DARK SHADOWS
Hello, all you happy people! How do I know you’re happy? Because it’s a brand new month and there’s a brand new Odd Review out! You’re, like, reading it right now! And if that’s not enough to be happy about, I don’t know what you can do about it!
But this is everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, here saying “Hi” and “welcome to the column”! See? That was me right there who said that. And just in case you don’t know what goes on here, I’d better tell ya that my job is to find cool and/or strange stuff that you may not remember, or may not be aware of, dust it off a little bit, and show it to you!
I don’t usually bother trying to be timely and tropical…I mean topical, slight error, sorry. However, the timing on this particular article was too perfect to prevent its posting. Or, in other words, it’s October, Halloween time, and the season for all things creepy, spooky, and sinister! Therefore, it is the perfect time to talk about a classic gothic soap opera called Dark Shadows!
Surely you’ve heard of Dark Shadows. That’s the old soap opera with all the witches and ghosts and werewolves and, of course, iconic vampire, Barnabas Collins. And that’s not all! Other weird and twisted story elements involved travelling into the past, and the future, and even parallel dimensions! Sadly, the show had run its course before I came along. Sure, I’ve seen a few reruns here and there, but not enough to really understand what was going on. Most of what I knew about the show, I had heard from my older relatives and it convinced me that I had missed out on something!
Fortunately for me, the show is now on DVD, and available on Netflix! The show developed a cult following, and the standard fan opinion is that the show didn’t get good until Barnabas was introduced. But I wanted to see it from the very beginning! So I’ve been renting Dark Shadows: the Beginning, and I’m proud to say that I’ve recently finished it! So now I’m gonna tell ya about Dark Shadows Before Barnabas.
The show started off as a pretty normal soap opera, but heavy on the gothic elements normally associated with Victorian romances. We start off by meeting Victoria Winters, a young lady who grew up in an orphanage, who is taking the train to Collinsport, Maine to accept a job as a governess. On the train she bumps into Burke Devlin, a man who went to jail for a hit-and-run murder that he didn’t commit and has now come back to Collinsport for—bum-bum-BU-U-UM!—revenge!
Victoria finds her way to Collinwood, the beautifully drab and forbidding ancestral home of the Collins family, where she meets her employer, Mrs. Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard, the stern but likeable matron of the Collins family. Mrs. Stoddard has not left estate for eighteen years, when her husband Paul mysteriously vanished. Elizabeth’s grown-up daughter, Carolyn, is an eat-drink-and-be-merry girl and a total spoiled brat who only wants what she can’t have and doesn’t appreciate what she does have until it’s lost to her. Elizabeth’s brother, Roger Collins, is a smug, arrogant, proud weasel of a man with an inexplicable English accent. Roger has a nine-year-old son named David, who is the creepy and thoroughly unlikable child Victoria has been hired to tutor and supervise and…whatever else governess’s are supposed to do.
Now get this, it turns out that Roger Collins is actually responsible for the hit-and-run death that Burke Devlin went to jail for. Burke has come back to Collinsport announcing left and right that he has come back to wreak his righteous revenge on Roger. Which is pretty dumb, because when the brakes on Roger’s car get tampered with, Burke instantly becomes Suspect Number One, even though he didn’t do that either.
Ya want to know who did it? It was his nine-year-old son, David! See, the two of them don’t get along AT ALL, and David sabotaged his father’s car as a pre-emptive strike cuz he is constantly afraid of being “sent away”. Not only did he try to kill his own father, but he then tried to plant evidence to frame two different people for it! But, you know, he’s a Collins, so Liz Stoddard covered the whole thing up.
But there’s still plenty of unresolved business, especially between Burke and Roger. So Burke keeps making threats and insinuations until he finally ticks off Liz Stoddard’s right-hand man, Bill Malloy. I LIKED Bill Malloy! He didn’t put up with any crap. He wanted to resolve the business between Burke and Roger before Burke caused enough trouble to ruin Liz Stoddard (if I recall correctly he was in love with her and wanted to marry her). So he tracked down the witness, a local artist and town drunk, Sam Evans, and arranged a meeting for a big, dramatic confrontation between Burke, Roger, and Sam. But on the night of this big meeting…Bill Malloy mysteriously vanished!
