In honor of AW's 45th anniversary,I thought I'd start this thread and perhaps all future posts concerning this show could be in one place.at present there are several threads.

Here's a description from Irna Phillips at the time of debut.

"What I want to say is that none of us can face reality 24 hours a day. We must have private 'worlds', made up of our down dreams and pleasures and emotions, into which to retreat. Otherwise, it would be simply too much!"

The story follows the lives of the families of two brothers, William and James Matthews, in a suburban university town. It opens with the death of William, then shows how the sad events affects the widow and their children and the other brother and his family. Grandma Matthews gets into the action, to. The writer promises to relate to contemporary problems; two of them she mentioned are school dropouts and illegitimacy.

10 hours ago, amybrickwallace said:

Especially how to stall for time while figuring out how to break a 10-dollar bill.

 

10 hours ago, beebs said:

LOL I nearly forgot about that ridiculous scene.

I still joke with my friends about how about 60% of that episode was about people's various difficulties in trying to tell everyone in town that John Randolph had died in a fire at the edge of town. AT LEAST TWICE. 😆

😂😂

Yep. They were trying to adjust to the format, but you can fast forward a lot of that episode and not miss a thing. Maybe there should've spent more time on Marianne's grief rather than breaking the $10😂 Luckily, it got better. The padding isn't as bad in the other full 90 minute episodes that are posted.

Edited October 16, 20214 yr by AbcNbc247

9 hours ago, Neil Johnson said:

Believe it or not, the Chromokey scenes were one of the few things AW got right about Steve's return.   Since the days when Agnes Nixon created Steve, he always had a house in St Croix.  And between 1968 and 1975, Steve went to St Croix several times with Alice, and at least one time when he was married to Rachel.  Each time, the beach beyond the terrace was shown with Chromakey.  And when Mary Matthews died on this same St Croix terrace in 1975, it was done with the Chromakey horizon.    Corrine Jacker got almost nothing accurate about Steve and Alice's history, but somebody in the studio (probably Paul Rauch) must have told her about Steve and Alice's romantic times at the old place in St Croix, and the Chromakey beach.  So I can't complain about that.   

Thanks for letting me know. I will, sadly, never be seeing any of this material, so when I read about the high production values Rauch insisted  on, I had assumed they did not have Chromakey. That isn't fair of me, as I know it was an industry standard at that time. I just associate it with, frankly, Julia Hoffman screaming to Barnabas that the parallel time room is changing. 

I recall an interesting detail from Eight Years in Another World was that Paul Rauch owned a vacation home in St. Croix, so the establishing shots used for the Chromo-key, and the later remote during Janice's story, were also a way to write off his vacation home as a business expense on his taxes.

Edited October 16, 20214 yr by j swift

41 minutes ago, j swift said:

were also a way to write off his vacation home as a business expense on his taxes.

Of course!! 😂😂😂😂😂

12 hours ago, Nicholas Blair said:

The show expanded to 60 minutes and then to 90 minutes without TPTB figuring out how much additional story they would need. After Reinholt was fired, he showed one of the magazine writers a scene where Vic Hastings and Angie Perrini (probably the original one, the boring Toni Kalem) talked on and on about office furniture until Steve Frame came in and said he was going to Australia.

In many ways the hour expansions hindered many soaps.  Lemay’s objective was for longer scenes and dialogue which he did well. But eventually large casts and new families were added taking away from the original core families.  

2 hours ago, DRW50 said:

Thanks for letting me know. I will, sadly, never be seeing any of this material, so when I read about the high production values Rauch insisted  on, I had assumed they did not have Chromakey. That isn't fair of me, as I know it was an industry standard at that time. I just associate it with, frankly, Julia Hoffman screaming to Barnabas that the parallel time room is changing. 

Actually this episode is on Youtube.  I watched it a couple of years ago.  I don't know the original episode date, or how you would search for this particular episode, but it's there somewhere, if you're interested.   

2 minutes ago, Neil Johnson said:

Actually this episode is on Youtube.  I watched it a couple of years ago.  I don't know the original episode date, or how you would search for this particular episode, but it's there somewhere, if you're interested.   

Pretty sure it was October 15, 1981

20 minutes ago, Neil Johnson said:

Actually this episode is on Youtube.  I watched it a couple of years ago.  I don't know the original episode date, or how you would search for this particular episode, but it's there somewhere, if you're interested.   

Sorry, I meant the Lemay episodes you mentioned. I haven't watched this period because 1980 put me to sleep and I haven't rushed to go back.

