Gerard, I'm cackling maniacally over your Mom's comment about Baby Jesus!  (hahaha guess you know where *I'm* going!)  My Mom also banned me from watching DS.  Watching it secretly was the first major flouting of her authority in my young life--one of the few times I actually needed to disobey because I was such a Class A nerd as a youngster.

It's funny and poignant to think of how much money five dollars was back then.  I was just listening to a tape recording of Cass Elliott contrasting the Monterey Pop Festival with the festivals of the early Seventies and saying how crass and commercial things had gotten to the point where "the tickets cost a huge amount of money--fifteen dollars!  That's sooo much money!"  and she was really being sincere.

Sheesh--I'm so old I can remember Saturday matinees at the local movie theatre that cost less than a dollar.  *sigh*

G.

My favorite Quentin is early 1897.  He was such a raffish, tasty bit o' goods then.

Runners up include the lusciously eee-vil Quentofi, amnesiac Quentin chewing out Miss Olivia Priss Corey in 1970, and crazed Quentin of 1995 (just because Selby was so excruciatingly good in the part).

My least favorite Quentin is PT 1970 vintage.  But even when he got on my nerves in that ugly jacket, I still wouldn't have kicked him out of bed for eating crackers.

G.

Not to mention breaking up with Chris Jennings--THE Hunkiest Man at Collinwood!!!  I really wondered where her brains had gone at that point (not to mention other bits...)

G.

I think you have to be careful purchasing DVD's from these places (I would think the videos would be OK so long as you are sure they are NTSC standard).  A lot of currently available DVD players do not seem to do well with DVD-R's and RW's.  I have a couple of friends who share their tapes of Queer as folk (the popular, trashy gay soap opera) and this year they tried to upgrade to DVD.  Well, the rewritable DVD's their burner turned out would not play on several different make of players (I have a friend who works in an office with a whole galaxy of media equipment), so we had to go back to using VHS.  We even tried putting the DVD burner setting on VR format and that did not work either.

So, buyer beware on these discs.

That said, I'd love to have good copies of some of those films you mentioned.  I think I read that the Louis Jourdain Dracula is finally being released by BBC on both VHS and DVD formats, this summer, if memory serves.

G.

OOOHHH!  IT'S JOE HASKELL'S CLEAVAGE!!!

YUMMMY!!!!

*g* G.

A few observations:

(1) You can't "save" a television program that's never even been on the air.  The network's decision was clearly part of a programmatic shift in the direction of material they perceive as being more where the market is moving now.  I doubt whether they did more than glance at the NWBDS pilot by the time it was finished since they had made these programmatic decisions separately from the process of generating the pilot.

(2)  Reality TV shows *are* scripted.  I imagine the writers who are getting jobs are the ones who (besides having the right personal connections--that's how H'wood has ALWAYS worked) are good at coming up with the situations/concepts that non-actors can parrot successfully.

(3)  Far from "dying" I think the Dark Shadows "franchise" is enjoying adequate success, given that we're talking about a television show that is nearly 40 years old (ugh, you don't know how old that makes me feel!).
Not only has the entire series been steadily in print on VHS format for the past decade. it is now enjoying a success on DVD to the point where MPI is accelerating the schedule for the release of the episodes.  The honoring of Dan Curtis at the TV Museum, the spate of articles around the pilot, and the fact that TV Guide is running a piece about the original series in a week or two, all shows a lot of health, as far as I can tell.  Of course I hardly have my finger on the pulse where today's entertainment scene is concerned.  I am afraid I do not have the stomach for that.

Let's hope we see the return of the original episodes to broadcast television in the near future.  I would think the events I have outlined above would be enough to show how "viable" (as we used to say in the 70s) the property still is.

G.

Wow, Darren, what a great project!  From the bottom of my dark little heart, I thank you!

I haven't seen ANY of the DVDs yet, though I am contemplating purchasing at least one set (the one with the Julia/Tom Jennings storyline).  That storyline included a notorious technical defect which appeared to originate in the master tape.  I believe it happened in the episode where Julia comes stumbling in like a wino at the tail end of a bender babbling about "Tom."  As I recall it, there's this shrill beep that lasts about 2 or 3 seconds at one point as the action is moving from the foyer into the drawing room.  I wondered whether that scene got snipped in the interests of "tidying up" the DVDs.  (sorry, I don't know the technical lingo)

I discussed this at one point with Richard Holt--there's a post from him buried in the archives about this scene, and how it originated in the master tape.  I think he may have checked with somebody at MPI about it.

That happens to be one of my favorite episodes, and I'll be upset if I learn that it now circulates in a trimmed version.

G.