These quotes come from the "But What About The REAL Dark Shadows?" topic, but I figure my response is probably better served here:
Most of all I'm sorry that they seem to have chosen to "remake" DS....rather than expand upon the original concept, as they did with Star Trek's "Next Generation". I've never in my life seen a remake that did justice to the original version of anything. Maybe that's just MY issue, and not the fault of what I'm looking at...but there it is. I really don't think I WANT to see a re-creation of Willie Loomis. What's the point? Show me someone completely different being Barnabas' minion.....and make me forget the original.
Of course, we still know very little about the WB DS (the barnabasundead.com items notwithstanding, which all carry disclaimers that they might not even be from the "real" script), but what we *might* be getting with it is more of a reimagining of DS than a true remake. That's the way things were with the '91 series. Yes, many plot points were repeats of what had first happened on the original ABC serial - but much of it wasn't. Probably one of the biggest plot departures was that Barnabas didn't marry Angelique, he actually did kill her (though accidentally in a struggle (no let's torture your little sister for this Ang)), and he wasn't attacked by the "bat" (which, in what I've always thought was one of the best reimaginings on the series, was at first "disguised" as Josette!) until after Angelique had been buried in the woods. And as for character: Roger's background was different (he was an artist), Maggie's was different (she was a psychic), Vicki was different (she was not the clueless doormat of the original - she actually figured things out - she stood up for herself - and she was all the more interesting for it), and Willie was VERY different (he was hardly the hustler we knew, but a drunken shell of a man, who, after his "encounter" with Barn, was used more for comic relief than anything else - and to great effect, I might add). When it came to Willie, with the exception of having released Barn, almost everything about his involvement in the storyline was completely different from the original because Vicki, not Maggie, resembled Josette, no one was ever kidnapped by Barn, and Barn and Vicki's romance played out similarly to the way that it did on the original series at the point Original Willie was already locked away in Windcliff - so that necessitated new material for him. (Though no one was sorry to see the references to the cow mutilations go.
)
Now, given that an actor like Matt Czuchry and not a character actor like Jim Fyfe has been cast as Willie this time around, I'm guessing most of the changes they made for Willie in the '91 series will not be repeated in the WB DS. But it is fairly likely that Willie's story will play out very differently than it did on the original for the probable fact that the action should take place again at a point in the original story when Willie was nowhere around...
all the "stuff" that's been leaked out isn't doing anything to make me believe it's going to work for me personally.
Personally, I take what's been "leaked" with a grain of salt. Knowing how someone like, say, Joss Whedon loved to leak false info regarding both Buffy and Angel plots to keep the fans off the real track, who's to say anything that's been "revealed" on the barnabasundead site is going to be the way things actually play out? Only time - and a lot of patience - will tell.