![[August 17, 1969] Got some zzz's after the heavy groups last night, woke up at dawn to morning maniac music! What a way to start the day! But I'm getting a little tired, maybe it's time to leave? Looks like it's gonna rain all day, maybe they'll cancel the rest of the acts](https://preview.redd.it/8fieor23bzjh1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=a984a2d0e8079171796024ce7b464612e2e26522)
"New-ish" Laredos. I don't wear these much, I try to keep at least one pair of boots in reserve for "formal wear." I think a job interview is formal enough, though.
I remember this ad getting a lot of play during the early 80s. For some reason, I associate it with the show "St. Elsewhere", as an ad that usually played during the breaks on that show.
I was young enough then that I didn't know who Marlene Dietrich was (whom the ad is referencing). I've never tried Hochtaler wine. Did anyone ever taste it?
As a member of Dingoes Ate My Baby, Oz has to play gigs which are mostly at night. That's not too bad, except that how does he justify to his band mates why he can't play at least three nights out of every month?
It doesn't seem to me that the band were at a level that they could turn down gigs if they got offered them, and certainly they had to occasionally have gigs that fell on full moon nights.
Did Oz just tell his band mates "Sorry guys, I'm a werewolf and I can't play gigs on full moon nights," which, admittedly, I could imagine him doing. But then it would just as easy to see the other members of the band telling him, "Sorry, dude. That sucks, the whole lycanthropy thing. But we need a guitarist who can play at any time. And Hoffmeyer [random background Buffyverse cool dude] is free. So.... see ya around."
So how did he deal with it? What did he tell his bandmates?
Do you have any memories, however vague, of storylines on soap operas that you'd swear you've seen, but can't seem to find any record of actually happening?
For example, I only casually watched All My Children (my main show was One Life to Live). But sometime in the 1980s, I'd swear there was a run of episodes in which Erica Kane was a racecar driver. Somehow, she was invested in a racecar and the driver got sick or waylaid somehow, so she drove it in some major race.
For some reason, I thought of that sequence and tried to find some evidence of it on YouTube but couldn't. I even looked at a fan site, Pine Valley Bulletin, that synopsized all her storylines but couldn't find any mention of it.
Did it actually happen? Or did I somehow dream that all up?
And does anyone else think they remember stories that may or may not have actually happened?
Pretty self-explanatory. I am told by customer service reps over the phone that I have to do a specific transaction at a branch office. All I can find are ATMs. The phone number and website only show ATMs. It must be a branch office with tellers and actual customer service reps.
If there are no branches in Austin, then does anyone know of branches in nearby cities? (Dallas, Houston)
My examples all come from horror movies because that's my favorite genre. But I'm sure there are plenty of examples from all genres. Anyway, what famous movies scenes / elements are actually themselves referrencing previous famous movies?
It Follows / Halloween - In both instances, our teenage heroine protagonist is sitting in the back row of a classrrom listening to an offscreen teacher lecture, and notice the film's boogeyman outside the window.
The Shining / Nosferatu - Kubrick patterned the image of Wendy ascending the stairway after the famous scene of Count Orlock's shadow ascending the stairway in the silent film.
Alien / Planet of the Vampires - In both films, a spaceship is lured to a seemingly dead world by a strange alert signal. In both films, some of the crew members discover an ancient derelict spaceship complete with the fossilized remains of a giant alien.
Lost Highway / Carnival of Souls - David Lynch freely admits he got the image of the weird pale-faced man for his movie from the early 60s drive-in classic.
What have you got?
Just recently moved and got all my pairs lined up.
