6 hours ago, Mitch64 said:

I remember back in the day,  a poster on the old MD board called them the "Blister Sisters" but they meant it as a compliment, and I saw it for what it was...too drunk traitor trash mean girls teaming up and backing each other up...which would have been fine if people  called them out on it, but they were always right. They had a chance when REva pulled the plug on Stiff Dickie but they glossed over that!

hee hee...I miss meanie domain so much. I don't recall being in the GL forum much, but I spent a lot of time "expressing myself" on the ATWT board.

12 hours ago, Mitch64 said:

This is a good scene...as dumb as Dinah obsessing over DuhHart and Cassie..characters that had NO chemistry...(you could always almost scene LW rolling her eyes at that greaseball) at least this was old fashioned soap, no clones, no time travel and no Reva. But it really makes you see how shallow the writing was and how much the talent was wasted...Moniz is looking GREAT here and they have reduced Dinah to an Annielike psycho....Dinah is always best when she shows that she actually does care about someone other then herself,, and not in a love triangle...GT showed affection to Bill and her dad and when they showed them her younger siblings...in a still broken way. Cynical conniving Dinah going after something she thinks she deserves is interesting...an unlikeable nut case is not. If only they had Matt and her screw so Van could toss them both out on their asses.

And yes, having an amnesiac Van confronted with her spoiled whiney daughter would have been worth it...."Well, I always questioned if it was the right move to give you up, but I can see it is...tell me dear, did they keep you in the Freak Show section...as the Incredible Annoying Whining Girl?"

PattiD was fired after trying as hard as she could to create a fan base for Buzz and Selena...(yes,there was a Suzz fanzine..made up of about 5 women who were really so pathetic it was sad...they would send Christmas Presents to Patti's kids ..one of her kids made a hilariously snide post something like "My Mom told me to thank the person who sent me that gift..so ...thanks..." ) By that time Zimmer had taken totally over as the queen of the show and Patti, desperately trying to appeal to the power structure jumped on a message board, where people were complaining about Jevas total domination of the show and Reva's stupid storyline and Patti told them to "BITE me!" so it was bye-bye Patti!)

Thanks for the details on why Patti was let go (one of the reasons, anyway). I missed a lot of the GL fan hysteria of these years so your recounting always amuses me. I actually did like Selena and Buzz as a couple but they weren't anything special, and much as I think Patti herself was an interesting presence, I could never imagine sending her and her family gifts. 

(is that type of thing still done with soap actors now?)

I do think that Moniz could have played some of the same ambiguity in the writing that Gina Tognoni did, but I still enjoyed her playing of Dinah as a complete bitch by the end. The only thing that I wish they had added, beyond a stronger Vanessa, was a rivalry with someone who gave as good as they got. International soaps would have had her against a truly malicious figure and she would have been in for a real fight. 

6 hours ago, Reverend Ruthledge said:

For GL historians: 

This question was asked on here a long time ago and I can't remember by whom so I don't know if anybody still on here will care. Also, this post might just get lost in the shuffle, but...just in case anybody reading this had the question of when the setting for GL became Springfield, it happened in July, 1968. Right before the show moved from 15 to 30 minutes....Also, to answer the question I remember someone asked about whether or not the characters all moved at the same time, the answer is no. Nobody moved to Springfield. Los Angeles just became Springfield. No mention of the change and no characters had to move. 

I hope that answers some questions any of you might have had. 

Thanks for the information. This had been nagging at me for years. Although I was watching well before 1968, I could not for the life if me remember everyone (or even anyone) moving from Selby Flats, Los Angeles to Springfield. I kept thinking, "How many episodes could I have possibly missed?" LOL.

So the answer to the mystery is simple: TPTB just made the arbitrary decision to change locations without explanation. The rational eludes me. It's like Bay City, Michigan morphing into Bay City, Illinois with neither explanation nor reason.

P&G's dropping the article "the" from The Guiding Light and The Edge of Night was another head-scratching move.