He was found floating in the water at the foot of the cliffs where Collinwood JUST HAPPENS to overlook. Somebody killed him to drag the story out, and it sure worked! Was it Sam Evans, who didn’t want to admit his part in the cover-up? Was it Roger Collins, who didn’t want to go to jail for manslaughter and lying under oath? No! It was Matthew, the old and mentally unbalanced handyman who is maniacally loyal to Liz Stoddard! …Say whaaa? And you know who stumbled onto this fact? Victoria Winters (remember her?), governess, eternal optimist, and token damsel-in-distress!
Matthew kidnaps her and ties her up in a secret room in the old mansion on the Collinwood estate. The only one who knows he’s hiding out there is young David Collins, who likes to hang out at the old house and talk to ghosts. I told ya he was a creepy kid! Anyway, Matthew managed to elude the police, but gets scared to death by the ghosts that haunt the old house.
Before anyone has time to draw in a breath of relief, Roger’s estranged wife, Laura Murdock Collins, returns to Collinsport. She’s been away to an asylum for years, but now she’s back to finalize a divorce and gain custody of David. Except, there’s more to it then that. She’s not really Laura Collins. She’s surrounded by all sorts of weird coincidences, mostly involving fires. She’s completely enthralled by fires, and actually spends most of her time staring into the fireplace. When she’s not doing that, she’s trying very hard to avoid answering questions.
It turns out she’s some supernatural thing, apparently some weird variation of a Phoenix. Every hundred years there’s a Laura Murdock-something who died in a fire with a child. Apparently she needs the child as part of her phoenix-type regeneration process, this time around, she’s after David.
Laura Collins put Liz Stoddard into a magically-induced coma that baffles all the doctors, who eventually move her to a hospital in some other city. The family lawyer, Frank Garner (well, ok, he’s actually the SON of the family lawyer, but he’s part of the firm, too). …Where was I? Oh yeah! So, the family lawyer, Frank Garner, who has a weak romantic tie to Victoria Winters, suddenly becomes considerably cooler because he knows a parapsychologist who he calls in to help treat Liz Stoddard.
The parapsychologist is Dr. Peter Guthrie (one of my favorite characters on the show so far!). He doesn’t believe 100% in all the occult stuff, and treats the whole thing with the scientific method. But he’s the one who figures out that Laura Collins is actually a blood-sucking succubus-bitch from Hell. …Well, ok, that’s just my little pet name for her…I wonder if I can say that in this column?
The part I didn’t understand was why everyone was trying to save David from Laura. NOBODY LIKED HIM! They kept saying things like, “We have to keep that innocent boy away from her!” Innocent? Did we forget that a hundred episodes ago he tried to kill his own father and frame two other characters for it?!
But, they do save him, and Laura burns up all by herself, presumably this means she will not return in the future. In the past maybe, but not in the future. Anyway, Laura fries and Liz is magically all better and upset that they took her out of the house. So she returns to Collinwood…
Just in time to meet an old “friend” named Jason Maguire, who knows Liz’s terrible secret about her missing husband and why she never leaves the house. Apparently she killed him and had Jason bury him in the basement, which totally blows some of my theories out of the water. Anyway, Jason is here to chisel a bunch of money out of Liz, and has blackmailed her into letting him and his partner, Willie Loomis, stay at Collinwood…much to the annoyance of everyone else who lives there.
Willie Loomis is a total shmuck who manages to ruffle the feathers of, like, EVERYONE else on the show inside of three episodes. He hits on all the girls and totally cheeses off the guys. He’s just a no-account punk and I really love it when he and Burke Devlin finally get into a fight down at the local bar. You know the good ol’ tough-guy line: “Two hits. Me hitting you, you hitting the floor?” Yeah, that’s about how the fight went. Burke totally cleaned his clock, didn’t break a sweat, didn’t even take his coat off! Burke is cool!