Not just who got turned into a vampire, who's everybody who ever received a chomp on the neck and a little medieval blood-letting? I'm trying to make a list. In my current rewatch, I'm just up to the very start of Parallel Time. I've watched the 1840 storylines, though I don't remember much of them (don't worry about spoilers on my account). I know I must be forgetting a few names:
1967
Willie Loomis (Barnabas)
Lots of offscreen cattle (Barnabas)
Maggie Evans (Barnabas)
Carolyn Stoddard (Barnabas)
1795
Barnabas Collins (vampire bat)
Ruby Tate, a Collinsport street walker (Barnabas)
Josette DuPres Collins (Barnabas)
Millicent Collins Forbes (Barnabas)
1968
Vicki Winters (Barnabas)
Tom Jennings (Angelique)
Julia Hoffman (Tom Jennings)
Joe Haskell (Angelique)
Jeff Clark (Angelique)
Barnabas Collins - 2nd time! (Angelique)
Adam - technicality, when Barnabas got bit he got empathetic wounds (Angleique)
1897
Sandor Rakosi (Barnabas)
Charity Trask (Barnabas)
Dirk Wilkins (Barnabas)
Pansy Faye - original, NOT Nancy Barrett (Dirk)
Tim Shaw (Dirk)
Judith Collins (Dirk)
Rachel Drummond (Dirk)
1969/70
Audrey - technicality, only possibly happened (Barnabas)
Barnabas - 3rd time, 2nd time by a bat
Nelle Gunston (Barnabas)
Megan Todd (Barnabas)
Roger Collins (Megan)
Philip Todd (Megan)
Sky Rumson (Megan)
Parallel Time
Carolyn Loomis (Barnabas)
And by the core four, I mean the original four members of the family from the first week until the last episode (at least, the last episode set in the modern day) - Elizabeth, Roger, Carolyn and David.
It struck me recently that I cannot recall a single episode in which the core members were all in the same room at the same time.
In 1897, there were several scenes with Edward, Judith, Quentin & Carl bickering. I think there were a few scenes in 1795 when all the principal members of the era were altogether. But never, ever to my recollection has the modern-day family been all in one room together.
Episode 6 of "Seeds of Doom." After defeating the Man-eater of Surrey Green Krynoid, the Doctor offers to take Sarah-Jane on a beach holiday. Naturally, they wind up in Antarctica (which looks JUST like a British quarry) where the story all began.
And before they hastily depart (before Sarah-Jane dies of sudden shock of being WAY underdressed for Antarctica), the Doctor asks "Have we been here before, or... are we yet to come?" And they both burst out into hysterical laughter like this is the funniest quip that's ever been uttered in the history of BBC television. Sarah actually joins in and recites the line as well, like it's some kind of well-known catch phrase.
What am I missing here? Why do they think this line is so utterly hysterical? The way Sarah chimes in makes me think this is supposed to be a reference to some pop culture meme or something. Is it? Is it a reference to some British saying? I feel like there's something about this I'm not getting.
I swear I've heard this story before, but cannot remember who apparently said it. It was back in the golden era of Hollywood and one particular movie star was earning $300,000 a picture (equivalent to multi-millions nowadays).
A reporter tried to grill him about it, and asked: "What makes you think you're worth $300,000 a movie?"
The star reportedly didn't even bat an eye before answering: "Because I can get it."
I cannot for the life of me remember who said it, though. Does this story ring a bell with anybody else?
I really, really hate this kid.
I hate, hate, hate, HATE him!
Not in the way that the show WANTS me to hate him. I don't see him as an utterly evil unnameable force that will one day grow into the leader of the secretive race of Lovecraftian beings who will extinguish the human race. I just see him as an annoying brat who should have that snotty little smirk of his smacked off his face and then be shipped off to military school.
I try to be a little lenient to kid actors, especially when they're working in scenes with actors like Joan Bennett or Jonathan Frid who've had more years of experience & training than they've been alive. And actually, the kid isn't the worst actor in the world.
But Michael is just irritating! He's not scary. He's not intimidating in any kind of "Bad Seed" or "Village of the Damned" sort of way. He's just a petulant demanding brat. The sociopathic David Collins from the early DS episodes was a more menacing presence than this kid ever is. I've even begun to hate Philip and Megan Todd because they do nothing but argue about him now ("now" meaning the point I'm at in my re-watch.)