God only knows what goes on in the minds of executives. Do they impose any mandates onto the shows just to justify their salaries?

12 hours ago, P.J. said:

I watched this a while ago. I remember that Billy was the only one really saying "Vanessa can still turn this around", while everyone else is waiting for her to die. I wanted Billy to go into her room and start arguing with her, instead of what everyone else was doing, which was basically crying over her and saying their goodbyes.

Very true - I was hoping they would do more with Billy generally during this whole storyline. I was getting worried about Bill not being around, but they finally brought him in towards the end.

17 hours ago, Reverend Ruthledge said:

For GL historians: 

This question was asked on here a long time ago and I can't remember by whom so I don't know if anybody still on here will care. Also, this post might just get lost in the shuffle, but...just in case anybody reading this had the question of when the setting for GL became Springfield, it happened in July, 1968. Right before the show moved from 15 to 30 minutes. Also at the time Irna Phillips stopped writing it for the last time. Although name of Selby Flats hadn't been used in a very long time. Selby Flats was just a suburb of Los Angeles and the name Selby Flats stopped being used and the setting just became Los Angeles in general sometime in the 50s. Then, the show was "without a setting" for a while in the 60s when Los Angeles quit being named specifically. It just became a generic city that nobody named. They would just say "the city" and things like that. The actual name of Springfield was not spoken until July, 1968. It was first uttered by Sarah McIntyre who was living in Chicago at the time and placed a call to "Paul Fletcher at Cedars Hospital in Springfield". So, there was no fanfare about the change in setting. The setting of Los Angeles just gradually faded away and the city just suddenly began being called Springfield with no explanation. By that time, Los Angeles hadn't been named in such a long time (years) that it wouldn't have been all that jarring for viewers. Also, to answer the question I remember someone asked about whether or not the characters all moved at the same time, the answer is no. Nobody moved to Springfield. Los Angeles just became Springfield. No mention of the change and no characters had to move. 

I hope that answers some questions any of you might have had. 

Thank you for posting! Very interesting. The location of Springfield and its history was one of my first questions many months ago when I first jumped into GL.  

21 hours ago, prefab1 said:

I'm usually against giving characters total personality transplants when you bring them back with new actors, but with Dinah I'll make an exception. She hadn't been seen on the show since she was a teenager, she'd been away for 6 whole years, Moniz's Dinah was much closer to what the character should have been in the first place (given her traumatic backstory), and the original conception of the character was extremely boring and bland. There's basically no way you could have driven years of story with Original Recipe Dinah like they did with Self-Pitying Bad Girl Dinah. 

If I recall Gatti's Dinah had more of an edge and was a protective foster sister to Dory when she first came on.   There were scenes where her Dinah lashed out at Vanessa for abandoning her and I even recall a scene where Dinah even told off her cousin Phillip while played by Gatti.  I even recall a scene where Vanessa comes home to Dinah having friends over and they're drinking with the two later having a fight.   The Cam/Dinah coupling was a way to soften her character and to bond them together for both not growing up in healthy family environments.

I noticed once she was let go and replaced with Turco, the character became more of a good girl and totally not like the version of Dinah that came into town raised in a carnival.  She and Cam became the goodie goodies while Alan Michael and Harley took on the personas of original Dinah/Cam.

So when Moniz came on... her version was much closer to the Gatti version that started out.

13 hours ago, P.J. said:

 

@Reverend Ruthledge  thanks! It's always interesting to get the background. I just find it odd they did it. Do you know of any other soaps that switched settings? I mean, I assume ATWT always took place in Oakdale, but now I wonder.

Yes, ATWT always took place in Oakdale BUT when the show began Oakdale was a suburb of a "big city". The city wasn't named specifically. Some characters lived in the suburb Oakdale and others lived in "the city". Some characters, like Chris Hughes, lived in Oakdale but worked "in the city". I always assumed the "city" was Chicago because that would make the most sense sense Oakdale was later identified as being in Illinois. However, it wasn't deemed to be in Illinois when it began and Edith Hughes moved from "the city" where she lived to Chicago for a time after Jim Lowell died. So, that blew my theory that Oakdale was a suburb of Chicago. Over the years, Oakdale morphed from being a suburb to being a city and to being in Illinois near Chicago. 