BUT! It turns out that it was a good thing they saved David after all. Why? Because he was inadvertently responsible for the arrival of Barnabas. See, he’s been telling Willie all these stories about his relatives and how many of them were buried with their jewels and medals and things. Well, Willie doesn’t have the patience for this long slow blackmail scheme of Jason Maguire’s. No sir, Willie is a grab-it-and-run kind of guy. He’s been advised to steal something that wouldn’t be missed. So he’s tracked down a crypt in a cemetery where members of the Collins family are buried…
And then that was the end of the set! Next up, we’ll be getting Dark Shadows: Collection One, which I understand is supposed to begin with the arrival of Barnabas.
Now, I’ve seen the show this far. I gotta say, it does NOT suck! Ok, it moves at a snail’s pace. If you only watch one episode, you kinda feel like nothing much happened. The show was on every weekday, but it was only a thirty-minute show. And a lot of that seemed to be devoted to re-capping whatever has been happening lately. And there are a LOT of episodes where characters seem to have the same conversations over and over and over again. You really want somebody to say “Why are you even bothering to ask me that? You’ve asked me that every episode for the past two weeks and I haven’t given you a straight answer yet, why do you think I’d start now?”
You often get the impression that the writer’s didn’t really have enough story to stretch it out as long as they wanted to. In fact, the plot I’ve just summed up for you took them about nine months to do. Seems to me it could have moved a little quicker. The special effects were cool and retro…a bit sad by modern standards perhaps, but for a daytime show in 1966 they were top-shelf!
Some actors messed up on their lines, the product of not enough rehearsals before taping. Or worse, having to read directly from cue cards! This totally messed up veteran film actors, like Joan Bennet, who played Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard, seemed to be the worst in this area. She’s supposed to be the big-time movie star adding credibility to the show! I guess she was used to more rehearsal time than the daily taping schedule allowed. She was still great, though!
Let’s see now…I’m up to somewhere in March of 1967 and the show was supposed to continue on to 1971 before getting dropped by the network, so there’s still lots more for me to watch. And luckily for fans, there is only one single, solitary episode that did not survive. There’s supposed to be an audio track somewhere that someone tried to construct an episode of still-images from, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. Still, that’s a pretty impressive statistic, considering there were over a thousand episodes of the original series!
Let’s see, the show was supposed to be created by producer Dan Curtis, inspired by a dream he had where some girl went on a trip to a creepy old house. Most of the folks in the show are known best for being on this show. But the guy playing Willie Loomis, John Karlen, might be remembered from the show Cagney and Lacey. And it turns out that Mitch Ryan, who plays Burke Devlin, is the bad guy in the first Lethal Weapon movie. And I’ve already mentioned that Joan Bennet was a movie star before she got on the show.
Anyway, what it comes to is that the show is brilliant. It’s a little tedious in places, with the backtracking in case you missed an episode. It’s also a little annoying some of the stupid things certain characters put up with. And I really wish there had been more to the scene when Burke beat up Willie. But the show is really good, and I can’t wait to see what happens next! People keep telling me the show didn’t get good until Barnabas showed up. Well, I don’t think that’s really true, but I do hope it means that it will get even better!
Here’s an interesting tidbit I came across on my research. Apparently the show was doing pretty badly up to this point. The network was going to cancel the show. So the writers and producers said “Oh well, let’s go out with a bang! Let’s throw in a vampire!” So they came up with Barnabas Collins and hired classic Shakespearean actor, Jonathan Frid for one thirteen-week storyline, expecting the character—and the show—to end. Of course, fans know that Barnabas remained a regular on the show until it was finally cancelled in 1971. Ain’t that always the way it works out?
I almost forgot to mention that the show was so popular that it spawned comic books, tie-in novels, audio-novels, and two movies featuring members of the original cast. In 1991 MGM tried to re-make the show to air on NBC…but it didn’t work I guess. I think you can see all the episodes of the 90’s series on YouTube. In 2004 the WB produced a pilot that was never picked up. Current internet rumors state that Johnny Depp and Tim Burton are planning a new movie inspired by the classic series.
