Hehehehe…I’m gonna start watching it again. It was so bad and cheesy it was hysterical. It’s also incredibly confusing. So Barnabus is a vampire, but he’s a good guy?
The FAQ on this site (warning, MIDI!) http://members.tripod.com/~MrJuggins/ is informative.
And there is:
http://www.darkshadows.co.uk
and
http://www.portraits-of-collinwood.com/
What does cheese, which I presume we all like, have do to with anything?
Oh man, now the theme song is stuck in my head.
When the SciFi channel first started playing that show, my wife would wake up early to watch it every morning and thus every morning I’d awaken to the theme song and the first five minutes or so before the “acting” and “plot” drove me from bed to be anywhere but in that room.
I think you’ve got it. The actors really are having fun. How could it not be fun to watch them?
I didn’t get hooked on Dark Shadows growing up. But blush I LOVED the short-lived revival series from 1991. Anybody else remember that one?
As a writer, I loved the concept of an actor playing one part in the present and a different one in the past, running parallel storylines, etc.
I think part of the appeal was the originality. At a time when only standard soap operas were available, along comes one with vampires, et al. (as far as I know) they didn’t add horror to soap operas again until Marlena got possessed on Days of Our Lives. gag
I kept meaning to watch it on SciFi… but now that I bought my first TiVo…
Okay, I screwed up-
Kate Jackson was Daphne, a governess, and she fell in love with her boss, but his wife Samantha and some guy named GERARD were trying to stop them. Because Gerard was possessed by the spirit of some beheaded guy-and they had the head and everything!
It was pretty cool.
Remember the dramatic “stinger,” whenever there was a fade-out? “Dum–dum–duuuum . . .”
What was a “poison ring”?
They open up to reveal a compartment the size of the ring that cuold be used to hold poison to slip into someone’s drink while they weren’t looking. You can see the hinges in some of the pictures.
Cool! I’ve heard of them sort, of, before, but I didn’t know they were connected to DS.
I could never get into DS as a kid – even though it was supernatural, it was slow-moving and soap-opera-like. But Pepper Mill was a fan (short for “fanatic”).
A couple of years ago I got her the Dark Shadows Blooper tape. Unbelievable! – flies land on the actors’ faces and stay there through the scene. Supposedly solid walls shake. People blow lines with no retakes. People walk through a scene they’re not supposed to be in. It was shot on the cheap and pretty fast and I’m sure no one thought it would last this long.
I also got her a history of the series on audiotape written and read by one of the actresses. Fascinating stuff. As long as you don’t have to watch it.
I was banned from watching Dark Shadows by my mom, so bad were my nightmares from … the hand. The hand! It crept and it crawled and it moidered. I think I was perhaps 7.
Of course I went on to a lifelong addiction to horror fiction.
Actually, there’s no reason that should have been left in, unless someone just didn’t see it (which I doubt). Having worked on a soap and having had a lot of experience with this stuff, they should have reshot that scene. Yes, soaps tape an entire show in one day, and yes, typically, it’s preferred to get through all the scenes without having to do a retake, but if it’s necessary to stop, it’s necessary to stop. For the most part, we would do blocking and rehearsal in the mornings for several hours, and then start tape around noon. Most of the time, dress was done by going through all the scenes on one particular set, then we took a break and came back to tape those same scenes. Anything technical like the above - they should have gone back and redone the scene. The production values on soaps are still pretty flimsy compared to the rest of television, but they’ve improved greatly over the last few years. And since some shows (two in particular) have been earning accolades lately for seeming more like primetime shows than daytime shows in their writing, acting and production values, to not go back and tape something like that over again reflects badly on all of the shows (Yes, I take these things seriously…soaps used to pay the bills for me:).
:::insert snarky comment here:::: Then again, this is One Life to Live - it doesn’t surprise me that they’d leave something like that in. ::::end snarky comment:::::
Ava
Absolutely. That pace is kept up to this day, if not surpassed. I’ve shot quite a few soaps. Guiding Light, the city, Days Of Our Lives. My friends over at ABC call their show, “No Life To Live”.
It’s brutal work. And frequently shows the most amazing lighting and camerawork in studio television work today.
Cartooniverse
So it seems mostly kids watched it?
And then those kids grew up and had kids of their own.
And named them after “Dark Shadows” characters.
Just like me! 
My first star crush was on David Selby, who played the dashing, mutton-chopped Quentin Collins. His occasional transformation into a werewolf only seemed to confirm his raging masculinity.
I prefer 1840s Quentin. So manly, yet NOT a werewolf!
I thought Quentin was a weenie, but then I was in the sixth grade.
Who was the military guy who tried to kill Barnabas and got whacked himself instead? He thought it was funny that he was dead…whatever happened to him?
Walloon, is it possible that they rebroadcast “Dark Shadows” on sci-fi without commercial breaks? If you had time for a commercial–and a lot of 'em then were a minute long apiece–then the actor would have time for a costume change.
As far as the lack of retakes… my explanation was always that it was going out live and being kinescoped (in the old days) or videotaped (by the 60s) so the producers would have a record of what went out. I bet that really pleased the actors, having their flubs and goofs immortalized.
We had different standards in performance then. The screwups were accepted as a natural part of performance–it’s not like there was jack-all you could do about it. When we rented the first season of “Dark Shadows” on tape when it first came out, what chiefly impressed me was the terror in the eyes of the actors.
Ugh… this is nerve-wracking. Simply nerve-wracking.