1 hour ago, alwaysAMC said:

Thank you for posting! Very interesting. The location of Springfield and its history was one of my first questions many months ago when I first jumped into GL.  

You're welcome. It's interesting because I think there had been a move to get away from the Los Angeles setting even back in 1965 which was during those "generic" years when the name of the city they were in was never named. On the script where Julie Bauer was being put in the sanitarium, the script had the name of the sanitarium as "Oceanside Sanitarium" and then that was crossed out and someone (Agnes?) wrote "Lakeside Sanitarium" in ink. I can't think of any other reason to do that except to move away from the Los Angeles coastal setting. 

11 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

Thanks for the information. This had been nagging at me for years. Although I was watching well before 1968, I could not for the life if me remember everyone (or even anyone) moving from Selby Flats, Los Angeles to Springfield. I kept thinking, "How many episodes could I have possibly missed?" LOL.

So the answer to the mystery is simple: TPTB just made the arbitrary decision to change locations without explanation. The rational eludes me. It's like Bay City, Michigan morphing into Bay City, Illinois with neither explanation nor reason.

P&G's dropping the article "the" from The Guiding Light and The Edge of Night was another head-scratching move.

God only knows what goes on in the minds of executives. Do they impose any mandates onto the shows just to justify their salaries?

You're welcome. I'm glad I could clear that up. You may have been the one asking the question originally. Yeah, the transition from Five Points to Selby Flats made a lot more sense than the transition from Selby Flats to Springfield. 

14 hours ago, P.J. said:

Wait, what did Amanda do to snare Ben?

She was WAY more interesting when the Dobsons wrote her. She was truly damaged by the way Lucille treated her, socially awkward, afraid of her own shadow, terrified of displeasing Lucille. But like I said before, she could be very selfish and manipulative, too. She used the way Lucille browbeat her to get Ben to feel sympathetic to her. She would turn on the waterworks and he'd comfort her. 

Lucille made her terrified of sex, so much so she couldn't consumate her marriage to a guy named Gordon. But she was so turned on by Ben, she finally seduced Gordon and realized she liked sex. Right after they had sex, she dumped Gordon. She totally used him just to make a point to herself. It was kind of brutal, actually. Once Gordon turned her on to the delights of sex, because Ben was still with Eve she would pick up random guys and sleep with them.

One time she disappeared and Lucille was hysterical because she was missing, so Ben went to look for her. He found her with her latest pick-up and insisted she leave with him. They got caught in a storm, and of course ended up in a barn. She tried to seduce him, but that time he resisted her charms.

After Eve left him (for catching him with Diane, not Amanda), Amanda was all up in Ben's business. She became his friend, his confidant, and showed interest in everything he did, especially with his art career. IIRC, she was the one who got a Chicago dealer to look at his work. (The guy Justin and Ross's sister Lainie ended up marrying. Can't remember his name). She arranged to be in Chicago at the same time and ran into him "by accident." They ended up having dinner but oh, no, she never got a reservation for a room and it was too late to get one, could she stay in his room, etc., etc. You can imagine how that turned out.

Sometime after, Evie was getting ready to forgive Ben. I can't recall exactly how, but Amanda talked him into a spur-of-the-moment marriage.

It's the kind of manipulative stuff you could imagine Alan doing to get a woman. But she always had this outside aura of niceness and shyness, so she fooled people without consciously trying to do it. Also, Lucille was such a hideously bad mother. Watching the way Lucille treated Amanda made it really hard not to feel sorry for her.

When people say Cullen was dull, that was the Marland years. He had no idea how to write a woman with that many layers.