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to give this a rating! Well, it’s pretty darn good, but there is room for improvement. So, let’s see what my handy-dandy D&D percentage dice have to say. In case you don’t know, percentage dice are two ten-sided dice used to randomly determine a number between zero-one (how can you stand it?!) and double-zero, which actually stands for one hundred (how can you stand to be without it?!). So I’ll just roll the dice like this…
Hello, all you happy people! How do I know you’re happy? Because it’s a brand new month and there’s a brand new Odd Review out! You’re, like, reading it right now! And if that’s not enough to be happy about, I don’t know what you can do about it!
But this is everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, here saying “Hi” and “welcome to the column”! See? That was me right there who said that. And just in case you don’t know what goes on here, I’d better tell ya that my job is to find cool and/or strange stuff that you may not remember, or may not be aware of, dust it off a little bit, and show it to you!
I don’t usually bother trying to be timely and tropical…I mean topical, slight error, sorry. However, the timing on this particular article was too perfect to prevent its posting. Or, in other words, it’s October, Halloween time, and the season for all things creepy, spooky, and sinister! Therefore, it is the perfect time to talk about a classic gothic soap opera called Dark Shadows!
Surely you’ve heard of Dark Shadows. That’s the old soap opera with all the witches and ghosts and werewolves and, of course, iconic vampire, Barnabas Collins. And that’s not all! Other weird and twisted story elements involved travelling into the past, and the future, and even parallel dimensions! Sadly, the show had run its course before I came along. Sure, I’ve seen a few reruns here and there, but not enough to really understand what was going on. Most of what I knew about the show, I had heard from my older relatives and it convinced me that I had missed out on something!
Fortunately for me, the show is now on DVD, and available on Netflix! The show developed a cult following, and the standard fan opinion is that the show didn’t get good until Barnabas was introduced. But I wanted to see it from the very beginning! So I’ve been renting Dark Shadows: the Beginning, and I’m proud to say that I’ve recently finished it! So now I’m gonna tell ya about Dark Shadows Before Barnabas.
The show started off as a pretty normal soap opera, but heavy on the gothic elements normally associated with Victorian romances. We start off by meeting Victoria Winters, a young lady who grew up in an orphanage, who is taking the train to Collinsport, Maine to accept a job as a governess. On the train she bumps into Burke Devlin, a man who went to jail for a hit-and-run murder that he didn’t commit and has now come back to Collinsport for—bum-bum-BU-U-UM!—revenge!
Victoria finds her way to Collinwood, the beautifully drab and forbidding ancestral home of the Collins family, where she meets her employer, Mrs. Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard, the stern but likeable matron of the Collins family. Mrs. Stoddard has not left estate for eighteen years, when her husband Paul mysteriously vanished. Elizabeth’s grown-up daughter, Carolyn, is an eat-drink-and-be-merry girl and a total spoiled brat who only wants what she can’t have and doesn’t appreciate what she does have until it’s lost to her. Elizabeth’s brother, Roger Collins, is a smug, arrogant, proud weasel of a man with an inexplicable English accent. Roger has a nine-year-old son named David, who is the creepy and thoroughly unlikable child Victoria has been hired to tutor and supervise and…whatever else governess’s are supposed to do.
Now get this, it turns out that Roger Collins is actually responsible for the hit-and-run death that Burke Devlin went to jail for. Burke has come back to Collinsport announcing left and right that he has come back to wreak his righteous revenge on Roger. Which is pretty dumb, because when the brakes on Roger’s car get tampered with, Burke instantly becomes Suspect Number One, even though he didn’t do that either.
Ya want to know who did it? It was his nine-year-old son, David! See, the two of them don’t get along AT ALL, and David sabotaged his father’s car as a pre-emptive strike cuz he is constantly afraid of being “sent away”. Not only did he try to kill his own father, but he then tried to plant evidence to frame two different people for it! But, you know, he’s a Collins, so Liz Stoddard covered the whole thing up.
