GH: Classic Thread

[DRW50]

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[victoria foxton]

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[titan1978]

Hulu has a classic holiday 2005 episode up.  So many great characters shown, Alan reading the Christmas story.

 

Greg Vaughn’s Lucky was wasted during his run on the show.

[titan1978]

How did I not remember that Terry Brock was on the show all the way to 1990?  She was there for 6 years!  I remembered her of course, but not that she was there that long.

 

Some classic Bobbie and Lucy fights.  They really do not like each other.

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Watch when Lucy shows up.  Amy follows the drama from the Nurses Station and that smile on her face in the background is so great!

[Soaplovers]

I've always wondered... were Robert/Anna really that popular of a couple?  I know when I was a kid back in 1991, Soap Opera Digest were running stories about how the couple reunited and were married in a nice elegant wedding in the summer of 1991 that Faison tried to crash.  

 

However, I've always believe that the two were just thrown together due to the writers not knowing what to do with them vs the reuniting and wedding being organic.  If I can recall, wasn't Robert more popular with Holly (I know my mom was pro Robert/Holly in the 80s with Anna as a potential spoiler)... and his pairings with Cheryl/Katherine were more embraced than any with Anna.  And of course, Anna/Duke were the tortured couple you were rooting for to get together with Robert as an early spoiler than Olivia being a more dangerous spoiler.

 

Am I off base in this?

[victoria foxton]

I remember that Anna & Robert were hastily thrown together in early 1991. It wasn't well done. I liked Robert more with Holly, Cheryl and Katherine. Liked Anna way better with Duke. Your not off base. 

[titan1978]

I also preferred Robert with Holly.  And back in the day, Duke and Anna were one of my favorite couples.

 

I think Robert/Anna had chemistry, and I didn’t hate them together.  It just seemed to me that the time had kind of passed to move them into a couple.

 

I loved Cheryl.  Never could stand Katherine.

[j swift]

Poor Anna had spent 1990 dating duds (Casey the Alien and Edge Jerome) and Robert was dating clingy women who were not exactly his type.  So, by 1991, it seems like they were the best each other could get at the time. 

[BetterForgotten]

I have to wonder if Robert/Anna only had a sustaining impact purely because of Robin and not because of their own relationship. 

[Wendy]

I love(d) Robert/Anna, personally. I'd guess it all comes down to the usual personal preferences. But they did appear on enough covers which makes me think enough did like them or they would not have repeated that, etc. But who knows?

 

And considering what Anna is reduced to now, Robert looks even better.

[titan1978]

They had some heat.  The flashbacks when she arrived showing their relationship were really well done, and they really sold that first wedding, considering we didn’t really know Anna at all.

 

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As a viewer I just felt they waited too long to pair them.  Instead of Duke 2 (which I actually enjoyed when it was airing), that was when they should have been paired.   But again, I was not a fan of Katherine, so I feel like Robert was kind of floundering relationship wise then too.

 

One of my favorite scenes on GH of all time is Robert calling Anna boring, and she pays him back by tying him up and leaving him all hot and bothered.

[titan1978]

Watching the classic New Year’s Eve episode on Hulu.  A couple of things stand out-

 

Tony.  This was when I had pretty much decided I hated Tony.  He had never been my favorite, but he was sliding into his insufferable breakdown that dragged on for years.  By the time he was written out I wasn’t upset at all.

 

The playing of all the beats.  Seeing Monica explain the surgery to Jason, make a phone call looking for Alan, Jason talking to an unconscious Carly, Tony and Bobbie speaking about BJ.  It’s the one thing soaps have going for them all of them don’t do anymore, the daily interactions and small moments around the stories.

 

I forgot about Brenda’s breakdown.  A low point for the character.  It wasn’t Vanessa’s high point as an actress on the show either.

 

Billy Warlock is maybe one of the all time miscasts on this show.  Of course, neither Labine or Guza write with a point of view or strong pairing in mind for him.

[victorlord75]

I likewise caught this episode on Hulu, and I had not seen the episode when it had originally aired.  While I do agree about the episode "playing all the beats", for me, the biggest surprise was how bored I actually was with the episode overall.  Somehow, whenever I thought of Wendy Riche's tenure on the show, I always remembered it as an era filled with great warmth and respect for characters that viewers really wanted to see.  Watching this episode sort of reminded me that in some ways, I have idealized the past much more than I had thought.  However, to be fair, by this time, Labine was gone as HW and Guza, Jr. was in, and I was never a big fan of his storytelling.  The only "big story" he wrote that I can say I really liked was his re-activation of the Luke/Laura rape story, but not much else.

[OldGHFan]

 

I know there are some die-hard Robert & Anna fans.  And if you started watching GH in 1990 or 1991, I can see why you would be an R&A fan.  But I started watching GH in 1977 and I saw the real-life magic of both Robert & Holly and Duke & Anna play out.  They were the supercouples.  GH was the #1 soap when both those couples were the top GH couple.  Created by Gloria Monty, both couples had that magnetic magic.  For sure, Tristan and Finola have chemistry, but I like them so much more as bickering exes.  Plus, I think the "Robin" thing helped cement them as a couple.  But IMO, they never were a supercouple.  There wasn't that much of a story.  They were two individual extremely popular characters that had chemistry.  They just didn't have that romantic chemistry that R&H and D&A had in spades.

[Planet Soap]

Awesome thread.

 

Personally GH as a soap was never "unwatchable". Even in it's worst periods you could still sit through an episode. The show was probably strongest from '78-'82 and again from '93-'00. Even the early Phelps era (01-04; later the Metro Court Crisis ) was still watchable and light years ahead of what we have now.