I introduced Mrs. Raza to the original Dark Shadows soap opera, and we’ve been watching on Netflix. She’s actually quite interested in it; the fact that it is 45 years old is of no import to her.
My question: there is “dramatic music” that plays at various times during each episode. These days we take it for granted, but Dark Shadows was a live performance. How was the music performed? I shudder to think there were live studio musicians, but the idea of a sound guy with a reel-to-reel tape player with the music already sequenced seems off, too; the music is sometimes synchronized pretty precisely with the dialog, and with a live show I would think it too difficult to have the music perfectly sequenced/timed beforehand.
Since that is such a short and simple question, I’ll pad out this OP with some DS snark: there is certainly some decent acting. Mitchell Ryan (later as Greg’s father on Dharma and Greg) playing Burke Devlin was fine, as were most of the others, but some are just atrocious. The actor playing Maggie Evans’ father (the artist) is painful to watch. Some of it is just poor writing, but his stuff is awful.
Rubixcube is correct. I’ve been watching the DVDs from the first episode. At the beginning of each episode is a slate, with a voice saying, “Dark Shadows episode number X. VTR date X/X/66, air date X/X/66, take 1.”
The air date is usually 1 week later, sometimes 2 weeks later. Also, very occasionally, they’ll say “take 2,” but probably 99% of the time, it’s take 1.
The time in between the VTR and air dates give time to add music, sound effects, and occasionally, visual effects (ghosts, etc.).
Really? I had no idea. I mean with the flubbed dialog, the occasional set issues (actors bumping into and moving “brick” walls), even microphones getting in the scene, and actors occasionally out for an episode (“the part of X will be played by Y”) I couldn’t imagine it being other-than-live. Sure, a lot of the goofs are relatively minor, but still…I can’t imagine going with “take 1” if they had a choice.
But I just read the Wiki entry, and youse guys appear to be correct. Ignorance fought!
The biggest reason for the minor flubs is they were producing the show 5 times a week. Dark Shadows may or may not have had more than its share of blown lines, boom shadows, and other mistakes compared to other contemporary soaps (I didn’t pay much attention to the other soap operas in the 60s, but my mother did, and I still remember she watched “Edge of Night,” and “Secret Storm,” but I wasn’t old enough to see if they suffered from the same problems as often–maybe they did).
As I’m watching the old DS episodes, I’m giving them a pass because of the time pressures. But it’s still pretty funny to see the screw ups and melodramatic overacting.
I’ve looked at the coverage of the JFK assasination that includes the episode of “As The World Turns” that the news bulletins interrupted. The only music I heard was an overbearing organ. Was that standard for soap operas of the era?
8-Track tapes were not introduced until 1967 according to Wiki. I always liked that cheesy organ music from the soaps. The Jack LaLanne Show also had some pretty hysterical “work out music”.
I can’t say definitively, but it probably was because it was cheaper to play one instrument (or only a couple–an organ and maybe one or two others), rather than have a full orchestra as in movies.
Certainly, the organ was used as the stereotype soap opera music. For some reason, an episode of Gilligan’s Island came to mind where Mary Ann is listening to some soap, and the only music you hear is from an organ. So it was well-recognized by the time Gilligan was on the air as being related to soaps.
The Proctor and Gamble soaps used organ music until 1973 or so–it was a carryover from the days of radio serials. Not all soaps were still using organs by then; the small number of clips that I’ve seen from early 70s ABC shows were using orchestrated music cues.
Part of the reason that apparent minor flubs were left in the show is that videotape was much more difficult and costly to edit in those days–it pretty much had to be spliced by hand, a la film editing. In his memoir of “What’s My Line?”, the show’s producer Gil Fates noted how they really, really tried to avoid editing when the syndicated “Line” was in production. He also described the first time he used an electronic tape editing machine in 1975 while compiling the WML? 25th anniversary special–he was amazed by how incredibly fast the process was as opposed to how it was done previously.