Innovation's '91 DS Comic, Book 4, The Book That Never Was

[Mysterious Benefactor]

SG #71's Sci-Fi update:

This report is greatly edited because something like 80% of it was about how to get and which satellite services offered DS if your cable company didn't. Thankfully, by this point I actually did have Sci-Fi. In fact, my cable company finally provided access to it in my area in February of 1995, pretty much at the tail end of DS' first run on Sci-Fi. (The first two eps I was able to record/see were Ep #1192 (Quentin and Daphne return to RT when the room changes back from PT - and Joanna shows Samantha what she will become) and Ep #1193 (Samantha falls from Widows' Hill to her death - and Judard eavesdrops as Quentin and Daphne promise to marry) - given that I hadn't seen those eps, and particularly I hadn't really seen Virginia Vestoff's Samantha, since they originally aired a little more than 24 years earlier, it was a thrill to see them again.)

And DS did indeed wrap up it's first run on March 16th with Eps #1244 & #1245, and started it's second run on March 17th with Ep #1 (giving something extra to celebrate on St. Patrick's Day  ).

I didn't watch when the '91 Series ran April-May, so I don't know if it ran without preemptions. Though promos for it ran every day during the original DS, so I could check. But even though I've kept the VHS tapes I used to record original DS (because there are all sorts of PomPress/Fest ads on them) watching VHS tapes is a hassle. (One of these days I should make a DVD of all the ads and then toss the tapes.) Besides, I'm pretty sure SG #72 will get into that.

And I'm also pretty sure SG was heavily promoted on Sci-Fi. It would probably be a hoot to see one of those ads again, so who knows, some day I may actually check out the tapes after all...

And imagine, something published inaccurate info related to DS. We never see that. Nope. Never. 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

SG #71's update for other DS merchandise:

Interesting that AKI would continue to have the Cross figure through the fall when AKI announced in SG #70 that it would be "discontinued in early 1995."

It's very interesting that Abbelaire was no longer making fans buy the Angelique watch in order to also get the Barnabas watch at a discount. Or at least that isn't mentioned. And apparently so much for the reduced price of $35 being "a spectacular, 1-time-only savings" for the holidays.

And SG continued to hawk David Campiti's Glass House Graphics. But then his name is listed in the Contributors section of SG #71, so that may very well have had something to do with it, depending on just how much he was contributing. 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Some of the things SG #71 shared regarding mentions of DS on TV/in film and/or in print, including associating DS to the then upcoming film version of Interview with the Vampire:

SG #71 also made mention of this:

I'm presuming it's in reference to the storyline in which Dr. Marlena Evans was possessed. The storyline was written by then head writer James E. Reilly. He may have also written a storyline in which two characters were supposedly aliens. I never watched DoOL when either aired, so I could easily be wrong about that latter storyline being one of Reilly's, but an interesting connection to DS with the aliens storyline is that one of the "aliens" was played by Alexis Thorpe, who played Willie's ill-fated girlfriend Kelly Greer in the '04 DS pilot...

[Mysterious Benefactor]

This Ron Sproat article that appeared in SG #71 is worth sharing (though it would have been nice if they'd spelled his name correctly - but no doubt the dreaded DS curse of errors strikes again!):

Part 1:

Part 2:

[Uncle Roger]

I watched Dallas pretty regularly back then but I couldn't place the name Deborah Tranelli. She had a relatively small, recurring role as Phyllis, Bobby Ewing's secretary.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Oh OK - I had no idea who she played either, and I was too busy to look her up. Thanks for looking her up and sharing the info. 

Funny, I remember the name Phyllis, but I can't even picture what she looked like. I guess she didn't make all that much of an impression. But then, given how Dallas had so many larger than life characters, I suppose it's not surprising that a character who was probably as normal as they come would get lost. 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Another article that appeared in SG #71 that's worth sharing:

I've told this story before, but I reconnected to DS in a somewhat similar way to the author. It was almost a decade before DS first ran on Sci-Fi, and it wasn't while channel surfing, but it was in 1985 while casually browsing the TV Guide one day when I was on vacation from work and noticing that DS was actually airing on an independent station in my area. I couldn't believe it. I'd already missed that day's ep because it had aired at 11am, but the next day I was firmly in from of my TV to see if it really was true that DS was back on (I was afraid to accept it until I saw it with my own eyes  ). But sure enough at 11am the familiar music and voiceover thrilled my senses. And as I watched, I was so excited to see that it was an ep that I'd never seen during the original run because I didn't start watching DS until September of 1967. It was May 17, 1967's Ep #233, the one in which there's a violent thunderstorm at Collinwood as Barnabas tells Vicki and Carolyn the story of Josette's death on Widows' Hill. But I was also sad because my vacation was going to be ending before the next ep would air and at the time I didn't own a VCR, so who knew how long it was going to be before I could catch another ep. (But when I did I was beyond excited to realize it was a milestone ep: August 4, 1967's Ep #290 in which Julia discovers Barnabas in his coffin and then Barnabas goes to Julia's room to kill her only to discover she's been waiting for him. What luck was that?!  ) But I would catch an ep whenever I could - and within several months of doing that I was definitely hooked and determined to watch regularly - and the first ep I recorded on my new VCR was October 12, 1967's Ep #339, the one in which Dr. Woodard steals Julia's notebook. And I've been involved with DS regularly ever since.

