michael stroka:"look HALL i don't care if you are playing a gypsy...loscalzo said I get to wear the most eye make-up.don't ever try to upstage me again!!!"

one more tid-bit.

if i'm rembering this correctly the episode in today's slide show(#101)marked the first time that maggie was ever at collinwood.i remember thinking how odd and out of place she looked there at the time.little did i know(and she?)how much more time she would one day spend there.

wierd.

if i remember correctly the episode took place during that very brief and very weird moment when the possiblity of a 'romance' between roger and vicki was being tossed about.

i thought early b&w maggie had that 'wise beyond her years' quality.she basically had to raise herself with an alchoholic father who required more care than he could provide.if i remember correctly her mother died when she was very young(cancer?)and after her death sam began to drink heavily.here maggie was the proverbial 'working girl with a heart of gold'.

after the barnabas abduction they changed her personality and made her more girlish.i thought she started to get really clueless during the period when she was being persued by nicholas blair.after she takes over as collinwood governess she essentially stops being the character we first met.

far out!

i wonder if those songs carolyn rocked out to at the blue whale in the early episodes were available on vinyl.
it's nice to picture a young caroyln practicing the "frug" and the "twist" in her room.

so true about the lack of modern electronics at collinwood.as i recall the kitchen had neither a stove or a refridgerator.

both collinwood and the old house looked exactly like what they really were.gilded age mansions built by the robber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.houses of that size simply were not built in this country before this period.in this they took great liberties.

i'm not an expert on architecture but collinwood doesn't remotely resemble the french chateau.to me it does read much more of the 'english manor house' both inside and out.

great points all around.

the writers did seem to become 'bored' with the present day characters or if not bored they didn't really know what to do with them for many of the reasons pointed out here.hence there was alot of floundering.

in some ways i find it 'comforting' that the core characters essentially remained unchanged in the present.a little constant in an insane world.but it does prove problematic when trying to come up with compelling storytelling.

i too noticed the lack of direction for the original cast as soon as the story returned to the present after 1795.
they drifted about the perifery of the plot for several months before being somewhat returned to center stage during quentin's haunting of collinwood.

it is interesting to note that the core family didn't really change in the present.not only did they need to emerge from every crisis unscathed but essentially they always forgot about it entirely.for nearly a year the adam plot consumed everything and eveyone around it but as soon as it was 'done' and the plot shifted to the quentin storyline everyone acted like none of it had happened at all.which is pretty remarkable when you consider what everyone went through during it.it's also true that david wasn't really allowed to grow up in a realistic way.i started to notice that as soon as maggie took over as governess.he seemed too old even then to be babied by a governess and in real life would have been sent away to school.

it was questioned here why they didn't make the collins family bigger in the first place.why not more siblings and children?my theory is that the show started off with as many characters as it could to establish itself.over the proceeding months a few more joined the fray:mrs.johson.jason mcguire.willie loomis.

then the character was introduced that would fundamentally change the whole format of the show:barnabas collins.after barnabas dr.julia hoffman was the last major "human" character that was allowed to take root on the show in the present.look at the characters that come to center stage after her.they are either supernatural by nature(angelique,adam,nicholas,eve) or by influence(quentin,tom/chris jenings).once it became clear that the supernatural edge was bringing in the ratings the produces didn't bother to introduce us to 'regular' human beings in the present fearing that they would probably read as 'boring' to the viewers responding to this new hook.thus when characters like burke,victoria and joe depart they aren't really replaced by comparable characters.why date a fisherman when you can date someone trying to create a master race dedicated to satan?this thinking was perhaps short-sighted and misguided.

at the same time the writers must have recoginzed that the original family was important to viewers because as has been said no matter what disaster befell them they always(for the most part)emerged without a hair out of place.

you're right stefan that the 1897 make-up is really wierd.

i've been watching it this weekend.the guys are totally "dolled up".they are much more made up than in other storylines.it does sort of create a sense of "hightened reality" which maybe was the point.

with his heavily made up face and jet black hair aristede reminded me of liza minnelli.
nancy barrett does look really weird too.the eyebrow make-up is yucky and for the first time her hair is not platinum but dark red-ish blond.

the storyline in general has it's own distictive "look" quite different than anything else.

i wonder if the make-up artists worked in the theater where it needed to play to the back row and it wasn't taken into account how it would look in close-up on t.v.?