This is why I watch Spanish Soaps.
Posted on 12/08/2009 10:01:13 AM PST by Zakeet
I havne’t seen As the world turns since I was 15 years old was still on the air
Zakeet it well known fact that soap opera is dying art
As will my 82 YO mother. During the summers, I'd watch her soaps with her. I soon learned that you only had to watch Fridays, and the following Monday, to stay up with all the major plot lines. Tuesdays through Thursdays were merely filler.
So it’s not surprising that something that started off with the title “Guiding Light” (now what would THAT mean?) was the first to go.
It was the oldest to go, actually---The Guiding Light was the longest-lived broadcast series in history tracing back to its birth in radio in 1937 on NBC; and, if I'm not mistaken, it was the first radio soap to move to television and the only such radio soap to prove to have staying power on television, for whatever that was worth.
The show's creator/writer, Irna Phillips (who had created but lost the rights to arguably the first successful radio soap, Painted Dreams), hooked the original around the two families---the Rutledge family, whose head was a widowed church minister who'd come to an uneasily melting-pot town called Five Points, a hybrid of Poles, Slavs, Germans, Irish, Jews, Swedes; and, the Kransky family, whose head owned a pawnshop and whose daughter's friendship with a Rutledge daughter linked the two families.
The title of the show had a double reference: it alluded to how the town came to see Rev. Rutledge himself, and to a candle in his study window that indicated he was available to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to him.
The Kranskys were moved in due course to their own radio soap, The Right to Happiness, and the Rutledge focus began to change when Arthur Peterson, who played the reverend, went off to serve in World War II, and the focus began to shift toward a physician; Rev. Rutledge had been written out of the show for Peterson's service as having gone off to serve as an Army chaplain, and when Peterson returned Rutledge became a hospital chaplain and a lesser focus figure. By 1952, a new family, the Bauers (if you were a fan of The Guiding Light, you knew the Bauers were figuring heavily in the show's stories for three decades after the soap moved to television), had become the central family, the show had made its television transition (the two overlapped radio and television until 1956), and The Guiding Light was well enough established as another scandal-and-melodrama offering.
In its earlier radio heyday, however, Phillips wasn't shy about busting the soap formulae taking hold even then, going so far as to hook entire episodes (the radio version ran fifteen minutes a day, as did most of the radio soaps and, truth to be told, no few classic radio comedies such as Amos 'n' Andy, The Goldbergs, Easy Aces, and Lum & Abner) around a Rev. Rutledge sermon and its suggestions through others around town. She even worked her staff organist, Bernice Yanocek, into the show---Yanocek provided the music for several soaps Phillips had going at the same time, but for The Guiding Light Phillips sometimes had Yanocek playing the church music attributed to Mary Rutledge for her father's church.
Phillips was considered a rival to Frank and Anne Hummert for producing radio soaps but she was a different operator---she did most of the writing herself (the Hummerts had staff writers for their soaps) and worked by plotting as many as six soaps at once, dictating to her secretary and even acting out scenes (Phillips had first hit Chicago, then a major radio production hub, as an actress). She also did her best to avoid the kind of herky-jerky, melodramatic transitions typical of a Hummert soap (The Romance of Helen Trent was just the signature among their repertory).
(How do I know all this? Easy. I'm an old-time radio nut and, while not exactly a fan of the radio soaps, I have a few reference volumes, including and especially Mr. John Dunning's On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, that give plenty of detail about The Guiding Light and other radio soaps and their masterminds. When The Guiding Light was canceled in September, I couldn't resist a tribute to its longevity by satirising, on my own radio show (I have one Monday nights in Las Vegas), an original script from the radio version, from 1952 (the Rutledges were long enough gone as a major focus), in a routine called "The Groping Dark" . . .)
Vote he still on the show
Well my mom watch Spanish speaking soaps they are good LOL!
Vote he still on the show
Well my mom watch Spanish speaking soaps they are good LOL!
At one time I watched all four soaps on CBS.. then they ruined Guiding Light with that STUPID shooting format... (hand held camera all outdoor scenes and extreme closeups and shaky lense)... it was terrible and I stopped watching what had been an excellent soap for a long time (with some really dumb story lines the last few years)... they then tried some of the same shooting formats on ATWT and they also went to some very bad writing, let some of the best actors (Martha Byrne) go and shoved the veterans to the background and I stopped watching it... I got sick of the same ole same ole on B&B and stopped watching it and just this year pretty much quit Y&R for the same reasons I quit B&B.
