Spent the weekend browsing the old show. YouTube has quite a bit, if you have the patience to weed out the Johnny Depp- Tim Burton overwhelming publicity. YouTube has quite a few clips from the old show, including one with the very beginning. Fan club events and interviews, from then and a few from now.
I saw a few clips that might have been from the short run evening version with Ben Cross as Barnabas. I didn't look at those.
What I did not see anything of, is the two movies they made from the show: Dark Shadows and House of Dark Shadows. Not surprising. The movies were pretty bad. By the time the movies were made, the show had lost focus and was campy. Blood and guts and 'boos' and very little story. An adventure into variations of time travel and ghosts and vampires and werewolfs and anything else 'not normal'. It created a lifelong interest in these things for me, led me to some good reading that led to better research that led to more reading that leads to more research.
Interesting the bizarre storylines were, and even educational. Entertaining they often were not.
Over time, everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that Dark Shadows didn't start out as a vampire-and-werewolf chiller and thriller.
It started out as a Gothic Romance.
"My name is Victoria Winters.My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me.and link my past to my future."
Victoria Winters, you see, is an orphan. She has been pulled out of her orphanage to be a governess in a big old house by the sea. The residents of the house consist of an angry young boy, an angsty teenaged girl (and could anyone be more angsty than a teen in the late 60s?), the boy's drunken irresponsible father and the girl's mother who hasn't left the house for nearly twenty years.
Pure Gothic as far as genre goes. Nowadays cliched, but back then the genre was undergoing a revival. (Maybe as an outlet for all that built-up angst?)
It took Barnabas almost a year to appear. The first few months were dedicated to straight out mysterious events that had logical explanations. Then the supernatural began creeping in -- ghosts and premonitions and dreams.
Oh my lord, the Dream! I don't remember the details of the dream, but the storyline was that each person would have the dream, but each person added something to it. And when the next person had the dream, the last person who'd had it died. It was one of the most intricate and well developed plot arcs I have ever watched grow daily. Just seeing bits of it, and sometimes the actors, can give me thrill-chills because it was such a creepy story. (It was also a good way to kill off a bunch of characters that no longer fit, which as an author, I appreciate today and didn't realize then.)
The Barnabas-Josette- Jeremiah- Angelique story was well done as well. The ghost stepping out of her picture and opening her music box and waltzing through the big empty room. WOW! This story would be reworked over and over again throughout the show, but the first incarnation was damned good storytelling. So were a few of the others as Barnabas keeps going back to try and change the past, and Angelique or/and her cohorts follow to prevent him from doing so.
This is pretty much where the evening television remake started, and they didn't do a bad job with it. I would have continued watching. But too many people turned it off or turned away from it when it wasn't played for thrills or laughs. A common complaint was that there was too much sex.
Really? It was a soap opera. Or a Gothic Romance. Romance IS usually about sex, is it not? And exactly why was Angelique so obsessed with Barnabas? If it had just been for his money or his standing, his brother would have fit the bill just as well. No, she wanted Barnabas, and it wasn't so she'd have someone to talk to during meals.
So much good drama in there. Good plotlines, good story arcs.
It's a shame that it is being remembered as camp and memorialized for new generations as a comedy. although I don't mind the laughs. From what I've seen, they are mostly clever, if campy, laughs.
But I sure do wish they'd revive the "it was a dark and stormy night" genre of serials. The endings are so much more satisfactory than the endings to the current reality spooky shows.
Badly made by today's standards (and even their own) but entertaining and mysterious and fun.
I guess that's what most people remember -- the fun.
I saw a few clips that might have been from the short run evening version with Ben Cross as Barnabas. I didn't look at those.
What I did not see anything of, is the two movies they made from the show: Dark Shadows and House of Dark Shadows. Not surprising. The movies were pretty bad. By the time the movies were made, the show had lost focus and was campy. Blood and guts and 'boos' and very little story. An adventure into variations of time travel and ghosts and vampires and werewolfs and anything else 'not normal'. It created a lifelong interest in these things for me, led me to some good reading that led to better research that led to more reading that leads to more research.
Interesting the bizarre storylines were, and even educational. Entertaining they often were not.
Over time, everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that Dark Shadows didn't start out as a vampire-and-werewolf chiller and thriller.
It started out as a Gothic Romance.
"My name is Victoria Winters.My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me.and link my past to my future."
Victoria Winters, you see, is an orphan. She has been pulled out of her orphanage to be a governess in a big old house by the sea. The residents of the house consist of an angry young boy, an angsty teenaged girl (and could anyone be more angsty than a teen in the late 60s?), the boy's drunken irresponsible father and the girl's mother who hasn't left the house for nearly twenty years.
Pure Gothic as far as genre goes. Nowadays cliched, but back then the genre was undergoing a revival. (Maybe as an outlet for all that built-up angst?)
It took Barnabas almost a year to appear. The first few months were dedicated to straight out mysterious events that had logical explanations. Then the supernatural began creeping in -- ghosts and premonitions and dreams.
Oh my lord, the Dream! I don't remember the details of the dream, but the storyline was that each person would have the dream, but each person added something to it. And when the next person had the dream, the last person who'd had it died. It was one of the most intricate and well developed plot arcs I have ever watched grow daily. Just seeing bits of it, and sometimes the actors, can give me thrill-chills because it was such a creepy story. (It was also a good way to kill off a bunch of characters that no longer fit, which as an author, I appreciate today and didn't realize then.)
The Barnabas-Josette- Jeremiah- Angelique story was well done as well. The ghost stepping out of her picture and opening her music box and waltzing through the big empty room. WOW! This story would be reworked over and over again throughout the show, but the first incarnation was damned good storytelling. So were a few of the others as Barnabas keeps going back to try and change the past, and Angelique or/and her cohorts follow to prevent him from doing so.
This is pretty much where the evening television remake started, and they didn't do a bad job with it. I would have continued watching. But too many people turned it off or turned away from it when it wasn't played for thrills or laughs. A common complaint was that there was too much sex.
Really? It was a soap opera. Or a Gothic Romance. Romance IS usually about sex, is it not? And exactly why was Angelique so obsessed with Barnabas? If it had just been for his money or his standing, his brother would have fit the bill just as well. No, she wanted Barnabas, and it wasn't so she'd have someone to talk to during meals.
So much good drama in there. Good plotlines, good story arcs.
It's a shame that it is being remembered as camp and memorialized for new generations as a comedy. although I don't mind the laughs. From what I've seen, they are mostly clever, if campy, laughs.
But I sure do wish they'd revive the "it was a dark and stormy night" genre of serials. The endings are so much more satisfactory than the endings to the current reality spooky shows.
Badly made by today's standards (and even their own) but entertaining and mysterious and fun.
I guess that's what most people remember -- the fun.