I definitely take exception to the author saying DS had "atrocious production values" - did they watch ANY of the other soaps that were on at the time? Now, too many of those had atrocious production values (I'm pointing at you in particular, General Hospital!!). If in the author's opinion DS had atrocious production values, the mind boggles as to how he/she would have described the production values of other soaps of the time. In truth, DS often had production values that were on the cutting edge of video production. But as we know, it's so much more fun for people to make fun of DS than to give it its due. 

And the other day after I'd put in The Beginning's Collection 6, Disc 4 and gotten a capture from Ep #206 for the Everyone In Collinsport's Favorite Word Slideshow, for the first time I checked out several of the extras on that disc. One that I watched had info that I thought was very interesting, and it's something that this article reminds me that I wanted to post about. We constantly read how teens were a major audience for DS, so much so that at times one would think teens comprised the majority of the show's audience (and sometimes writers even use that to demean DS as something of a "less than" show because of it). However, the Dark Shadows Syndication Promo Reel includes this ratings info:

  DAILY 5 SEASON
NATIONAL AVERAGES
WOMEN 18-34   1,240,000
WOMEN 18-49   1,970,000
TOTAL WOMEN   2,630,000
TEENS           970,000

Do those stats make it seem like teens were the show's majority audience? A large audience, certainly - but the majority? But then, just how many of the people who've written about DS have actually verified everything they've written? Well, given that too many of their errors could have been easily disproved with even a little actual research, we know only too well that not many writers have bothered to check their facts...

[Uncle Roger]

I think that DS was the first soap to done any extensive filming outside the studio. Other soaps did it on very rare occasions and it usually looked cheesy.
I also think that it was one of the first, if not the very first, to use orchestrated music, instead of the pipe organ music that was a staple on radio. Carol Burnett spoofed this mercifully in As The Stomach Turns. The organ music was still being used in the early 1970's.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

   I think you're right about both location shooting and orchestrated music.

(And I'm sure anyone who watched soaps thought As The Stomach Turns was hysterically funny. It was a perfect parody of many soaps of the time.    And considering that Carol Burnett was a soap fan herself, she definitely did it with love, as opposed to ridicule...)

[KMR]

  DAILY 5 SEASON
NATIONAL AVERAGES
WOMEN 18-34   1,240,000
WOMEN 18-49   1,970,000
TOTAL WOMEN   2,630,000
TEENS           970,000

If I'm interpreting this right and there isn't a typo, this could mean:

WOMEN 18-34  1,240,000
WOMEN 35-49  730,000
WOMEN 50+  660,000
TEENS  970,000

Which would make teens (undifferentiated by sex) as the 2nd largest demographic.

HOWEVER... What about men? If we're going to take that one article's word that there were 20,000,000 viewers, we could assume that there were 16,400,000 adult male viewers! 

Of course, they also left out pre-teens, who were certainly a major group (and probably the biggest consumers of the teenage magazines, among the DS viewership?). Let's say adult men were the same number as women 50+. So that would make pre-teens be 15,740,000. Based on how popular DS was in my grade school, I could buy that! 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Interestingly, so far as demos go, most things haven't changed all that much since DS was on because the most desired demographic is still 18-49 year old women - and women viewers are still far more desired than men because many advertisers still think that women make the most decisions when it comes to what products to buy (and that probably is still true to a major extent).

Regardless of sex, advertisers don't really desire 50+ viewers because the thinking is they're too set in their ways to try new things. Though while that may be true of some, it's certainly not true of all. Mostly everyone I know is 50+ and they're more than willing to try new things. It's certainly true of me. But then, no one can say advertisers' thinking always syncs with reality. However, it still remains true that any show for which 50+ viewers comprise the largest portion of its audience is very much in danger of being canceled. It happens time and time again no matter how many millions of 50+ viewers they are for the show. 

On the other hand, the thinking when it comes to teens has changed drastically since DS was on. Advertisers now realize that if they can lure teens to buy their product, they may just have a customer for life - or at least the life of a product.

