OLTL Tribute Thread

[Khan]

Ugh, Badderly, lol.

[DRW50]

A promo at around 2 minutes and another around 2:45.

There are a few promos in the early minutes of this video:

 

Edited February 23 by DRW50

[Franko]

We're now up to the "Beef up The Banner" storyline that was talked about in at least one 1991 issue of Soap Opera Digest. I'll be curious if it actually goes anywhere, or if it's just filler for the end of the Rauch run.

[Vee]

I am counting the weeks til the big changeover.

[Cw3]

Rauch brought in Lee Ann and Jason characters? Seems like she was intended to be a love interest for Max and that fizzled out so fast. Wish they had done more with Yasmine Bleeth. She could have been a great complicated bad girl or a beloved heroine. 

[DRW50]

Jim Muneco uploaded some OLTL videos. A few episodes were already up at present but I'm not sure these were (one is a Soapnet airing).

 

Edited March 21 by DRW50

[DRW50]

They also just uploaded a number of August 1981 episodes.

[Vee]

Rauch brought in Lee Ann. Not Jason. Mark Brettschneider was a Gottlieb hire.

[Khan]

In retrospect, Brettschneider/Jason seems almost like a prototype for what Roger Howarth/Todd would become.

[j swift]

He made ponytails on men de rigueur

[JamesF]

I've just finished my first journey to Llanview after hankering for some classic soap to get stuck into. I started from New Year's Eve 1992 and have just finished with January 1999 where episodes on You know where have stopped. I chose the jumping off point as I knew of the Linda Gottlieb shake up, Malone/Griffith bringing a different tone to the show and frankly, it felt like it would offer up my kind of soap.

The initial two years was just brilliant stuff and pushed the envelope hugely for 1990s daytime (and indeed is unapologetically socially progressive in a way that wouldn't land easily today...). As I expected, the quality took a directly downward trend up to the start of 1999 but there was something even then that kept me coming back.

The good

• Probably not too surprisingly, the Dorian/Viki story from Lord of the Banner, on through the murder trial, the Joey affair, the start of the alters. Erika Slezak has that Susan Flannery quality of being mesmerising and genuinely scary when she does anger. The scenes of Viki/Dorian going at it in the crypt are now among my favourites of soap history. 
• Marty's rape. I can't see any show now doing this initial story with the level of frank brutality. The animosity between Todd/Marty months afterwards was uncomfortable but compelling with both Howard and Haskell giving really great performances.
• Nora (until 1998 or so). Such a total breath of fresh air. HBS felt like she was made for the role and I loved how fully formed the character was with her foibles, ambition, ethics, family dynamics (both Hanen and Gannon) etc. It was sad to watch her gradually become such a neurotic, generic soap stereotype and I think probably felt the shift from Pam Long's arrival. The Georgie murder into Rappaport arrivals painted her as, frankly, really clingy and pretty [!@#$%^&*] dumb. Flashes of OG Nora remained but not nearly enough.
• The Gannons. Another breath of fresh air on soap and the reality of what it meant for Nora/Hank to be married in the 1970s and how Rachel reacted to her upbringing was very well written. I also thought Valerie Pettiford was streets ahead of her replacement as Sheila. The character brought something grounding to the show but while Nora became annoying, Sheila just seemed to dilute down into irrelevance.
• Maybe controversially but Mia Korf was far preferable to me as Blair than KDP. I bought her as the survivor and a vixen who had sex with Max on her wedding dress before marrying Asa. KDP...I dunno...the period I've seen of her I find her too much. I can tell she's a talented actress but Blair leaves me cold.
• Kevin/Joey. Recasts abounded through the 1990s but Nathan Fillion brought a magnetism and star quality to Joey. His chemistry with Kevin Stapleton as Kevin was goofy fun. There was a really fun scene of them together after Kevin had been stabbed and it brought a lightness to things that soon disappeared (not least with the next dual recast...)
• Drew - the Victor Browne version. I don't know what went wrong here. I thought the first iteration of the character was intriguing, sexy and clearly had great history to draw on. Then he got turned into an out and out villain, booted out and replaced with an inferior actor and another personality transplant. A waste.

