Is It Just Me?: Quirky Things Only Another Soap Fan Can Relate To

[P.J.]

 

 

I did too. I thought the entire last week struck just the right balance of nostalgia and reassurance that life goes on.

[will81]

Not entirely sure why, but weddings on soaps would always get me. The bigger ones felt like a holiday or like that feeling you get when summer is about to start. Just something special in the air.

 

 

[Darn]

 

Soaps don't do weddings people care about anymore. Remember when they were week long events the show had been building to for months? Couples you were rooting for and their wedding was the pay off? Now we have two millionaires having a commitment ceremony in a restaurant/bar.

[vetsoapfan]

 

Soaps used to make us wait FOREVER for our favorite couples to end up and the altar, and it made the event so much more exhilarating after years of anticipation. I waited a decade (literally ten years) to see Bill and Laura marry on DAYS, six years for Doug and Julie to marry on the same show. I miss those long-arc romances and emotionally satisfying pay-offs.

[Fevuh]

Got another one - B&B is a particular violation of this one, although most shows have done it at one time or another on B&B it's just a norm.  You can be married for a year, or two years, and have babies, and get an annulment.  No need for a divorce, you can get annulments everywhere, takes 1 day to process and get married the same week to someone else.  Stay married for 3 years, get an annulment, and go back to your former wife/husband and get married the same week. 

[Gray Bunny]

Is/Was it just me, or could you sometimes get certain background music cues stuck in your end?  I'm currently watching clips of DAYS circa '94 and '95 when they had some spectacular, well-remembered background cues and I find myself getting them stuck in my head, just as I did some 24 years years ago when I originally watched it.  I attribute this to my eventual habit of listening to classical music anytime I'd study for school, to give myself actual background music instead of the melodies stuck in my head (or perhaps I was just going crazy) 

[juppiter]

Dating myself here.... back in the day before the switch to digital (I think that was 10 years ago), you could hear channel 6 on FM radio station 87.7... for me, that was the local CBS affiliate. So I would sometimes listen to my soaps at the office on the radio.

[will81]

Yeah you are right, they don't even get close. They barely have the budgets that allow all the actors on contract to be in the same room, let alone a big event of any kind.

Yes. Y&R cues get in my head all the time. The funny thing is, I could watch classic Y&R on mute and know exactly what music cue they would be using

[YRfan23]

I have a habit of playing classic Y&R cues in my head too!

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[vetsoapfan]

 

I did that too, pre-VCR. It was fun!

[Fevuh]

I had a Sony "Watchman" that was a tiny TV - like 3 inch screen.  Had an antenna and looked like a radio.  I'd keep it face down while I was working and just listen.  If something exciting was happening and no one was around in the office, I'd pick it up really quick and watch the scene. 

 

Another quirky thing - courtroom scenes now are lame.  A Court case used to be like weddings - practically everyone on the show was there.  Now there's like 6 people in the room.  They don't bother with brining in extras, the courtrooms are smaller.  Not the same.  On Y&R recently when Victoria, Nikki, and Sharon were on trial, it's like...everyone on the show should be there and they weren't...looked thin. 

[vetsoapfan]

 

Decades ago, almost the entire cast would be in court for a trial, whether most of the actors had any dialogue or not. I remember one trial on Somerset, where there were, like, 18 contract player sitting in the gallery. TPTB would never spend that kind of money today.

[juppiter]

Something like Marley’s trial for shooting Jake (AW) or Reva’s trial for pushing Annie down the stairs (GL) are templates for how these things were done for decades on soaps.... everything else on the show screeched to a stop for big events like that. Btw— neither person was guilty. That is another American soap trope. If you see the trial, that means the person didn’t do it. 

[Bill Bauer]

Not necessarily. The murder trial of Meta Bauer was a huge story on GL and she actually did it. 

[Paul Raven]

Totally agree.

Nowadays there is this mentality that viewers won't invest or wait around too long.

Hence stories like Kyle marrying Summer on Y&R. The premise was ridiculous but the marriage took place. Mere months later it was over.In the good old days that storyline would have been explored and we would have seen the struggle between the two characters to make ago of it etc. at least a years worth of story.

That long term investment was what made soaps unique but TPTB have lost sight of that.