The fascination with Angelique is classic, and very simple.  Everybody loves a really good, no-holds-barred villain.  I thought Parker's work in the role went way beyond portrayal... she MOLDED Angelique to the unscrupulous, obsessed Witch we all loved to hate.  I think as Connie said, this was really true of all the DS actors and their characters.  At least it is certainly true of the people she mentioned, because they were simply very extraordinary actors.  The eccentric elan with which they lived their lives offstage bled through into the sizzle and spark they gave their characterizations before the cameras.

I can never really chose a favorite, but if I had to select a favorite Barnabas/Angelique scene, it would be the showdown between Cassandra and her erstwhile hubby in the Old House after Nicholas has removed her powers.  In less than a page of dialogue, they covered all the insanity of the emotional ups and downs these two went through with one another.  And both Parker and Frid played it brilliantly.  I still remember watching that as a child--glued to the tube doesn't begin to describe it!

G.

Thanks for posting that, O Mysterious One.  I don't remember having seen it before (now, I may have seen it, but with the kind of amnesia I'm coping with, it's entirely likely that I did see it and have plum forgotten.  As my beloved Great Grandmother said:  "Don't git old!")

I had to laugh when reading that, given that the Dark Shadows ratings were going up again in February-March of 1971, and the ABC executive board members at the March board meeting expressed concern that the network was shutting down such a popular, high profile series.

Substitute "who had followed" with "who had worked upon" in your card, and it does get a bit closer to the truth...

G.

Hey Jennifer, no, you're not alone in being less than thrilled with all this.  I personally have adopted a wait and see attitude about all of it.  Given the talent they're raking in for it, I'm becoming morbidly curious about just how awful it might be.  It could turn out to be an unintentionally hilarious send-up, particularly with "Molly Dodd" as Liz and "Muad-dib"as Barnabas, especially if they are using the script posted on Barnabas-Undead.  Ever imagine DS with Keno and IHOP jokes?  Well, fasten your seat belts.

And who knows, maybe the Frog Fromage crew will surprise us all and create something more exciting than we could ever have imagined!  I must confess that I don't hold out much hope for the latter.  I saw more than I would have cared to of the WB's hatchet job on Tarzan (my housemate became addicted to that thing), and I shudder to think of 9 weeks of something along these lines with a DS label stuck on it.

G.

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