The bad

• There was some great writing and performances in Viki's DID storyline. But it went too far and was just dragged out too long. Elements being played for laughs, Viki's family idiotically missing some fairly obvious signs and Dorian goading the alters...not for me.
• Carlo/Alex - I didn't get it and I don't get Alex. It often felt like she/they were part of a different show that was spliced in with OLTL. Tonja Walker could do camp and had some fun lines (there was some funny sparring between her and Renee over a portrait going up at The Palace) but it felt way too broad for an otherwise sophisticated show. The Mortimer story was particularly wtf.
• The aftermath of the rape. Todd...I don't know what to say here. The character was watchable for me throughout but the evolution into main character, Lord brother, sought after damaged soul, abuse victim... it felt contrived and manipulative. Equally the bizarre twist of Powell Lord becoming a serial rapist in response to his own guilt.
• Patrick. I could barely watch him and can't believe that was how Marty evolved. The dreadful accent, typical stereotypes of Ireland being some misty backwater, Men of 21 nonsense. Hated all of it.
• Armitage family - this was a shame as Maggie starts to have some traction toward the end of the run but they were a strange bunch of characters and it was not an interesting story.
• Cord, to me, was absolutely wasted throughout the period. I know he was a central part of the show's success in the 1980s and enjoyed what I saw of him but he really came off as a loser. It felt like a waste of the actor.
• Andy. This was Patrick level stuff for me. What a boring, simpering, wet lettuce of a character.

I only broadly tracked where stories fell in the shift of writers but 1995 felt like Griffith/Malone were running out of ideas and in 1996 after they had gone, everything became dumbed down. For example, Andrew was written as a boring nag to facilitate Cassie's attraction to Kevin instead of this being a well crafted story (I have nothing against the concept but it was badly written). Dorian becomes a clown. Maybe Strasser liked leaning into that side of Dorian, I don't know, but either way the writing left little choice.

Labine stuff just doesn't hit the mark. The Cramer women history was too derivative of Viki's parental drama. If Lord of the Banner was HBO, this was Lifetime.

It also started the shift towards darkness with Georgie that just then takes over the whole show with Barbara, Drew's death and Cassie going off the deep end. Not to mention the ridiculous Nora/Sam story. Leaving Llanview in January 1999, it seems a very depressing and mean spirited place compared to my entry point in 1993. Bo propping his son's corpse up in bed while Nora wails behind the locked door and Todd uses it as a comedy headline. Bizarre.

I'm now moving on to some GL but if 1999 onwards is available and I'm just being dim, please drop me a PM! Quality descent aside, the show hooked me in.

[Khan]

You're not alone there, @JamesF, lol.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about '90's OLTL!  I'm sure @Vee in particular will look forward to reading them.

[Vee]

I do appreciate them! And FWIW, Malone was fired/left in March of '96. I think everything from then til '98 or so was the show drifting on autopilot, cruising on the glories and supercouples (even variable ones like Patrick/Marty and Antonio/Andy, both of whom I loved as a kid but I can see issues with the latter especially in recent rewatching) of the Malone/Gottlieb era. It wasn't til JFP came in that people thought the show got supercharged with buzzy stories like the Georgie Phillips mess, and that's what brought me back from a bored period of non-watching when Bob Woods and Hillary B. Smith gave an interview gushing about their new storyline (in which Georgie falsifies video evidence of an affair with Bo). Of course, as we would all soon discover, viewers and actors alike (HBS tried to get killed off by the end of '98 re: the ONS with Sam), JFP was far from the next great hope for the show.

I am deep in the summer of '93 atm rewatching the Spring Fling saga and it absolutely holds up. I haven't seen it like this since it first aired, as I started watching not long after the rape. I will say I think '95 is definitely Malone in operatic excess by comparison but most of it (especially the DID story) still really works for me, even if every third or fourth scene in some of the B or C-storylines is a bit too hokey or too earnest. The Patrick and Marty saga is definitely a product of its time (and of the Irish craze in American media/film in the early-mid '90s) but aside from the unbearable Brown Penny poem I still have time for the swooning romanticism of a fair amount of it. There is a purity and a flavor to the show in those years that is specific and unique; you know you're not getting it anywhere else on the dial.

I do think what I've seen of Mia Korf is exceptional, and unbelievable in that there has not been before or since so far as I know an AAPI lead that prominent and well-defined on any soap opera in America to this day. She is great. I'll always love KDP's Blair for who she is but it's a shame and a sin what happened. Were OLTL back today I would find a place for Korf (who still looks great) in a role specifically tied to Blair and tied into that switch in a metatextual way, to right that wrong and add a new family.

Edited March 22 by Vee

[Khan]

"Unbearable" doesn't begin to describe that [!@#$%^&*].  It's become my "NIAGARA FALLS!".

[Vee]

I watched the episode with their first love scene (plenty hot) again recently, and midway through that voice-over I thought 'okay, it's bad but it's over.' I was wrong! It had two more stanzas or whatever at least. Imagine hearing the full run of that for two years.