ATWT Tribute Thread

[Paul Raven]

Brian was Mary's husband, Teddy was their son (actually Grant & Joyce's son). He turned up in the mid 90's as Ryder.

Pat Holland was John's 2nd wife.She died shortly after the wedding.

Margaret Porter was played by Kathleen Noone before she went to AMC as Ellen.

[DRW50]

Thanks. So Pat wasn't the kidnapper then. Poor Pat -- sometimes I forget that in the 60s 70s there were all the devoted and unrequited loves of the various leading men or damaged men.

I forgot about Ryder's real name. That was such wasted potential...imagine Joyce coming back to Oakdale and wreaking havoc, especially since the show was so dull in 1996 and 1997.

[Paul Raven]

Pat indeed was the kidnapper. She was in love with John and was manipulated by him into going ahead with the kidnapping.

[DRW50]

These scenes with Craig being roughed up in prison don't seem much like Marland at all. It's more like some kind of campy Rauch or Tomlin type of thing. I guess at least it was an excuse to show Scott Bryce's fit bod.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CHMrYm-4T0&feature=related

[All My Shadows]

I believe he was introduced by way of Susan and her alcoholism. They were both boozy lushes and got along real well because of it. I believe Kevin died because of his drunk driving, and Susan left Oakdale not long after.

[DRW50]

Oakdalian has posted some great stuff from Nancy and Mac's 1988 wedding. It's such an inspiring storyline, and also the last time you will see that era of the extended Hughes family (Don, Penny, Amy, with a cameo from Julianne Moore as Frannie).

I don't think you can embed that, but this is a clip from the 1986 Thanksgiving episode. The scene where Tom holds his baby brother, after Margo had recently had a miscarriage, will break your heart. Not difficult to see why Gregg Marx won an Emmy the next year.

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This is when they see the empty nursery

[Mitch]

Marland was so good at having a group of people "talking,"...the soaps just havent done that in the last ten years (watching Carly and Jack have the 18 millionth convo about their relationship, alone, in a room, with no other contact with people in their "storyline," bores me to tears.) You also get the feeling that Kim, Lisa and Nancy were actually making Thanksgiving dinner. It seemed "real," and also fantasy (the nice family that lives in a beautifull kitchen that is never mess, despite the fact they are cooking and everyone in town comes and goes.) Soaps, especially the P& G ones went so "trailer trash," in the last ten years, espeically GL during the Wheeler years.. Reva looking sweaty and living in a dive, walking around with her flabby arms showing in a tank top...no thanks..I will take Kim in her pearls!) I love this part of the John Dixon evolution, when he wasnt the town villain but the town crank..giving jabs to everyone (especially love the John/Lisa squabble) then Marland had to go hook him up with Iva Snyder and he became just as dull and sanctimonous as she was.

Also, there is a feeling in these scenes that you just couldnt get now, its as if these people are reacting naturally to each other as if they had known each other for years, which the actors have delt with each other for years. You can't get that with recasts and newbies.

Greg Marx' Tom sigh...if only we knew we were about to get in the next guys boring, stiff, and unsexy Tom.

[DRW50]

The "talking" is what hooked me on ATWT. I loved seeing people just have conversations, and I loved when you had a large gathering when so many different subplots would be going on. Like the parties for Nancy and Mac the night before their wedding, you'd have Paul worried about his father contacting him, Jessica worrying about Duncan kissing her, Tom worrying about Hal finding out he was Adam's biological father, Lyla and Margo learning that Emily was Craig's lover.

What I also loved about ATWT then was that because most people were generally very low-key, that meant when they did explode, it was even more powerful, you knew the stakes were high. Now on soaps it's just high drama all the time and who really cares?

I was never much of a Lily/Holden fan, but these clips have some moments of the classic late 80s/early 90s era I haven't seen anywhere else on Youtube, like Holden pulling a gun on Josh, and some of the riveting scenes where Lily found out about all the lies surrounding Holden's mugging and Aaron's conception. The second clip also has a bit of those beautiful scenes where Holden sees Lily in Malta.

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[Mitch]

Very true, I used to get kind of annoyed that everyone was so low-key, but it is more natural. I guess it really was the low key plus the fact that everyone was so damn polite all the time...which is not a bad world to live in. The soaps now are all about such hightened melodrama that the characters quickly become caricatures, monotonous and boring. It used to be that there would be a few drama queens per soap (Lisa, Lucinda, Reva, Blake, etc.) but now EVERYONE has to scream at the top of their lungs about the LOVE OF THEIR LIVES or revenge or something..that the audience considers them "boring," if they dont (I always thought that about Rick and Mel on GL, they were the normal couple on the show, not lighting any fires in chemstry, etc, which made them seem real, but people on the boards would talk about how boring they are..they just wanted to see Reva scream BUD over and over again.)

