Great essay, Zahir!  I'm far, far from being an authority, or even a fan, of the 1991 DS, but as I understand it wasn't just the heavy hand of Dan Curtis that sabotaged the show; there were other factors at play:

(1) The Gulf War, and the cupidity of NBC programmers, meant that the series episodes were shunted all over the place in the schedule, to the point where you'd have needed David's crystal ball to know when the next installment was going to air.  As well, the initial Friday night slot was a notorious "death slot" in the NBC schedule so the series was already being given short shrift by programmers.

(2)  NBC suits (Brandon Tartikoff, perhaps?) apparently insisted that the 1790 flashback and scenes set in the present interweave in the latter weeks of the series, resulting in a hodgepodge effect in some of the episodes and an unnecessarily speeded-up retelling of the original 1795 story.  (I still wince whenever I think of that last episode.)

I personally found the art direction to be very erratic--sometimes great, othertimes unwatchable--and the same for the writing--Curtis needed to hire someone of the calibre of Sam Hall to be a script editor.  My impression is that DC himself was the script editor.  This in general never proved to be a scenario resulting in greatness (yeah, I know the Curtis worshippers out there will disagree--just giving *my* opinion here).

I'm sure I've already written more than anyone cares to read, but the final thing I have to say about this show is even though everyone always talks about the lavish production values, something about it just looks somehow tawdry to me.  I don't know whether it is that clashy color palette they kept reverting to (see note above about art direction) and the network trying to cut corners on post production (I have no idea about the technical side of things, but the series always looks so grainy and poorly-developed in the film stock sense of the word). 

I still think that if the network had supported it more, it would have lasted at least one more season.  I have the impression that there was backstory and personality conflicts behind the abrupt pulling of the plug.

cheers, G.

Interesting comparison, michael.  I think you may have a point.

I am lol at your use of the Salem Branch.  hee hee!

G.

If Moltke had come back to play a new character, especially an evil one, during the Tarrytown hiatus period, I think it would have made PT 1970 an even more nuanced and intriguing story.

We got Lara Parker as the ingenue in PT 1841.  I'm just as glad that she got to play a thoroughly psychotic version of Angelique in this storyline.

And this reminds me:  having finished the new comic book and seen the 2012 trailers, what is it with the evolution of the Angelique character into a psychotic slag with super-powers?  On the series, she was also a character with a lot of shadings and nuances and layers.  Yeah, Barnabas always ranted about how eee-vil she was, but we (the audience) got to see some of her doubts, her questionings, and even her desire for love as opposed to her obsessive need to have Barnabas come crawling to her on his hands and knees.

There is no answer to this... maybe the trend for apocalyptic villains with superpowers in the mass media is part of the reason for why the character seems to be written as she is in spin-offs and tie-ins.

G.

Wow, I finally sat down to look at issue four and it's ... wall-to-wall schlock is the best phrase I can come up with for it.

If the original issues 4 through 6 were combined into this one final issue that explains at least some of the ways in which the story fails.  I don't know why they hired such a poor artist, and the colorist didn't even bother to check hair colors from earlier issues.

I wonder how long this mag will last.  Fans of the new movie will be puzzled when they check it out and don't find any jokes...

G.

Well, frankly, regardless of how I feel about the new movie, I think Burton is pretty much hardly to blame--in my own eyes.  Given what has been reported here of what they're saying about him and his work elsewhere.  I am not on this sites and am blissfully ignorant of all of it--and rapidly losing interesting in keeping up with any of it.

I think Radcliffe would make a great Barnabas, say ten or twenty years down the line.  If anybody wants to do DS again after the release and box office performance of the Burton-Depp parody.

If the parody really takes off and does huge b/o, I don't really know that anyone would want to bother doing another take on the old story.  but then, who knows?

G.

[edited by admin]

Nancy honey, I am so sorry about your loss of that storage trailer.  I've lost a lot of things over the years too, but in a much less traumatic way; simply through the detritus of moving about, living on continents thousands of miles apart, etc. 

I figured out a solution to what I'll call the enigma of Depp Shadows--it's a parody.  Pure and simple.  Think about it.  It's actually a brilliant strategy for Burton since filming a parody plays to all his strengths as a director.  I presume that Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer also has elements of parody (how could it not, with a title like that?) which explains the choice of screenwriter.  As with the original DS, the director has his own huge input no doubt.

I feel confident that this film will be a success with teens and twentysomethings, which means WB giving the green light to the full restoration of NoDS and the release of the 1970s feature films on a regular commercial DVD as opposed to MOD.  Which was what I personally wanted all along.  So, no hysterics from this fan.

G.

Hmmm.... it all sounds reminiscent of the glory days of Joe Certa and Gold Key comics.

I have the current issue on hold at my comics shop, and would like to read to the end of the current arc--I thought it was supposed to continue through to issue 6, but maybe not?

The whole [spoiler]Quentin becoming a wolf thing in the last issue was just DUMB.  I hope it gets explained at some point.  I'm not all that optimistic though. [/spoiler]

Anyhow, Bat, thanks for the review.

Best, Gothick