Another World

[Contessa Donatella]

I don't know if y'all enjoy some of the things people are doing with photos or not, but here are a few that Kim Wells has done that I really like & all are shareable with credit to her. 

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[Contessa Donatella]

For a long time I had a pertinent quote about the AW 90 minute show without a cite. I have connected it to its source now so I am recording it here & there. "Indeed, programmers at NBC, which led daytime in the mid-1970s but had become a weak third place by the late 1970s, basically admitted that they had stretched Another World to 90 minutes daily in 1979 because they couldn't come up with a better idea." p. xvi Hyatt, W. (1997). The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television. Billboard Books.

[Mona Kane Croft]

Thank you for finding the citation, Donna.   

[Contessa Donatella]

You can imagine my pleasure at finding it! I always thought this quote was important partly because the programmer in question wasn't named, which I took to be a likely case of someone wanting to speak up but not wanting to get fired. 

[Soaplovers]

So I've watching some early 1989 and I've come to Frankie's early episodes.  What a bitch..so unlikable.  I'm glad the writing and actress softened the character over time.

It did make me wonder why the show just didn't have her play Molly Ordway instead instead of creating a new character?  She had the same type of relationship with Emma that Molly did..and was kind of a troublemaker as well.  

[Mona Kane Croft]

Frankie's early time on AW is a good example of Donna Swajeski's inability to create engaging new characters.  Swajeski did a fairly good job of writing for existing characters, but the new characters she brought to the show were often burdened with cliched (at times cartoonish) characteristics.  For example, Frankie had the ESP nonsense; and Derek Dane had the "beauty and the beast" vibe.  Swajeski often added some characteristic to her creations that she believed, made her characters interesting and quirky.  But to me, those characteristics just made Swajeski's characters unbelievable and irritating. Later, as you mention, Alice Barrett softened Frankie and made her believable and likable.

And why didn't Swajeski just have Barrett play Molly Ordway?  Because she probably didn't even know Molly existed.  Obviously she knew almost nothing of the extended-Frame family history.  

 

Edited September 29, 2023 by Neil Johnson

[Contessa Donatella]

Well, I was told at the time that they were doing the New Age "wooh wooh" thing with Frankie because of that copycat business, in this case OLTL's Luna Moody. (Was her last name Moody?) Anyway the Susan Batten role with all those characteristics & that it was suggested to the writer that she do a lookalike, well I guess a seemalike. Personally I think that our soaps doing so much copycatting is a weakness but corporations tended to do copycatting on products at the highest levels, so they wouldn't have given one hoot for my opinion. 

[Mona Kane Croft]

Agreed.  Frankie was an obvious rip-off of Luna Moody.  

And I also agree, copycatting on soaps has led to the near demise of the entire genre.  That all seemed to begin in the early 1980s, when many soaps tried to copy (in one way or another) the success of General Hospital's Luke and Laura and over the top unbelievable plots.  Nobody wants to watch an afternoon of soap operas that are all nearly identical.  Before the 1980s, every soap had its own unique recognizable identity.  Thank God soaps were not copycatting one another in the 1960s -- otherwise, every soap would have had vampires, witches, and werewolves!   

[Contessa Donatella]

AMEN!! 

[chrisml]

Frankie was before Luna Moody on OLTL. If anyone copied a character, it was Michael Malone on OLTL--who would yrs later be an AW headwriter.

[Contessa Donatella]

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You are correct! Wow, that is weird. So we just toss out that fan lore. Thanks for the heads up. 

[chrisml]

Soaps seemed to like the new age/psychic thing. The character of Sandra Mills on Santa Barbara appeared a few months before Frankie Frame. Sandra could be the original for all of this. Someone at NBC obviously liked psychics because yrs later Celeste would show up on DAYS. 

[NothinButAttitude]

Speaking of clairvoyants being on the show, Frankie was one of the few that seemed real. It wasn't slapstick. I'd add Nadine (on GL) for that too.

Love Celeste but I felt she was too slapstick. 

[Xanthe]

I had actually forgotten that Frankie was supposed to be psychic and when I watch old episodes it seems mostly like she has vague feelings that something is wrong. I had less patience with Lisa Grady whose psychic powers seemed to be much more concrete and accurate insights into the minds of Vicky and the Sin Stalker as plot demanded. (Of course although she perceived details of the Sin Stalker's mania she did not pick up his identity.)

Psychics can be useful plotwise because you can use their feelings to justify taking sudden action without any actual evidence.

I thought that I had read that the original casting concept of Frankie was that she could be Italian-American called Francesca, but when they cast Alice Barrett they made her Mary Frances Frame and decided to have her as a slightly new-age flake because Alice Barrett was also that way inclined. Casting being what it is it is possible that they always intended to have the character as a Frame. I can also see both sides of the Molly Ordway question -- Molly had the baggage of having been married to Michael Randolph and there had been no Randolphs around for quite a while. Sharlene was already covering having been married to a Matthews and with secret child Josie. So in many respects Frankie with a clean slate is a useful option and then you can still bring in Molly later and mine that past as well as having her connected to Frankie and other Frames.  

 

[TEdgeofNight]

Facts don't seem to matter with Donna.