Thanks, O Mysterious One, for the bounty of these updates.  I really look forward to them, especially since there has been so little discussion of the "current" 1968 episodes here.

I'll have to dig out my tape of 576.  I know I've seen it but the Liz dream sequence sounds like a hoot!  I've still been watching 1967... getting ready to revise my endless article about Grayson's work in that storyline...

G.

How amusing, Criseyde!

Sounds as if those six episodes (or however many have been commissioned) will be heavily recycling old storylines from the original series.

Just out of curiosity, did the Reuters story carry anything about storylines for Julia and Liz?  (One of my peeves about the 1991 effort was that Liz had NO storylines AT ALL.)

Steve

Oh yeah, I also love Forever Knight, especially the first two years--that one also went downhill drastically in year 3.

G.

Well, I agree with Jonathan Frid on this one. hoDS would have benefited from a lot more atmosphere and character development, and a lot less red stuff running out of every orifice onscreen.

As I've said before, as my sister and I were taking our seats in the theatre back in the Summer of 1970 when we saw the movie, I heard one guy ask his friend what he thought of it, and the latter summed the whole thing up with terse eloquence:  "lotsa teeth, lotsa blood."  Maybe that level of gratuitous violence helped make it a hit for MGM, but I have read that hoDS and the resulting parental protests led to a lot of ABC affiliates around the US dropping the series.

I read an interview that Mr. Frid gave in Baltimore's City Paper in the 1980s or 1990s, I believe, in which he characterized the violence in hoDS as pornographic (or words to that effect), and said that the "realism" of the movie robbed the story of its fantastic qualities that had made it so special in the first place.

I also have an interview with Grayson Hall from 1973 in which she says that Jonathan did not want to play a vampire any longer.  I wondered whether he had it written into his contract that he would not have to do any further fanging scenes on the show since there were none after the Roxanne storyline in 1840.

In my opinion, the hoDS director's preference for sensationalism over storytelling was also what ruined the 1991 Dark Shadows series, particularly as it went on in the later episodes.

G.

Hi Sweetie,

In the script posted on the "Barnabas Undead" site, Ang [spoiler]pops up shortly after Barn leaves his coffin in episode 1.  She has a couple of scenes thereafter where she pops up and makes trouble.[/spoiler] I alas don't recall very much--it really seemed very sophomoric stuff to me.

FWIW, the treatment of the character seemed to owe something to another popular WB series, Charmed.  Forgive me if once again I seem "negative."  Pollyanna ain't my middle name.

xo la Tuftress

Oh God. Are you saying that WAS the real pilot script they had on there?

That thing read like an old MAD Magazine skit on Dark Shadows. not one of their better skits, either.

I guess time will tell as regards the New WB Dark Shadows.

G.

Ooh baby!  I know most folks don't care for the heavy use of eyeliner on DS, but Julia and Tom look absolutely combustible here, and the makeup really helps.

It gives the actors the look of heroes in one of those tragic sex dramas of the early 1930s, before the RC church invoked the Hays code and the movie moguls made all the men put their shirts back on (but then Errol came in and the shirts started flying off again, hooray hooray).

Julia looks particularly sultry in her closeup paired with Nicholas, and I love Tom's eee-vil grin.  why do I suspect that Julia's neck wasn't the *only* thing he had on his mind to take a bite of???

Great closeups of Clarice and Joan, too.

G.

Boy, Our Lad Briscoe really threw his all into Tom's Last Stand!  Love those fanging snapshots!

Last night I was re-watching one of my favorite movies, Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and I had to wonder whether Don Briscoe ever saw it.  Ferdy Mayne uses a tongue-twixt-teeth technique a couple of times that is somewhat reminscent of Our Don's.  I don't think Don did "the tongue thing" until [spoiler]Tom's return visit on the series.[/spoiler]