If not for the fact that I knew he's gone pretty quickly, he might actually be the one thing to make me stop watching the show.
The only good thing I can think of to say about him is at least he's not as annoying as the kid playing Alexander. And speaking of.... just how did Michael get rid of that ultra-thick Brooklyn accent that Alexander had!?
In one of her proudest achievements pre-Frasier, actress Mason got to bare her fangs on the gothic 60s daytime soap "Dark Shadows." Her part isn't very big. Just a day or two. She plays a floozy who runs afoul of the show's main vampire Barnabas on the town docks, then gets bit and shows up again as a bloodsucker.
Who cares about multiple Academy Award nominations when you get to chew up the scenery on daytime?
Wealthy priviledged elites - Dallas
Comfortably upper middle class - Family
Upwardly mobile - The Jeffersons
Lower middle class - One Day at a Time
Solidly blue-collar working class - All in the Family
Underclass, struggling - Good Times
Your workplace was your family - Mary Tyler Moore Show
Aimless loner - "A complete unknown with no direction home" - the Incredible Hulk
I mean, yeah he's a creep. But so handsome and charming, despite being so oily!
In my recent rewatch, I'm up to the first few weeks of the dreaded Leviathan storyline. Ironically, it seems like watching DS becomes much like the typical arc of a Lovecraft story: Some dreadful dire darkness is on the horizon. No matter what you do, an unnameable stygian horror will come to overwhelm your favorite show and plunge it into chaotic horror!
But anyway, maybe this is a hot take, but I don't think the Leviathan story is the catastrophe that it's usually made out to be. Yes, it's a letdown after the series highs of the 1897 storyline, but any story they ran after that story wrapped up was gonna pale in comparison.
Of course, everyone zeroes in on the Lovecraftian elements in the story, but I do think this story was influenced as much by "Rosemary's Baby" and the Italian giallo movement.
Polanski's film was a massive era-defining hit just a year earlier and would spawn a whole sub-genre of ripoff movies that lasted throughout the 1970s. It was also, unfortunately, back in the spotlight a year after its release due to the murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate (before the Manson family were ID-ed as the killers, many people thought she might have been murdered by Satanists as retribution for exposing their secret underground.) Given the amount of "influences" Dan Curtis had the writers incorporate into the show, it was only a matter of time that the show introduced a demon seed baby.
But what strikes me most during this rewatch is the influence of giallo horror. The genre was getting more popular at this time (it hit its peak in the mid 70s) and the influences are all there: the mysterious stranger in a trenchcoat lurking around in the background (Paul Stoddard and - to an extent - Barnabas); lots of saturated colors (particularly deep reds); the extremely tight close-ups of actor's faces; the slow-paced, mostly dialogue-free scenes as some off-screen horror approaches a character. I can see why Curtis THOUGHT this would work on a daytime soap.
Unfortunately, the crucial element that DS misses from giallo horror is the most important one: transgressive gore. The glacial pacing of giallo movies is an intentional counterpoint to the scenes of violent mayhem that punctuate them. Part of the thrill of watching a giallo film is seeing something you know you shouldn't be seeing. But of course, that's not gonna be happening on a network daytime soap. They can show Megan Todd flitting about the antique shop all they want, but it's never gonna end with a rusty nail being rammed into her eyeball. Without that transgressive element, it just doesn't work.
Nevertheless, I do give the show props for at least trying something different. That is essentially what is so great about the show: It was willing to take BIG risks and go in directions that conventional wisdom said you just CAN'T go. When it worked (Barnabas, 1795, 1897) it worked spectacularly well. When it didn't (Adam, the dream curse, Leviathans) - you just have to chalk it up to a swing and a miss.
Anyway, does anybody else have thoughts about it?