6 hours ago, AbcNbc247 said:

 

😂😂

Yep. They were trying to adjust to the format, but you can fast forward a lot of that episode and not miss a thing. 

I think you could FF all but about 10 minutes!! Then you also have flashbacks!!!

LOL @ that Steve and Alice scene. I’ve never seen that Alice before and David Canary has an awful dye job.

It’s as if they brought Luke and Laura back, but now they were portrayed by Monte Markham (with a perm of course) and Karen Morris Gowdy. “Guess what, fans? Luke and Laura are back!”

On 10/15/2021 at 9:50 PM, vetsoapfan said:

You are being fair, because you are being truthful. The Chromakey was dreadful, and we were NOT interested in watching strangers playing once-beloved characters, particularly Linda Borgenson who was painfully bland and nondescript. Borgenson and Canary had no chemistry at all. There was no reason to care. 

Did they realise any improvement in the ratings with the audience checking out whether "Steve" and "Alice" were worthwhile? Was David Canary considered Bonanza-famous?

Did they intend to recreate the Steve and Alice romance, or was the plan all along for Rachel to get Steve back while Mac and Alice receded into the background? I have a hard time grasping what attracted Mac to Alice -- his other relationships that we saw onscreen seem to have tended toward difficult women. (But perhaps Janice was sweet to him to his face in order to entrap him and I am considering her secret murder plot against him to consider her difficult.) The love quadrangle seems very lopsided.

41 minutes ago, Xanthe said:

Did they realise any improvement in the ratings with the audience checking out whether "Steve" and "Alice" were worthwhile? Was David Canary considered Bonanza-famous?

Did they intend to recreate the Steve and Alice romance, or was the plan all along for Rachel to get Steve back while Mac and Alice receded into the background? I have a hard time grasping what attracted Mac to Alice -- his other relationships that we saw onscreen seem to have tended toward difficult women. (But perhaps Janice was sweet to him to his face in order to entrap him and I am considering her secret murder plot against him to consider her difficult.) The love quadrangle seems very lopsided.

The ratings were anemic before the attempt to renew the Alice/Steve/Rachel triangle, and did not improve at all during its run.

It was reported at the time that the idea was to rebuild Steve and Alice as a pair, but Linda Borgenson had no chemistry with anyone, and David Canary was a better actor with potential, so TPTB switched courses and veered Steve towards Rachel. That idea was a failure too, because "old-time" Steve and Alice fans did not buy it, and Rachel fans only wanted her with Mac, so the show finally cut its losses and killed Steve off yet again.

3 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

Did they realise any improvement in the ratings with the audience checking out whether "Steve" and "Alice" were worthwhile? Was David Canary considered Bonanza-famous?

Another World never improved in the ratings after 1979.  Never once got above number 9, whatever shenanigans they tried: Bringing back Steve and Alice; devoting a third of the cast to crime/mob stories; firing Beverly Penberthy; the comedy of Felicia and Wallingford; the return of Iris; beautiful huge sets courtesy of Jill Ferrin Phelps; Vicky Wydham as Justine, the Lumina plot; a gorilla in the final episode.  Nothing raised the ratings. 

I wonder if anyone ever considered returning to class-conflict with a middle-class family as the core?  Obviously not.   

2 hours ago, Neil Johnson said:

Another World never improved in the ratings after 1979.  Never once got above number 9, whatever shenanigans they tried: Bringing back Steve and Alice; devoting a third of the cast to crime/mob stories; firing Beverly Penberthy; the comedy of Felicia and Wallingford; the return of Iris; beautiful huge sets courtesy of Jill Ferrin Phelps; Vicky Wydham as Justine, the Lumina plot; a gorilla in the final episode.  Nothing raised the ratings. 

I wonder if anyone ever considered returning to class-conflict with a middle-class family as the core?  Obviously not.   

Nobody in charge understood the show or the audience or what viewers wanted to see (a problem rampant on daytime TV for decades now).

5 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

The ratings were anemic before the attempt to renew the Alice/Steve/Rachel triangle, and did not improve at all during its run.

It was reported at the time that the idea was to rebuild Steve and Alice as a pair, but Linda Borgenson had no chemistry with anyone, and David Canary was a better actor with potential, so TPTB switched courses and veered Steve towards Rachel. That idea was a failure too, because "old-time" Steve and Alice fans did not buy it, and Rachel fans only wanted her with Mac, so the show finally cut its losses and killed Steve off yet again.

I wonder how things might have been if DC had worked with Jacquie Courtney. Sure, she was on OLTL then.

How long was his gap between leaving AW and joining AMC?