But there’s still plenty of unresolved business, especially between Burke and Roger. So Burke keeps making threats and insinuations until he finally ticks off Liz Stoddard’s right-hand man, Bill Malloy. I LIKED Bill Malloy! He didn’t put up with any crap. He wanted to resolve the business between Burke and Roger before Burke caused enough trouble to ruin Liz Stoddard (if I recall correctly he was in love with her and wanted to marry her). So he tracked down the witness, a local artist and town drunk, Sam Evans, and arranged a meeting for a big, dramatic confrontation between Burke, Roger, and Sam. But on the night of this big meeting…Bill Malloy mysteriously vanished!
He was found floating in the water at the foot of the cliffs where Collinwood JUST HAPPENS to overlook. Somebody killed him to drag the story out, and it sure worked! Was it Sam Evans, who didn’t want to admit his part in the cover-up? Was it Roger Collins, who didn’t want to go to jail for manslaughter and lying under oath? No! It was Matthew, the old and mentally unbalanced handyman who is maniacally loyal to Liz Stoddard! …Say whaaa? And you know who stumbled onto this fact? Victoria Winters (remember her?), governess, eternal optimist, and token damsel-in-distress!
Matthew kidnaps her and ties her up in a secret room in the old mansion on the Collinwood estate. The only one who knows he’s hiding out there is young David Collins, who likes to hang out at the old house and talk to ghosts. I told ya he was a creepy kid! Anyway, Matthew managed to elude the police, but gets scared to death by the ghosts that haunt the old house.
Before anyone has time to draw in a breath of relief, Roger’s estranged wife, Laura Murdock Collins, returns to Collinsport. She’s been away to an asylum for years, but now she’s back to finalize a divorce and gain custody of David. Except, there’s more to it then that. She’s not really Laura Collins. She’s surrounded by all sorts of weird coincidences, mostly involving fires. She’s completely enthralled by fires, and actually spends most of her time staring into the fireplace. When she’s not doing that, she’s trying very hard to avoid answering questions.
It turns out she’s some supernatural thing, apparently some weird variation of a Phoenix. Every hundred years there’s a Laura Murdock-something who died in a fire with a child. Apparently she needs the child as part of her phoenix-type regeneration process, this time around, she’s after David.
Laura Collins put Liz Stoddard into a magically-induced coma that baffles all the doctors, who eventually move her to a hospital in some other city. The family lawyer, Frank Garner (well, ok, he’s actually the SON of the family lawyer, but he’s part of the firm, too). …Where was I? Oh yeah! So, the family lawyer, Frank Garner, who has a weak romantic tie to Victoria Winters, suddenly becomes considerably cooler because he knows a parapsychologist who he calls in to help treat Liz Stoddard.
The parapsychologist is Dr. Peter Guthrie (one of my favorite characters on the show so far!). He doesn’t believe 100% in all the occult stuff, and treats the whole thing with the scientific method. But he’s the one who figures out that Laura Collins is actually a blood-sucking succubus-bitch from Hell. …Well, ok, that’s just my little pet name for her…I wonder if I can say that in this column?
The part I didn’t understand was why everyone was trying to save David from Laura. NOBODY LIKED HIM! They kept saying things like, “We have to keep that innocent boy away from her!” Innocent? Did we forget that a hundred episodes ago he tried to kill his own father and frame two other characters for it?!
But, they do save him, and Laura burns up all by herself, presumably this means she will not return in the future. In the past maybe, but not in the future. Anyway, Laura fries and Liz is magically all better and upset that they took her out of the house. So she returns to Collinwood…
Just in time to meet an old “friend” named Jason Maguire, who knows Liz’s terrible secret about her missing husband and why she never leaves the house. Apparently she killed him and had Jason bury him in the basement, which totally blows some of my theories out of the water. Anyway, Jason is here to chisel a bunch of money out of Liz, and has blackmailed her into letting him and his partner, Willie Loomis, stay at Collinwood…much to the annoyance of everyone else who lives there.
Willie Loomis is a total shmuck who manages to ruffle the feathers of, like, EVERYONE else on the show inside of three episodes. He hits on all the girls and totally cheeses off the guys. He’s just a no-account punk and I really love it when he and Burke Devlin finally get into a fight down at the local bar. You know the good ol’ tough-guy line: “Two hits. Me hitting you, you hitting the floor?” Yeah, that’s about how the fight went. Burke totally cleaned his clock, didn’t break a sweat, didn’t even take his coat off! Burke is cool!