I just look at that scene of people talking in the kitchen and I think about soaps now, and how they would never spend time on actually creating dialogue for someone like the Nancy and John interaction concerning the coffee.. (loved Nancy nagging Lisa about the Earl thing, but come on, Kim and Nancy, Lisa is right, Thanksgiving dinner is not the time to discuss something like menopause...geez!!) They better give Lisa a big scene for Nancy's memorial, the Nancy/Lisa push/pull, disapproving but loving mother/rebelious but loving daughter relationship has been one of the most unique relationhips in soaps. )

Never was a big Lily/Holden fan...just have a settlemental attachement for yelling at Lily for the last 25 years..and now they even took that away, no one makes me want to give a good old bitch slap more then Martha Burn's Lily...but I forgot how young she looked back then compared to Hensley. I never thought that was weird back in the day but Lily looks like a fat little girl in love with a porny looking guy. All the vets look great still, LH looks almost the same and Hays looks exactley the same except for the gray hair.

[DRW50]

I couldn't believe the clip where Lily stumbled upon Holden in his tightey whities!

Sorry if you've already seen this but this is when Bob and Kim tell Sabrina about how she came to be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNvTKnTooKU&feature=related

When you watched this story at the time, the Frannie/Sabrina stuff, what did you think of it? I wish I could see more of it, very little is available. I also wish they'd done more with Sabrina. Supposedly she was created because Julianne Moore was going to be fired as someone didn't think she was attractive enough to be Frannie, so Marland created Sabrina to show her versatility and I guess to make Frannie look more attractive by comparison. Still, the amount of history in this story and the divisions (in clips from this episode, Margo is barely speaking to John and Barbara is very guarded around Bob and Kim), it had the potential to go on for years.

[DRW50]

This is a scene from early 1985, not long before the final Bob and Kim reunion, where she confesses her duplicity to him. How did Kathryn Hays never get an Emmy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdbQNd0Wu6E&feature=related

[Mitch]

I was watching at the time. Forgive me for repeating this but I always thought they should have made Sabrina a trashy slattern..smoking cigarettes, drinking and generally causing Kim to clutch her pearls in consternation..kind of like Wendy Moniz Dinah was for Vanessa..( I know people hated Moniz but thought she was great..) Sabrina was just...boring...we didnt need another, nice, quiet, forgiving person in the Hughes family, we needed someone to shake things up. Add to that the triangle she was in was not the most exciting on earth, Frannie Seth (snore) and Sabrina, all looked like nice, normal cute people who were uh, nice and normal. It was incredibly hard to believe that anyone would have been turned on by Sabrina, (though it would have been cool if they did a Sonni/Solida thing and have the librian like Sabrina go around picking up men in bars and screwing them when Bob and Kim were home counseling the latest person needing "honesty," in their relationship.

That clip just showed how boring Sabrina was ("Uh, Sabrina, I was screwing both your mother and your aunt at the same time, as a matter of fact, your mom was a big horn dog after my ass so she followed me down to Florida to do the dirty, and do the dirty we did..so, we were told you were dead so we went on with our lives with our little princess Frannie and you, well, you had to wear glassess and read a lot and live where it was overcast most of the time." Sabrina, "Oh, I see...jolly good story and we all make our mistakes chaps..shall we move on from here?")..Talk about a let down of dramatic potential!

Good clip of Hayes, and very interesting that they laid the groundwork for Sabrina before Marland came on board. Imagine soaps now talking about what happened 20 years before!!!

[Jay]

Who's the guy in the blue shirt (0:23-0:42) who would "kill for a cigarette"? And is that Janice Maxwell he's talking to?

[DRW50]

Yes that's Janice. I wonder if this is when she was turning evil. The guy is just someone who worked at WOAK I think.

[DRW50]

This is such a great, natural scene between Frannie and Casey, after her breakup with Seth. Both Julianne and Mary Ellen Stuart knew how to play Frannie as a decent person who still wasn't a sugary, self-righteous, or plaster saint. ATWT desperately needed that type of heroine in the mid and late 90s.

That Taylor really was dull. I wonder if it was intentional.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJOWDGP44do&feature=related