Guiding Light Discussion Thread

[NothinButAttitude]

Damn. Alex is so coldhearted when it comes to Blake. I can understand why, but good God! I love watching all the GL episodes on that channel b/c I get to see Roger and Mindy's romance. Get a little bit more depth do them. Dare I say but Mindy might've given Holly a run for her money in Roger's heart. I've never seen Roger be so sprung except with Holly.

[amybrickwallace]

Was Kimberley Simms the only Mindy to be paired romantically with Roger? Somehow I can't imagine him with Krista Tesreau's Mindy.

[antmunoz]

Were you not watching then? Simms' Mindy had the affair with Roger.

Sometimes I feel like some of you on this board have never even seen the show. Or least not the eras you're discussing and claim to have watched. It's annoying.

[DRW50]

Many people likely were not watching a soap at this point, or were watching another soap, or were too young, or may not have even been born. That's just life.

I like that people come into the thread and ask questions. There's nothing else to talk about anyway.

Don Stewart ad. I never knew he did these.

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[amybrickwallace]

No, I wasn't watching the show then. I wasn't allowed to watch soaps until I was in my teens. I like learning of the history of the soaps through the eyes of the fans.

[antmunoz]

So, you actually didn't watch Amy and Brick Wallace, amybrickwallace? LOL

[amybrickwallace]

Not the first time around, LOL. Their pairing began when I was 5 and ended when I was 7. I found them years later on YouTube, after I discovered SB as an adult laid up with a dislocated knee.

[antmunoz]

And yet you are a huge fan of EDGE and SFT also, both canceled before you were a viewer. Interesting. What soaps have you actually watched "live" that you have a connection to, Monika? I would think you'd have greater affection for storylines not viewed in chopped-up youtube bits and pieces.

[amybrickwallace]

I started watching DAYS in early 1996, mainly because my younger sister was such a rabid fan of that show. My sis also traded tapes with someone out of state for awhile, so I would watch the vintage episodes with her. So I watched that for several years, but GH was the one I started watching on my own, beginning in the summer of 1997. But I gave it up after several years because I was sick and tired of all the mob crap. I also watched AW from early 1997 until it was cancelled in 1999.

But I subscribed to Soap Opera Digest (and my sister to Soap Opera Magazine before that one went under) for many years and read every issue from cover to cover so I knew what was going on with all of the shows. Before I started watching episodes of the long-defunct shows online, I read a lot of soap books - the trivia books by Gerry Waggett (plus his Soap Opera Encyclopedia) and the long out-of-print books like Paul Denis' Inside the Soaps and Robert LaGuardia's Soap World - both published in the 80s when a lot of the soaps no longer on the air were still alive and kicking.

Some of that reading I did for a project in a communications class I took in high school. My teacher was a big AMC fan, so I figured I would have her attention if I wrote a paper entitled "The Pros and Cons of Soap Operas", which was a topic I really wanted to write about anyway. All the research I did paid off, because I did get an A on the project.

This was in the spring of 1997, right when Michael Zaslow was being dropped from GL, when no one knew what was wrong with his health at the time. With the magazines we had subscribed to and the soap books I'd borrowed from the library, I was able to write about how much Zaz meant to GL, his Emmy win, the controversial storylines he had played out over the years, and how the show was at an impasse without him. (At that time, he was just on a medical leave from the show.)

At heart, I just love a good story. The soaps of yore, under writers like Agnes Nixon, Bill Bell, Labine/Mayer, at their best, did that. They provided stories about family, romance and fantasy, with good actors interpreting their ideas. I'll take that any day over the mob, shootings and explosions. If I wanted to see that, I would just turn on the news.

[John]

Ok what was the opinion of Phil MacGregor as Rick Bauer in 82-83 before Michael O'Leary was cast

Phil MacGregor also appeared on EON & LOVING but always seemed to be replaced

Saw a pic of him & he looked good

[antmunoz]

He was okay. I don't think he held his own opposite Grant Aleksander. Michael was a breath of fresh air at the time, except when Rick was yelling at the too of his lungs at Mindy. A lot.

It's funny. O'Leary basically aged into a schlubby Dr. Rick, kind of like Mart Hulswit as Dr. Ed. Rick really should've been recast at some point, post-Abby, to keep the character "hot." I know it wouldn't have gone over well, but ultimately Rick became irrelevant. The black hair dye didn't help either.

[amybrickwallace]

Do you think Michael O'Leary had believable best friend chemistry with John Bolger's Phillip?

[antmunoz]

Oh, let's not even go there.

"Phill-in" was NOT Phillip. I'm hard-pressed to remember ANY Phillip/Rick moments during Bolger. It's like Phillip and Rick were in different storyline worlds (India and Claire). Bolger looked and acted so much older, spoke so...stagey and sophisticated (like he'd been raised by Aunt Alex in Von Halkein Land). It didn't help that Mary Kay Adams looked 45 with her updo and bun. Rick was with the REAL "older" woman, Claire, or Roxie. Mindy was with Kurt. Beth, with Lujack. And while their stories still overlapped and intertwined, that one recast really broke up The Four Musketeers. Recasts of Mindy and Beth went down far easier than this one.

I liked Bolger later on AW and OLTL, though.

[amybrickwallace]

Yeah, he was good as Gabe. Never saw him on OLTL.

[KateW]

CBS must have liked John Bolger, for he was one of the judges at Miss USA 1986 (2:25): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6ZTK9Ib8y8

Also on the judging panel is John Callahan, who was on Falcon Crest at the time (1:14).

BTW, this is the Miss USA competition where Academy Award winner Halle Berry finished as 1st RU.