Well, I'm not gonna vote!  So there!  Nyeah!

Actually, it wouldn't be right for me to do so.  I don't have the DVD's or the videotapes, save for special ones (right now, I can't afford the DVD's), nor will my cable have SoapNet should DS find a home there.  So I'll leave it up to those of the family here who have them.  I think for those of us who are disc/tape-impaired, we can follow along with the availability of posted episode-synopses (and do the same if it ends up on SoapNet) and fully participate in the discussions.

Gerard

If you have the seance, Connie, and one of the attendees goes into a trance and starts repeating over and over again:  "I don't understand!"...........move out!

Gerard

My favorite sets, believe it or not and this is gonna sound weird, were the restaurants where various characters (like Vicki and Frank) would have meetings and dinner.  Of course, they were only seen pretty much in the first few months of the series.  I enjoyed the detail, including other patrons eating and talking in the background, and waiters moving to-and-fro.  It was just such a wonderful style of reality.

And music?  For me, the haunting Joanna's Theme.

Gerard

The made-for-TV movie you're thinking of, Patti, was the pilot (and a very young and nervous 21-year-old Stephen Spielberg directed Joan Crawford in that memorable second story).  The show then became part of an NBC "experiment" called, I do believe but am no longer positively sure, "Three In One".  Over one season, in the same time-slot, three different programs aired; I think one was one of those typical early seventies lawyer shows, there was Night Gallery, and I don't remember the third.  Of the three, only Night Gallery survived because of very good ratings and continued for several more seasons.

One of the most frightening stories, to me, was in the first episode (not the pilot, the first episode of the new series) in which Carl Betz, formerly of The Donna Reed Show and Judd for the Defense, plays a doctor who, through hypnotism, can cause a subject to display all the symptoms of any disease.  With a certain signal, he can snap him out of it, the disease completely gone.  Unfortunately for him, the subject he was using, a handsome young man, was having an affair with Betz's character's wife.  The doctor tries to take the experiment to the extreme and hypnotize the subject into dying.  That works, but when the doctor gives the signal, the young man does not revive and is buried.  Much, much, much later the doctor learns he was giving the wrong signal.  The very-devastated wife learns of this and runs to the mausoleum, throwing open the doors and pounding on the casket with the right reviving signal.  To this day, the final, climactic scene showing what happened in that burial chamber after she was "successful" in "snapping him out of it" still give me shivers.

Gerard

Honey...are you sick, physically, or just upset about DS?

Hope you're very well Gerard 

Thanks, Patti!     No, I'm just in the duldrums about our show being gone.  But I'm sure some champagne tonight will help take care of that!  (Even though I don't like champagne - to me, even the "finest" always tastes like vinegar mixed with Alka-Seltzer, but you gotta have some on New Year's Eve!)  But I do make a rotten patient when I'm sick or recuperating from something.  When I had that back surgery last year, for three days I was a monster.  People are wondering what happened to some of our friends, and what those mounds of earth in the backyard are.  I just tell them that I'm trying to recreate Eagle Hill Cemetery, and waiting for my order of styrofoam tombstones to come in.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Gerard

I guess I'm also one of the few Keith Prentice fans.  I enjoyed his short stint on the show and thought his acting was fine.

I also enjoyed how they sorta "turned the tables" regarding Jonathan Frid's and Lara Parker's characters.  As Barnabas and Angelique, he originally loved her and then ran off to marry another, while she never stopped doing whatever it took to get him back, no matter how many times he told her to go peddle her papers (even though, deep down and in denial, he always still had the razzmattazz for her).  Now, as Bramwell, he wants her as Catherine, while she went off and tied the knot with another, telling him to go ring somebody else's doorbell (even though she is googly-eyed for him).

Last, but not least among my other likes is seeing a mature Josette DuPres Collins.  Mary Conrad is absolutely fantastic in the part, and is my favorite supporting character.  She's just so good, you just wanna have her as your mommy.  Along with that, a few years back during the run of PT1841, we had a neat discussion here regarding why Josette (and along with her, her now-deceased husband Barnabas, and their son Bramwell) was so ostracized by the family; it was never made clear, or even really hinted at in the series.  [spoiler]And it was obvious that this hostility towards her and her marriage with Barnabas existed long before she and the master of Collinwood had their little - ahem - "get-together".[/spoiler] I submitted that it had to do with late-18th/early-19th century prejudices, in that Josette was a Roman Catholic, something a staunch, New England Protestant family would not want having marrying into the clan.  Spooks, cursed rooms, family members going mad and murderous, whatchyagonnado?  But a Catholic?  Perish the thought.  You know those restricted-country-club types.  Papa's knifing the help, but at least they ain't eatin' fish on Friday.

Anyway, there were so many wonderfully subtle little things in that last and final storyline, it always makes for good gabbing on message boards with fellow fans.

Gerard

Some time ago, I created in my warped little mind my concept as to how things "on a grander scale" were different in PT and in RT.  For example, I envisioned in PT (at least in the 1970 version) that history was different.  In 1914, World War I was averted.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire remained intact, all the way to 1970, although the various nations comprising it were autonomous; it was more like a federation of nations rather than an Empire.  There was an upheavel in the Russian Empire, but without the instability of WWI, it did not extend to Bolshevism; rather, it modernized into a consitutional monarchy like Great Britain, with many internal reforms.  Of course, Hitler never rose to power in Germany and there was no World War II.  And so forth and so on.  Guess it doesn't take much to amuse me.

Back in the early 90's, there was a novel (can't remember the author now) called Fatherland.  It was a "what-if" novel:  what if Nazi Germany had not been defeated?  I believe the premise was that the Nazis developed nuclear weapons at the exact same time that America did, so the war ended in a stalemate, with Germany controlling virtually all of Europe right past Moscow.  It was set in the early 60's (Joe Kennedy, Sr., was the president of the USA), and the plot revolved around a journalist, who was in Berlin to cover a big celebration of Hitler's 75th birthday, and stumbled upon what seemed to be just your basic, run-of-the-mill murder case.  But it turns out that the murder had to do with keeping something covered up for decades:  the Holocaust.  Every vestige of the mass murders had been eraticated, including the death camps which had been dissassembled leaving absolutely no evidence once they had done the horrible things they were designed to do.  But some documents were forgotten, not destroyed, so the race was on to get them out of 1964 Nazi Germany before they, too, are destroyed.  It's not only an exciting novel, but fascinating in its perception of its own Parallel Time world.

Gerard

Even when I saw the movie during it's theatrical run, I always thought that she was, indeed, a witch, even if pivotal scenes from the screenplay which made that quite clear (I read it in the book, too - fascinating!; I loved the "prequel" scene with the hippie), either ended up on the cutting room floor or were never shot.  I guess I was able to read between the lines.

Gerard