One thing, though, is that Nielsen ratings represent only a percentage of viewership. The numbers that are featured in the Syndication Promo Reel are the raw numbers that Nielsen compiled and they represent just a fraction of the audience watching. Nielsen would then take that raw data and, using a series of equations that they developed, would then extrapolate how many viewers the raw data indicated were actually watching. The 20 million figure for viewership of DS was an extrapolated number from the raw data. Nielsen worked very hard to make those extrapolated numbers as accurate as possible (though they've had tons of criticism through the years). But the point I'm making is that someone can't actually take the raw data numbers and use them with any extrapolated numbers.    One has to use raw data with raw data and extrapolated numbers with extrapolated numbers when making demographic comparisons. 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Here's the CURRENT EVENTS - NEW DS PERSONNEL section from SG #71 for MTW:

Jeffrey was actually released in August of 1995. Something tells me future SGs will probably have a lot of info on that once we reach them...

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Here are several pieces of the CURRENT EVENTS - NEW DS PERSONNEL section from SG #71 for Barbara Steele:

A photo from a public appearance (maddeningly, the SG doesn't indicate where):

Her write-up:

And another photo from the '94 LA Fest:

And that's the final thing that I'll be sharing from SG #71. Next up, SG #72...

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Here's what SG #71 from February of 1995 had to say:

Pretty much the same as what was said in SG #70. And considering that by this point it had been more than a year and a half with no movement whatsoever, I'm actually quite surprised that SG still brought up the proposed film(s) at all. Though perhaps SG was still holding onto hope. But if so, will that hope last into SG #72? I suppose we'll see...

Apparently it did last:

With the exception of saying there are no "definite" developments, SG #72's update from May of 1995 is pretty much exactly the same as was reported in SG #71 - and even #70. And if someone wanted to be really hopeful, they might have seized on the use of "definite" as a hint that maybe there were possible developments but it was too early to say. But that would have been fairly fruitless because SG #70 said there were no "significant" developments, and obviously, in the long run, anyway, saying "significant" wasn't code for anything. And this would be a whole different situation if DC had pitched his ideas to a studio or production company and they had made a deal for him to write a script or even to make the film, script unseen. In that sort of situation even after nearly two years, the project could have remained in development with the hope of it coming out of "development hell (which is often how it's described in the industry) eventually and moving into production. After all, the Depp/DS film was in development for almost four years before it went into production, and being in development for even longer isn't out of the ordinary in the film industry. But in the case of this film, DC wrote what is known in the industry as a "spec script," meaning DC didn't have any sort of deal with any studio or production company to write a script - he simply wrote it on his own and then tried shopping it around with the hope that some entity would make a deal. But in almost two years that still hadn't happened. And it's certainly hard to let go of hope when you badly want something to happen. But at this point, the longer time passed with no developments, the less likely there were ever going to be any developments. which, as we know, turned out to be the case. So, will SG #73 come to that conclusion? Again, I suppose we'll see...

[Mysterious Benefactor]

SG #72's Sci-Fi report from May of 1995:

The first Barnabas eps actually began in August of 1995. Ep #210 ran for a second time on Sci-Fi as the first ep on August 24th.

It was definitely nice when on May 5th DS went back to 2 eps on Fridays. Though, as we can remember only too well, Sci-Fi would have more periods of 1 ep Fridays throughout DS' various runs on the channel. 

But given that SG got the above date correct, it's very odd that it got the dates wrong when it came to the mix-up of Eps #45 & 49. Rather than Ep #45, Ep #49 was wrongly aired on April 27th - and Ep #49 aired again in its correct spot on May 2nd. 

It's very interesting that when Sci-Fi ran CLIFFHANGER PLAYHOUSE they included interviews with Michael T. Weiss and M. M. Shelly Moore. Moore is particularly interesting because when it comes to past DS related interviews, Sci-Fi always showed material that was taken from the MPI VHS tapes, but not only wasn't the DS Resurrected VHS out yet, she doesn't even appear on it. MTW, on the other hand, has several interview segments on that tape.
And in case you don't remember, or maybe even never knew, M. M. Shelly Moore was one of the Executive Story Editors on the '91 Series as well as the co-writer for Eps #8, 10 & 12.

Are any of us surprised that the SG promotion with Sci-Fi was delayed? No? I didn't think so...

SG also got the date right for when Ep #1219 ran on Sci-Fi, February 24th, which makes the errors when it comes to Ep #45 & 49 all the odder...

The USA Network was considered "trashy"? I doubt Ben Cross would have been happy to see it described that way because he did several made-for-TV movies for them...

And it's quite interesting how Sci-Fi really started to expand to more sections of the country in 1995...