. Who was the kid? A big no to Eddie in love with Richie..though I do think Eddie would be on sick biscuit and would have a dungeon imported from San Crud to get off in. I actually thought Eddie and Jonathon has a weird kind of chemistry..though when he first came on the actor played Jonathon like he would screw anyone or any thing.

Carl, lol, I had no idea that you would uh, appreciate DAM's ass! Agreed, they should never had made Edmund a psycho who tried to kill Jonathon and Reva...(though one of my fave lines was "Southern Fried Venus,") It would have been more interesting if Richard was a closet psycho, or build someone else up, like that Goofy General who was the attacker and Scrambled Egg Brain Reva got them confused. Also thought it would be interesting if Edmund was revealed as the real Spaulding heir, as the baby didnt die. And really Edmund should have been the first gay villian in soaps..they wouldnt even have to romantically link him with anyone (I see Eddie more of a Craig'slist hook up queen) but he would have great bitchy one liners and quips as he went around town making everyone's life hell. Anything better then this Prince [!@#$%^&*]. DAM is a fine looking man, would have loved to see him play Tom on ATWT.

Hey, I loved the Dreaming Death, Brent/Marion,and the Nursey Rhyme Stalker..so who am I to judge! But agreed, it would have been okay for a summer storyline, like in the old days when they would go on remote. And then in the fall finished it (well, I would have made the family just an aristocratic family, not royalty..how dumb was that and how stupid that no one ever noticed that it was Reva who was the Queen on that Island, especially since it seemed like that goofy island nation was known across the world. It was supposed to be but they thought it was such a "hit," that we were stuck with that damn island for years.

God the show sucked then! Love the drapes covering the walls so they dont have to build a set. Dumber then even the clone was the two princes and San Crud!

Terry Lester as Frank Cooper???? Hmm, I can kind of see it! At least it would have opened up the romantic possiblities for him instead of the Deas. I love Marland but he just sounds so, pretentious with the "I have a Rolls Royce," and his stuff about architecture!

Phillip Brown is HOT! However, I can see them having this guy from commercials and prime time not understanding about the speed and economy of daytime, I know the got fired from GL as Ben Warren even before he started as he couldn't remember his lines and he complained that there was too many pages in his script. Wonder if he would have brought some more depth to Warren then the other actor did (though I think he is hot too.) Always thought that Buzz Cooper should have been cast with someone like Brown, rugged who you could believe was blue collar and you could beleive that hot women like Nadine and Jenna would actually give a damn about, instead of the overacting troll Justin Deas.

Nola didn't get much screen time her last year on the show at all, so I can see her not getting a lot of time with Maureen. It was stupid too, why pull Fletcher and Claire of all people into the cabin mystery and not nosy, looking for adventure and a good time Nola? I think that it was stupid and depressing to have a character like Nola leave like that. Plus, having Floyd, be the killer was just a throw off, (its like they had a mystery but didnt have a killer planned out) especially to have yet someone else be in love with Beth, when he never really had a scene with her. The show was starting to fall apart at that time, I actually think it was the weakest it was ever until Wheeler and Kriezman, with Charita sick then dying, and Simon, Stewart, the Hillary actress, Newman and Aleksander and Brown etc, all leaving, either of their own will or being fired, the sudden emergence of the Reva show, and the Lewise/Shaynes obscuring the Bauers and the Reardons and an upbrupt change of tone.

Its just funny that Marland, who was so uptight about writing sex on ATWT (even while subliminely showing off some of his, uh own sexuality) would be tapped to write a sex soap. I wonder if he had a lot of beefy guys in jeans running around?

Forgot about him and Jesse's dad having that thing. It was kind of a good story, Jesse's mom dies on Ed's table, and Ed donates Mo's heart to save Jesse, but in typical E & B, it just never came together. Its too bad that they had that really bad actor in the role of Jesse(I never had found him hot at all either) and they could have filled the family out with other siblings, etc to give SF a new blue collar family to unsurp the Coopers, (who had become way middle class,) just like the Coopers supplanted the Reardon's. A hot vixen sister for Jesse to go after Bill Lewis much like a young Nola, and much to the consternation of Vanessa, who would bring out Van's old snobbiness, cuasing problems for Matt, which could lead him into Beth's bed...that would have been more character motivated then what happened admist the clones and the Faux Annie's and the Nursery Rhyme stalker..(I actually like the both F Annie and Nursery Rhyme stalker.) Plus a young vixen from the wrong side of the tracks would make more sense then Drew, the Californian with that bad east coast accent, and that stupid record company storyline. Love that while the soaps are more crass and sexual now, they would never deal with an issue like this. First of all, Rita would be way too old to have sex on a soap today, and doesnt everyone know that there is hot sex happening all the time and no one has bad sex and married couples dont ahve sex anyway??? The show was so polite in talking about something like this, I think if they did it today, Rita would be a 23 year old model who would yell out, "I can't get off with Ed!" to poor Sarah. Was this the Dobson's or Marland, who loved to explore female "frigidness," on GL, what with Amanda being that way (hilarious that she came back as Toby Poser's Malibu Madame which could have actually made sense if McTavish had a brain.) Anyway, Rita is smoking hot with that rack and that sexy smokey voice. Funny, I also found MH kind of sexy in a regular guy with some beef on him way. He looks like he could be Charita's kid. Actually found him hotter then Simon. I know that Long wanted her to come back during the Roger is alive thing, which would have been great, hooking her up with the Alan at the time instead of dumb Nadine. Sara I could see writing out, they had plenty of older women supporting the young, like Bert and Bea, there can be too many listening ears on a soap.

How long did Gentry reprise the role under Rauch? I thought it was a smart move to bring back the original adult Ed since Simon wouldnt come back, I wonder why it didnt work? I do remember they had almost no story for him but in typical E & B fashion, little scenes they had hinted at something that could be interesting but they were caught up in their BIG Reva story, which was Faux Annie at that time. I remember a little scene during Abby's trial that they had Rick, Abby, Chele, Jesse and Ed all out to dinner at the Towers and then Alan walks in "A room full of Bauers, enough to destroy the appetite!" LOL...like old times briefly and alas, one of the last times we would see the entire Bauer Family on the show at that time have a together family scene. Never bought the Buzz/Alan fued, it should have always been Ed and Alan and the whole mob thing would have been more dramatic with Ed facing off with Carmen (I did like one scene when Simon came back and he is talking to Carmen warning her off Chele,"I learned a great many things on how to physcially torture the human body without leaving any marks, I think you should consider that before you ever think of coming near my daughter again." Good scene with a look of "I am NOT [!@#$%^&*] with him," on Carmen's smug face.

That wasn't Brad..that was some bad 70's musician, that was friend of Margos. However, the guy who played Brad was not a hunk either. Those photos crack me up, especially the bad stage show with Fulton. I can't imagine sitting through that kind of thing. Funny, was Jay supposed to be a blue collar butch kind of guy, as the actor looks quite, uh, not butch.