Edited September 27Sep 27 by DeeVee

1 hour ago, Reverend Ruthledge said:

Yes, ATWT always took place in Oakdale BUT when the show began Oakdale was a suburb of a "big city". The city wasn't named specifically. Some characters lived in the suburb Oakdale and others lived in "the city". Some characters, like Chris Hughes, lived in Oakdale but worked "in the city". I always assumed the "city" was Chicago because that would make the most sense sense Oakdale was later identified as being in Illinois. However, it wasn't deemed to be in Illinois when it began and Edith Hughes moved from "the city" where she lived to Chicago for a time after Jim Lowell died. So, that blew my theory that Oakdale was a suburb of Chicago. Over the years, Oakdale morphed from being a suburb to being a city and to being in Illinois near Chicago.

Y&R was also supposed to take place near Chicago. The Bells were from there and lived there most of the time. I believe the lore goes that they were driving through a town outside Chicago and decided to base Genoa City on it. (Years later, its location was specified as being in Wisconsin, but characters would still talk about taking a drive to Chicago. Eric Braeden has said interviews that Genoa City is a small midwest city similar to Wichita). 

I guess it makes sense to position a fictional soap town near a real big city--it expands what the characters can do. Every small town has rich people, but if you're going to have millionaires that own multi-national companies (which became more common on soaps during the 1980s) having them living in the boonies isn't very realistic. So you solve that by having the town be very close to or part of a bigger city.

Edited September 27Sep 27 by DeeVee

13 minutes ago, DeeVee said:

Y&R was also supposed to take place near Chicago. The Bells were from there and lived there most of the time. I believe the lore goes that they were driving through a town outside Chicago and decided to base Genoa City on it. (Years later, its location was specified as being in Wisconsin, but characters would still talk about taking a drive to Chicago. Eric Braeden has said interviews that Genoa City is a small midwest city similar to Wichita). 

I guess it makes sense to position a fictional soap town near a real big city--it expands what the characters can do.

The real Genoa City, Wisconsin is just over the Illinois state line. When the Bells were based in Chicago they had a vacation home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I think the Y&R 25th anniversary book made mention that the Bells took Genoa City as the setting for Y&R as they passed through the town on their way from Chicago to Lake Geneva.

Edited September 27Sep 27 by kalbir

Carter Bowden. When Vanessa comes to town, Ross starts dropping hints about how Amanda's keeping something from Ben, and Van is all over it like white on rice. She snoops (which she did all the time) and finds the agreement.

LOL...AMANDA? This is shocking info to me. I should've figured there was some reason Ross is all hot and bothered over her---well, besides her money. 

The more I hear about the Dobson years, the more I wish it was available.

3 minutes ago, kalbir said:

The real Genoa City, Wisconsin is just over the Illinois state line. When the Bells were based in Chicago they had a vacation home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I think the Y&R 25th anniversary book made mention that the Bells took Genoa City, Wisconsin as the setting for Y&R as they passed through the town on their way from Chicago to Lake Geneva.

I had no idea that was a real town! I thought they made up the name. That's very cool.

1 hour ago, Reverend Ruthledge said:

Yes, ATWT always took place in Oakdale BUT when the show began Oakdale was a suburb of a "big city". The city wasn't named specifically. Some characters lived in the suburb Oakdale and others lived in "the city".

Irna lived in Chicago, so I do think that it was supposed to be a suburb ..like Oaklawn or Oak Park. When Lisa left ATWT she took a train to the city, but it seemed more than a commuter train to get there. 

7 minutes ago, P.J. said:

Carter Bowden. When Vanessa comes to town, Ross starts dropping hints about how Amanda's keeping something from Ben, and Van is all over it like white on rice. She snoops (which she did all the time) and finds the agreement.

Right, Carter Bowden. Amanda made a deal with him to give Ben a contract that she paid for because all that Spaulding stock she inhereited made her much richer than him and it threatened his masculinity, or something. 🙄 Vanessa snooped around and found out about it. Amanda went from being the manipulator to being victimized by new manipulator Vanessa. This was when Marland wrote the show.