All My Children Tribute Thread

[Khan]

I don't know what to say to all that...except those critics can go [!@#$%^&*] themselves.

[Khan]

Yes. And if they don't (anymore), then they should. A soap opera must treat its audience with the utmost respect and intelligence. We know some creative license must be taken. That's why we have SORAS'ing. But these shows need(ed) to be consistent about it. If Kendall was born before Charlie and Tad, then AMC needed to acknowledge that, regardless of how old Charlie and Tad were on the show or how old they would have been without SORAS'ing.

[Kylie]

^You might say they do, but AMC disagreed and that's a HUGE part of what went wrong, IMO. Josh was younger than Kendall, but he still should been considerably older than me.

[Khan]

Agree. When AMC began regarding their fans as idiots who will swallow any story, that's when the party was over.

[All My Shadows]

SORASing should have been stopped a LONG time ago. This "fiddling with numbers to make characters the right age" bullsh!t is so illogical. So if GL didn't have Alan-Michael in his 20s in 1993, there would have been absolutely no male 20-somethings in Springfield?

And let's not act like SORAS is some new, modern soap evil. It's been making things ridiculous since the 1960s (looking at yall, Paul and Dan Stewart).

Edited December 12, 2011 by All My Shadows

[Khan]

Actually, I regard SORAS'ing as a necessary evil in soaps, but I definitely see your point. I just ask that ages be consistent, for lack of a better word. Don't tell me Kendall and Josh are decades younger than Charlie and Tad when I know that ain't so!

[Khan]

As crazy as this sounds, ladies and gentlemen, Kendall should have been played by someone in the same age range as Hillary B. Smith (soon-to-be-ex-Nora, OLTL) and Josh by someone as old as, say, Ben Browder ("Farscape").

[R Sinclair]

My problem with SORAS'ing is when they start mining stories from the character's SORAS'd childhood. In real time, we knew that JR spent 85% of his time with Dixie (and Tad by proxy), yet we're hearing all of these tales of how horrible it was for JR -- now an adult in his mid-20s by the time Jacob Young took over -- to grow up as Adam Chandler's son. It's like, WHEN THE HELL DID ANY OF THIS HAPPEN?! I was THERE for JR's childhood. "Junior" was with Dixie all the time. JR only spent the last 18 months of high school with Adam after Dixie's first death. Yet, somehow, after JR's SORAS'd from 17 to 25 in just five months, we're being told Adam's been grooming and conditioning JR for years and all of his malfunctions are due to Adam being a horrible father and yadda, yadda, yadda... It's like, why didn't you people WRITE that to begin with? Don't write Dixie and Adam as being able to respectfully co-parent Junior for his entire childhood... and then, basically say, "Guess what?! Adam was secretly horsewhipping Junior all those years."

However, I think the Bianca SORAS-ing was done properly. None of 16 year old+ Bianca's storylines were based on rewritten aspects of her onscreen childhood. Pretty much everything tracked.

I use both JR and Bianca as examples because they were born around the same time (late 80s) and yet their SORAS-ing was handled completely different.

[Khan]

Agree.

Re: Bianca -- I think it helped to have Bianca off-screen, living in Seattle with Travis, Barbara, Molly and Sean, for much of her childhood. We didn't see her as often as we did "Junior." So, unless they wanted to suggest something truly awful, like Travis molesting her, I think the writers could have included any tidbits from her childhood and no one would have been able to protest.

[SFK]

I also agree about Junior, the cute little curly-haired kid was ALWAYS with Dixie and good-natured. When Jesse McCartney took over, I do remember them giving him a snarky, "I'm Adam Chandler's son!" line once, which was sort of an, "Oh boy, here we go..." moment for me. But I guess that was just meant to be an moment. I was in college and didn't watch the show much while Junior was recast I guess twice after that pre-Jacob young, but from what I gather, the jerkiness didn't start until Babe cheated on him.

[Khan]

I still remember when David Canary had to play Ray Gardner in JR's nightmares.

[SFK]

Let alone being Erica Kane's daughters, Bianca and Kendall had no shortage of storyline possibilities given their upbringings outside of Pine Valley (Bianca, with two character we were already familiar with).

[ellabelle]

My main objection to Bianca as a child vs. Bianca as a teen and adult is that Bianca was seriously rocking the "I'm Erica Kane's daughter, and I'm a spoiled brat" attitude in the early/mid 90s when she was played by Gina Gallagher, and I loved how that Bianca interacted with Kendall. To me that was totally in keeping with the same little preschool-age Bianca who wanted her Mommy and Daddy to be together and who set her dollhouse on fire when she saw Erica kissing Uncle Jack.

The Bianca who came back to Pine Valley in 2000 played by Eden Riegel was the anti-Erica - unglamorous, laid back, sweet, quiet, and pretty much unlike the Bianca we'd seen before. We saw shades of the old Bianca the night Travis died when she screamed and cried and yelled at Erica and Jack, but for the most part, she was a fairly different character. Agnes Nixon has said that she'd planned for some time for Erica's daughter to be gay. My personal take on it is that the writers knew they had an uphill battle getting the audience to accept Erica Kane's daughter as gay, and they couldn't have her be gay AND a total b*tch, so they made her the nice one. And honestly, I think it kind of worked because they brought Kendall back shortly thereafter to be the b*tchy one, but then they made Kendall nice too.

As for Bianca's life in Seattle, I feel massively cheated. TPTB did a good job continuing to occasionally show Barbara and Travis after they moved, but I really got the impression that there was a lot of good story potential there that we never saw. Travis admitted during Bianca's anorexia that he still loved Erica and he wanted to hurt her for choosing Jack over him. When Sean came to town, that story was furthered when he later told Colby about fights that his parents had over his dad and Erica and how Barbara cheated on Travis. I wish that had all been able to develop on camera.

[SFK]

A glamorous bitchy lesbian could have been a lot of fun and I've actually suggested in the past that Bianca date an older woman like that, perhaps a rival cosmetics exec of Erica's.

I don't like how they nicened up Kendall either, and I felt that was more in response to Greenlee already occupying that spot.

Gina Gallagher was a very convincing spoiled brat, she always had that look on her face like something stank. You left out transitional Bianorexica, that's where we saw the real change to Bianca as sweet, unglamorous, and un-Erica.

Edited December 12, 2011 by SFK

[ellabelle]

See, I think Lena had the potential to be a glamorous bitchy lesbian, but then they had to make her all nice and sweet too. Dear Daytime Television: we like our bitches, both straight and gay. Being gay does not mean a character has to also be super nice.

I did leave out Bianorexica because um, honestly, I wasn't watching the show very often then, and no one has posted those episodes on you tube yet, so I really couldn't comment fairly on it. My opinion on that Bianca consists primarily of "gee I'm so going to hell for thinking this" thoughts that 1) the poor child's nose was enormous and 2) it can't have been good for either Gina or Nathalie Paulding's self esteem to know that the role was re-cast primarily because Nathalie was very, very skinny.