Dark Shadows=-->Best ABC Soap Opera of All Time or Classic?

http://www.tvofyourlife.com/images/jamesat15pic.jpg

I remember one flub my brother told me about where Frid said "Hollywood" instead of "Collinwood" and I guess the rest of the take was so brilliant they left it in.

It was live, IIRC. There were several US soaps that went out live as late as the mid-Seventies.

It looks like I will be writing about the Burton film; I suppose I should watch 2 or 3 episodes of this for b.g. It was huge when I was 7 years old, but I was incurious and probably never saw a whole ep.

I did the whole run-home-from-school thing for a while as a tike. The Monday-Friday serial aspect was a big part of the appeal. Viewed individually, the episodes are slow, clunky, and ultra-low-budget, but cumulatively, with story lines stretched over weeks and months, they managed to create some creepy effects.

I'm drawing a blank on other daily TV serials aimed at kids (as I assume DS largely was, after the first year or two) ... it reminds me of what I've read about some old radio series.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/74/conventions

The part of the episode where the Dark Shadows convention is covered is pretty entertaining. I wonder if people still have Dark Shadows conventions now.

btw Wiki has the show as "live-to-tape" (ie, no retakes) as opposed to live.

The film looks dreadful.

trailers don't mean shit, I've learned

i had a job for a couple years with a boss who was just obsessed with the show and talked about it constantly, had every episode on VHS, etc. it annoyed me at the time but now i kinda really want to see it.

Never knew that it was non-supernatural until several months after the debut.

i think the film looks pretty good and I've long since stopped being a burton fan. i dunno, the gimmick is amusing.

^^

The creepiest part of the show is the psychological torture/abuse that's constantly going on. For instance when Barnabas the undercover vampire abducts Maggie Evans and keeps her in a bare cell in his basement for two weeks while he tries to destroy her sense of identity and make her believe she's his wife from the 18th Century. And after she escapes with only shreds of her sanity left, Dr. Julia Hoffman hypnotizes her and erases all her memory of the event. Something like this happens all the time, characters having their mind split open by traumatic supernatural experiences only to then have their memories wiped clean by some unscrupulous character. In just one week of 1968 episodes I counted three such memory wipes. Another common scenario is when one half of a couple is falls under the hypnotic spell of a vampire or diabolical entity and starts acting weird all the time, which in turn exasperates and bewilders their partner to the point the partner loses their grip on reality.

In the case of young governess Victoria Winters it's astounding how clueless she is about realizing anything at all supernatural is going on around her, even after two years of dealing with the most bizarre developments one after another. I don't know why she doesn't take stock and think, "I had a normal life until I came to this town two years ago and since then everything's turned into a never-ending nightmare. Maybe I should think about moving."

The weak part of the show for me is how it never deals with ongoing effects of trauma. Characters always bounce right back from any sort of disturbing ordeal, experiences never have a cumulative effect. This makes the show seem psychologically false.

On the positive side most of the actors are very good, and the professionalism they show getting the episodes done on time with minimal to no tape editing, running between sets and changing costumes in real time, is impressive.

^ otm

in spite of its constant references to history and ancestors, the events of DS seem occur in a continuous, context-free present; hence the proliferation of alternative histories and identities, as well as the characters' invulnerability to trauma and retrospection

a magnificent achievement: https://darkshadowseveryday.com/

^ I've seen that blog, it is amazing