@DRW50 Wow.. blast from the past!

This was still being written using Marland's outlines, since he had passed away not too long before this episode aired.

Some thoughts:

• Aunt Mary.. I had forgotten Lisby Larson was on this soap, and she had a nice rapport with Kirk. If I recall, it turns out she's Hutch's mom that had abandoned him and his father.

• Iva - I had forgotten she took Aaron and MJ and vanished after Holden found out he was Aaron's father. This was the start of the end of her relationship with John in retrospect.

• Hughes backyard.. I missed that set in later years

• Sharon.. I mean Debbie! And with much prettier hair and how I'd forgotten how expressive she was as a performer back in those days. I had forgotten she and Faux Linc hooked up

• Janice... I liked her.

• Holden/Lily/Damian was just getting started. I always wonder what Marland was planning for them.. would he have done what future writers did by keeping Lily with Damian instead of going back to Holden right away?

Thanks for your thoughts @Soaplovers

I found Debbie very annoying. So much so that I was pleasantly surprised at how much I immediately liked Sharon Case's work on Y&R. The good old days...

I don't think Marland would have seriously invested in Damian/Lily as a couple.

I wonder if Marland would have had any further plans for Aunt Mary. He spent some time building up everything with Hutch and Linc but it all falls apart after he's gone, due in part to the very poor Linc recast (I have no idea what went on there - even if Linc was now meant to be bad, he should have never been so weedy).

Really interesting watching an event episode like this that used nearly the entire cast. It makes me nostalgic for days when soaps had the budget to do this. Still, it's telling that the best scenes--the ones where, when watching out of context, it's easiest to care about the characters and their dramatic situation--come at the Hughes house.

At the ball, we get a lot of short, polite, small talk conversations that are boring enough to replicate an actual charity event. Thank god for Susan and Lucinda, as Susan's clear disdain for Royce, Lucinda's brief emotional moment with Lily, and her amused reaction to the Hutch/Evan fight are some of the liveliest moments in this episode. Although I liked the Linc/Debbie scene at the end, I was really struck by how bland the younger characters were, to the point where they almost seemed interchangeable.

I didn't get into ATWT until 2000, and when I briefly caught scenes from it in the mid-90s, it always seemed dull and impenetrable. Watching this episode now, I have a greater appreciation for what the show was doing well at the time--especially in its use of its veteran cast--but I'm also struck by how it provided very few compelling "points of entry" for new viewers, unlike Guiding Light, which hooked me almost immediately when I started watching it in 1994.

6 minutes ago, prefab1 said:

Really interesting watching an event episode like this that used nearly the entire cast. It makes me nostalgic for days when soaps had the budget to do this. Still, it's telling that the best scenes--the ones where, when watching out of context, it's easiest to care about the characters and their dramatic situation--come at the Hughes house.

At the ball, we get a lot of short, polite, small talk conversations that are boring enough to replicate an actual charity event. Thank god for Susan and Lucinda, as Susan's clear disdain for Royce, Lucinda's brief emotional moment with Lily, and her amused reaction to the Hutch/Evan fight are some of the liveliest moments in this episode. Although I liked the Linc/Debbie scene at the end, I was really struck by how bland the younger characters were, to the point where they almost seemed interchangeable.

I didn't get into ATWT until 2000, and when I briefly caught scenes from it in the mid-90s, it always seemed dull and impenetrable. Watching this episode now, I have a greater appreciation for what the show was doing well at the time--especially in its use of its veteran cast--but I'm also struck by how it provided very few compelling "points of entry" for new viewers, unlike Guiding Light, which hooked me almost immediately when I started watching it in 1994.

The young characters were definitely on the bland side at this time. The show tries to change this by bringing in Mike Kasnoff, but I thought he was very tiresome.

I too appreciate seeing so much of the cast mingling, but I would agree this is not a period which would be easy for new viewers to understand. The problem gets even worse by 1994 as the show completely grinds to a halt.

Marland's last few years were too big to be sustained. What hurt is no one really knew what he would have done to cut the fat (I'm sure he wouldn't have written out Iva).

Marland started to involve too many new characters Hutch/Linc/Debbie etc with no ties to the Hughes/Stewarts or even Snyders.

Later writers tried with Dani, Ryder etc to go back to young people connected to the core characters.