All the old soap operas will go off the air then be replaced by the hugely popular ones broadcast in Spanish.
This is why I watch Spanish Soaps.
Yeah my mom remember her on Soaps back in da day like late 1980s into early 1990s she was good at it she was teen actress at one time
My mom watching current Univision soap like Sortiago come on 6pm our time zone on Dish network I watching Telumnudo they have English subtiles I watching Dona Barbara with English subtiles
That was good soap
What about Passion that soap was freaky ROFL
If you like continuous weirdness, try out Nip/Tuck. The first season was pretty good, but then it disintegrated into the most unbelievable plots one could imagine.
In fact, I really liked that first season, and was pleased when my daughter gave me the box set for Christmas that year.
I think I'll ask her for the 1st season of Sons of Anarchy, if she can get it cheap. Hopefully, Season 2 will be out in time for Father's Day. ;^)
My wife is watching that one, I just peak in when the hot babes come on the screen.
It is good I hearing rumor from one of my co worker who speak Spanish Univision is in negotiaton to put English subtiles for the soap aka Telumundo personally if they do that I be watch Univision I think their soaps are better than English speaking soaps
I’ve been thinking for years, that Univision was stupid for not including English subtitles on their soaps. Mexican soaps are huge over in Eastern Europe, especially Russia.
I hear story that Chechens want see the finale of this one soap and did the Russians so they stop fighting each other for one night ROFL
A handy site for all things broadcast, both radio and television.
http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=soapopera
SOAP OPERA
The term “soap opera” was coined by the American press in the 1930s to denote the extraordinarily popular genre of serialized domestic radio dramas, which, by 1940, represented some 90% of all commercially-sponsored daytime broadcast hours. The “soap” in soap opera alluded to their sponsorship by manufacturers of household cleaning products; while “opera” suggested an ironic incongruity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms. In the United States, the term continues to be applied primarily to the approximately fifty hours each week of daytime serial television drama broadcast by ABC, NBC, and CBS, but the meanings of the term, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, exceed this generic designation.
snip
I never knew that Abb
BOY stuff you learn on FR every day
A few other stories about Phillips:
* She's said to have fired her first As the World Turns lead actress, Helen Wagner, after only six months . . . because she didn't like the way Wagner poured coffee.* Whenever she saw an As the World Turns episode she didn't particularly like, she'd call the show's production office. When the receptionist answered, "As the World Turns, Phillips was likely to reply, "Not today, it didn't!"
* Another ATWT actress, Kay Campbell (who'd once been a mainstay on legendary radio soap Ma Perkins), was so shaken by the way Phillips abused actress Rosemary Prinz over a scene whose performance Phillips thought lame, that when she was offered a role on The Guiding Light she refused it---until she learned Phillips's protege, Agnes Nixon, was going to be running the soap. (It turned out a wise move: Campbell eventually relented when Nixon asked her to come out of retirement to join All My Children, playing matriarch Kate Martin until her death in an auto accident in 1985.)
* Agnes Nixon herself said, "Irna was her own best creation."
* Phillips was reluctant to allow CBS to start filming The Guiding Light in colour in the mid-1950s---so much so that she sabotaged the network's plan by arranging the entire episode to take place in an operating room, guaranteeing most of the colour was bright white and ruining CBS's try at a new colour technique.
* ATWT star Eileen Fulton was stunned one day when she accidentally dropped her script and actor Don McLaughlin all but dove to retrieve it before it landed on the floor, telling her, "A Phillips script, like the American flag, should never touch the floor!"
Not all Phillips's idiosyncratic moves were somewhere between arbitrary and brain-damaged. She created a television soap, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, in 1967 . . . and walked away from her creation when network censors turned down a storyline involving an Amerasian woman and a white man that referenced the film that inspired the soap. The soap was originally co-produced by CBS and 20th Century Fox, but when Phillips walked Fox backed out and CBS moved the soap to New York and away from the studio orchestra soundtrack Fox used in favour of the still-standard piano-and-organ music. The soap stayed on the air until 1975.
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