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Retconning: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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15 hours ago, Franko said:

That's one reason why I like the fakeouts, like Don Murray's three-episode run in Season 3 of Knots. 

 

I do like those as well. Murray's exit must have been such a huge shock back then, especially since he did survive a few episodes following that dive.

 

15 hours ago, Khan said:

 

Whoops.  I must've misread or -heard the information.  Sorry, YRBB!

 

Yeah, cutting out the music-oriented scenes from KNOTS episodes would be next to impossible.  Music was so integral to its storytelling, beginning with Lisa Hartman, and continuing through the Latham/Lechowick years.  In fact, I still remember when Danny -- oh, wait, YRBB, you might not be that far yet in your watching. ;)

 

No worries!! There's a still or two of Alexis being crowned out there. We never knew if it was her coronation or a dream, but it was certainly filmed and dumped when the show retooled (for the much, much better....).

 

It's not like you could even cut the singing scenes on KNOTS. Lots of times there were montages, or whole scenes in which characters made decisions/the plot moved. So getting rid of all of that would make for an incomprehensible show almost. Thanks for remembering I'm still watching haha... not sure what you're referring to, so I likely haven't seen it yet. ;)

 

15 hours ago, Khan said:

REALLY??  OMG.  If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: JER had no business being a HW of any show.

 

To be fair, though, 1st era JER (crazy and insane as it got) is vastly different from 2nd era.... for what that's worth!

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It would be really hard to cut the Ciji songs, or the first season of Cathy songs.  They were central to the plot, other characters and I don’t want them to be cut lol.

 

Once she started singing on Joshua’s show, some of those I would be okay with not seeing again.

 

Shout Factory did a good job with WKRP, but there were a couple of glaring omissions due to the fees.  Pink Floyd I’m looking at you.

  • Member
22 hours ago, Franko said:

Lady Ashley Mitchell, the photojournalist played by Ali MacGraw. At least Luke Fuller (Billy Campbell), Steven's boyfriend, got to have a dying scene. Lady A only got what turned out to be a death scene. The terrorists attack, she starts photographing the carnage and former boyfriend Jeff is caught in the line of fire as he tries getting her to stop. 

 

And not even that, actually. It’s clearly a body double, not Ali MacGraw. 

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  • Member

This is a thread about the good, the bad, and ugly of retconning. Please stay on topic. 

  • Member
45 minutes ago, mikelyons said:

This is a thread about the good, the bad, and ugly of retconning. Please stay on topic. 

 

The retcon thread has been retconned! :P

  • Member

Y&R

Katherine Chancellor was some dynamic businesswoman who ran Chancellor Industries for years.

 

Carl Williams mysteriously deserted his family causing great angst for years until he tuned up with amnesia.

  • Member
2 hours ago, mikelyons said:

This is a thread about the good, the bad, and ugly of retconning. Please stay on topic. 

 

Instead of telling the rest to stay on-topic, why not use that post to, you know, say something pertinent to the topic?

 

Also, since when do SON post-ers ever complain about a thread not staying on topic?

  • Member

Does it count as a retcon if a character portrayal was never fully expressed? For example, Passions quickly (within the first few weeks?) switched Julian from a credible businessman to round-the-clock horndog. I thought Ben Masters did well with what he was given, but oh, what could have been.

  • Member
48 minutes ago, Franko said:

Does it count as a retcon if a character portrayal was never fully expressed? For example, Passions quickly (within the first few weeks?) switched Julian from a credible businessman to round-the-clock horndog. I thought Ben Masters did well with what he was given, but oh, what could have been.

Every year PASSIONS retconned what you saw and heard the previous year. 

  • Member

Passions alone could dominate this topic.

 

For instance, when Fancy first debuted.. it was said she and Pretty had been traveling the world partying it up like the Hilton sisters.. and Fancy had to return to Harmony while Pretty continued partying.

 

Then a year or two later, it was retconned that Pretty and Fancy had never liked one another... and that Fancy caused Pretty to be deformed.

  • Member

On RH, we had the retcon of Faith's resentment towards Jill being created to bolster the Frank/Jill/Faith story.

One retcon that bugged me at the time was on GL with Jenna. She, Harley and Phillip were trying to get the goods on Jenna's husband, Geoffrey Morgan, and Harley was pretending to be "Starla". At one point, Jenna had to distract Geoffrey from discovering Harley. She managed to do this without having to sleep with him, and said as much to Harley later. And there was no sex scene shown, as would be typical for a soap. However, later, the story became that she did have to sleep with Geoffrey and conceived Rocky in the process.

  • Member

Sloppy one — Carly on ATWT started having flashbacks of Iris saying, “What have you done to my beautiful boy?”

 

this was already a retcon. When TPTB decided to take Jennifer Landon”s short term role as Gwen and make it permanent, they made her Carly’s sister and the beautiful baby boy became a girl.

 

so what was already a retcon got quickly retconned.

 

or it was just bad writing. Obviously it wasn’t originally meant to be Gwen, but idk what the original plan was. This was also at the same time the HW switched from Sheffer to Passanante.

 

An example of a good retcon IMO was KL’s Lilimae having a younger son, Joshua, that she had abandoned. It actually made what had already happened between Lilimae/Chip more interesting.

 

A retcon is almost never a good thing. When it happens, it should serve to enrich what we’ve already seen. The vast 95+% of examples fail this simple test.

Edited by juppiter

  • Member
On 5/22/2018 at 10:31 PM, YRBB said:

 

Still, it's the music rights. Unless KL was a massive seller (thus providing WB incentive to spend big), they will likely never get through that hurdle.

 

Hartman sings as Ciji and Cathy on camera many, many, many times throughout seasons 4-7. It's not like you can even replace the music with something else, unless you butcher the episodes by cutting the scenes out. Which is impossible.


The music. that was the same reason why WKRP took so long to come to DVD. they have a ton of music rights to get past, and many of the songs, just the 3-5 seconds they played, had to be edited over with generic music.

On 5/23/2018 at 10:05 PM, Khan said:

 

Instead of telling the rest to stay on-topic, why not use that post to, you know, say something pertinent to the topic?

 

Also, since when do SON post-ers ever complain about a thread not staying on topic?


This. threads are supposed to evolve IMPO. this one has. we've had very little of posters telling someone they're wrong because they don;t agree with them, or this..."Stay On Topic." "We're not on topic!" "STAY ON TOPIC!"

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