Why I hated the night-time DS
Voice of Sweet Lorraine
Eric Newman wrote:
On 31 Dec 2000 00:03:01 GMT, joey...@aol.com (Joeytrom) wrote:
>One thing I could never figure out is...How was Daphne related to Liz
and
>Roger?
>
>She apparently was the neice of both of them..so Liz and Roger must
have had a
>brother..but they forgot all about this.
In at least one review I saw, Rebecca Staab's character was listed as
"Daphne Stoddard," so maybe she was Liz's niece by marriage (i.e.,
Paul's niece).
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Oddly enough, one of the complaints, that Vicki was the 1990
reincarnation of Josette, and not Maggie, is probably the one thing that
seemed to make sense in the second program, because it's borrowed
directly from the plotline in the earliest days of the original DS.
Vicki DID have a mystical connection to Josette in the very beginning,
and it was strongly implied that she was, indeed, a blood descendant of
the generic brunette in the Old House portrait. (Which eventually went
out the window, with any hope of revelation that Elizabeth was Vicki's
real mother, and the switch from Josette's being a genuine genetic
ancestress of the Collins family, to being just a short-lived bride.)
Maggie had never even been MENTIONED as resembling ANYONE in the Collins
family up until that time--- even the fact that Kathryn Leigh Scott
happened to play the "dancing ghost" of Josette was simply a matter of
convenient timing. She was available that day, and brunette, and,
swathed under those veils, could have been anyone, except maybe Nancy
Barrett, who was visibly more petite than either Scott or Alexandra
Moltke, and, probably, would have been obvious, even with a
dark wig.
Maybe, by the time Barnabas was introduced, Curtis et. al. had already
considered the concept of having Vicki and Josette somehow confronting
each other, but their budget didn't permit whatever tricks the
prime-time "Patty Duke Show" used to show "Patty and Cathy" playing a
scene "together" and making it look good.
Using Maggie as the Josette reincarnation solved any such problem by the
time the 1795 storyline was put together, but having the living Josette
and Vicki at odds put a crimp in the established relationship between
the ghost and the governess--- the former closeness was rubbed out. The
1991 version restored some of the sympathy.
What else I didn't appreciate about the 1991 DS: what you already
mentioned about the sexed-up relationships, Willie as a dim bulb, the
near-omnipotence of Angelique over events (whose new status may have
owed more, to both the 1970 "parallel-time" corrupt version of the
original character, and the horny harpy of NoDS, than what one would
consider the "essential", flawed-but-sometimes-sympathetic familiar
model). . .
Oh, yes, and those rather ugly, totally non-18th-century style
portraits! (With all
that money to throw around, one might THINK some of it would have gone
to commissioning paintings by someone more familiar with that era in
portraiture. Along with not using any actors from the older series,
apparently nobody thought to seek out any of the painters who had worked
on DS 20 years earlier.)
I could go on and on. Still, I saw just some of this, and read about
the rest. I wish it would be re-run at least once more, just for
comparison purposes. (Don't think I'll be springing for the MPI tapes,
though.)
V.o.S.L.
Tony Ning Lew
Voice of Sweet Lorraine <aquila...@erols.com> wrote:
>I could go on and on. Still, I saw just some of this, and read about
>the rest. I wish it would be re-run at least once more, just for
>comparison purposes. (Don't think I'll be springing for the MPI tapes,
>though.)
Unfortunately, I don't think you'll be seeing them on Sci-Fi.
I read sometime back that they no longer have the syndication
rights. Does anyone know who has?
>
>V.o.S.L.
>