Funny you should say that...

Buddy actually was the first choice for the Scarecrow, but Ray Bolger apparently had a clause in his contract with MGM that gave him first refusal on the role and so Buddy was recast as the Tin Man instead.

[/font of useless knowledge]

Barnabas was never better than in 1967 - I really wish he hadn't been redeemed so much, as he seemed infinitely more interesting in his earlier, uncontrollable form.

The problem with the added humanity was that it robbed Barnabas of so many facets, and nothing seemed to emerge to replace all those lost qualities.  In the early days he's intelligent, resourceful, plausible - things that give a villain a real sense of danger.  Even Julia doesn't come close to controlling him - he's very much in control and what always disturbs me is the ruthlessness, you really believe he'd stop at nothing to get what he wants.

Those insidious qualities really do make him a cut above other DS villains - others require characters to develop selective stupidity while plotting and vying for control.  In 1967, Barnabas didn't need that - the really scary thing is that people in Sam and Joe's position wouldn't have suspected him for a moment in real life.

Episode 1001 was directed by Lela Swift.

"House of DS" shared very few technical crew with the daytime show - Ramse Mostoller supervised costumes, and Lela Swift worked uncredited as a director's assistant.  Dan Curtis directed both movies - he only ever directed for the show occasionally, so it had little impact on the day-to-day running of the daytime show.

Stuart's... arguments of how the editing of these classic episodes can be a "good" thing are weak at best...

When asked what the all time low for DS was. different people offer different opinions. Some might answer "The Leviathan storyline" or the "Adam storyline"... "the Mrs. Johnson character".

As I said explicitly in my last post, I'm not advocating wholesale tampering - altering the narrative content of the episodes is something else entirely, as it subverts conscious artistic decisions made by the production team at the time.  Mrs Johnson was always written like that, so were the Leviathans - no one sat down in 1968 and decided to write the stage manager a cameo appearance.

If the original script read this, I'd agree with you:


JOSHUA: Yes?

[Old woman gawps into thin air for unfeasible amount of time]

DISEMBODIED NOO YAWKER [OOV]: Then go to the house...

BATHIA: [flash of inspiration] Go to the house of the curse! Blah blah...


Clearly, it's not the intention of anyone concerned that the scene is meant to play like this.  The way in which it's been fixed does not compromise the material artistically - no footage is excised and the fix is seamless, so it's sympathetic to the original material.  Technically, the episode should never have been broadcast in that state originally - it was substandard then and it's substandard today.  And where fixes like this can be made seamlessly with today's technology, and without affecting the duration, they should be.  It "sells" the show better to new viewers and allows older ones to enjoy the episodes the way they were intended to be seen.  Artistically speaking, can anyone seriously say that the episode is worse for losing a very sad example of an elderly actress being impatiently prompted as she struggles to perform?

http://www.collinwood.net - the Dark Shadows Journal Online

New on the website:

* Frame by Frame: Episode 1
To celebrate the show's 37th Anniversary, take an in-depth look behind the scenes of the first episode of the original series.

* 1993 Dark Shadows Festival

A gallery of previously unseen photographs from the New York convention

* Plus news and other regular features updated

Got any more such things up yer sleeve...?

I was bored today, so I did a little tinkering and here's a version with a faux "recap" sequence, segueing into the titles:

http://www.collinwood.net/vids/dsrecap.rm

Thinking about the idea of a new DS series, I got a minor flash of inspiration and put together a mock title sequence for a new version - kinda tenuous I guess, but I figured people might enjoy it.

It's Realplayer and a little over 1mb:

http://www.collinwood.net/vids/dsopener.rm

I think a new soap -- and I do think if DS was to return, it would need to be as a soap -- would have to be a sequel to have a chance of succeeding, and I think it could do fine.

I'd enlist a couple of original cast to maintain the show's heritage and otherwise populate it with recasts of the younger characters and new faces that fit the show's familiar archetypes.