Greetings, fans,

I still remember this day 50 years ago today... this year, April 2 is again a Friday.

Back then, each day I kept waiting for the story to go back to 1971 so we could see what Barnabas and Julia were doing. But when Thayer's fateful voiceover came on at the end of the episode, I knew it really was the end.

Five years later, the series started running in syndication in my local market (on a Philly based station, in point of fact) and it was a new beginning, particularly since I had never seen any of 1967. I'd started watching in late June of '68.

And this morning, I watched Dark Shadows again--currently viewing the 1966/67 Laura storyline.

Remembering,

Gothick

Hi MB,

Great shots in response #669! That's our Julia.

The "football helmet wig" (I don't recall ever hearing it described that way before) did come out of the mothballs for a Maggie flashback sequence in 1968. I remember being very surprised that they went to the trouble of trying to get the hair and clothes right for that, and for some of the other scenes of Maggie's flashbacks during that period.

Excelsior!

G.

That scene with Sam and Joe encountering Julia at the Old House really is priceless. Nice capture of her in the Robs.

Today's scene reminds me of that old chart-buster with the refrain, "Go ask Julia ... feed your head."

G.

Or maybe not. Another quote from the Hollywood Reporter article:

Readers of Catton's 800+-page epic may barely recognize the book from that description, but rest assured that the murder mystery that becomes an obsession for 12 male residents of a mining town, each aligned with a sign of the zodiac, hasn't been lost entirely. It's just been pushed deep into the series — the fifth episode in particular — by which time very few of the men in that council have been clearly identified beyond perhaps their jobs and their facial hair. The zodiac connection, meanwhile, is unconvincingly laid out only in voiceover. If I'm giving the opening scene credit as a meta-commentary on a certain kind of contemporary television tendency, I'd point to this as a commentary on adapting prestige literary works for a different medium — an awareness that what works on the page can sometimes play as fundamentally silly or hollow on-screen, yet you have to keep it for fans of the original.

There are further discussions of the typical meta-narrative crap ticks and tricks the people who worked on this play that made me increasingly disinterested in current TV, having walked away from all of it after the sabotaging of Penny Dreadful's narrative--the last "current" series I watched (but abandoned after season 2)--a young friend told me similar things recently about her own experience with the Game of Thrones debacle, having invested years and lots of emotions in characters and situations that squashed against the big flat wall of the final 2 seasons like an overripe tomato.

Still, nice photo in the article. And I'm glad Eva is getting away from the malign influence of Tim Burton.

G.

Very sad news. May his spirit know peace.

"And in the double lotus keep
My hidden heart asleep."

--Old Chinese prayer to Kuan-yin

G.

Wonderful Cassandra photo! Our favorite Witch!

G.

Hi MB,

In an interview (it was really just a conversation, but it was recorded) Grayson did with fans in 1973, she told them that she had been told that the ratings dropped during the Quentofi body-switch storyline. So, this would seem to be what people working on the show were told at the time. Who knows--I could imagine Dan coming up with this as an excuse to do some of his crazy turn-on-a-dime plot switching which happened as we know in the middle of Leviathan and then happened a couple of times subsequently.

I do remember you, or somebody, mentioning that the ratings were climbing in March of 1971 when the decision to cancel was announced. You know my theory about the real reason and person behind the cancellation so no need to repeat it again.

G.