BUT! It turns out that it was a good thing they saved David after all. Why? Because he was inadvertently responsible for the arrival of Barnabas. See, he’s been telling Willie all these stories about his relatives and how many of them were buried with their jewels and medals and things. Well, Willie doesn’t have the patience for this long slow blackmail scheme of Jason Maguire’s. No sir, Willie is a grab-it-and-run kind of guy. He’s been advised to steal something that wouldn’t be missed. So he’s tracked down a crypt in a cemetery where members of the Collins family are buried…
And then that was the end of the set! Next up, we’ll be getting Dark Shadows: Collection One, which I understand is supposed to begin with the arrival of Barnabas.
Now, I’ve seen the show this far. I gotta say, it does NOT suck! Ok, it moves at a snail’s pace. If you only watch one episode, you kinda feel like nothing much happened. The show was on every weekday, but it was only a thirty-minute show. And a lot of that seemed to be devoted to re-capping whatever has been happening lately. And there are a LOT of episodes where characters seem to have the same conversations over and over and over again. You really want somebody to say “Why are you even bothering to ask me that? You’ve asked me that every episode for the past two weeks and I haven’t given you a straight answer yet, why do you think I’d start now?”
You often get the impression that the writer’s didn’t really have enough story to stretch it out as long as they wanted to. In fact, the plot I’ve just summed up for you took them about nine months to do. Seems to me it could have moved a little quicker. The special effects were cool and retro…a bit sad by modern standards perhaps, but for a daytime show in 1966 they were top-shelf!
Some actors messed up on their lines, the product of not enough rehearsals before taping. Or worse, having to read directly from cue cards! This totally messed up veteran film actors, like Joan Bennet, who played Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard, seemed to be the worst in this area. She’s supposed to be the big-time movie star adding credibility to the show! I guess she was used to more rehearsal time than the daily taping schedule allowed. She was still great, though!
Let’s see now…I’m up to somewhere in March of 1967 and the show was supposed to continue on to 1971 before getting dropped by the network, so there’s still lots more for me to watch. And luckily for fans, there is only one single, solitary episode that did not survive. There’s supposed to be an audio track somewhere that someone tried to construct an episode of still-images from, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. Still, that’s a pretty impressive statistic, considering there were over a thousand episodes of the original series!
Let’s see, the show was supposed to be created by producer Dan Curtis, inspired by a dream he had where some girl went on a trip to a creepy old house. Most of the folks in the show are known best for being on this show. But the guy playing Willie Loomis, John Karlen, might be remembered from the show Cagney and Lacey. And it turns out that Mitch Ryan, who plays Burke Devlin, is the bad guy in the first Lethal Weapon movie. And I’ve already mentioned that Joan Bennet was a movie star before she got on the show.
Anyway, what it comes to is that the show is brilliant. It’s a little tedious in places, with the backtracking in case you missed an episode. It’s also a little annoying some of the stupid things certain characters put up with. And I really wish there had been more to the scene when Burke beat up Willie. But the show is really good, and I can’t wait to see what happens next! People keep telling me the show didn’t get good until Barnabas showed up. Well, I don’t think that’s really true, but I do hope it means that it will get even better!
Here’s an interesting tidbit I came across on my research. Apparently the show was doing pretty badly up to this point. The network was going to cancel the show. So the writers and producers said “Oh well, let’s go out with a bang! Let’s throw in a vampire!” So they came up with Barnabas Collins and hired classic Shakespearean actor, Jonathan Frid for one thirteen-week storyline, expecting the character—and the show—to end. Of course, fans know that Barnabas remained a regular on the show until it was finally cancelled in 1971. Ain’t that always the way it works out?
I almost forgot to mention that the show was so popular that it spawned comic books, tie-in novels, audio-novels, and two movies featuring members of the original cast. In 1991 MGM tried to re-make the show to air on NBC…but it didn’t work I guess. I think you can see all the episodes of the 90’s series on YouTube. In 2004 the WB produced a pilot that was never picked up. Current internet rumors state that Johnny Depp and Tim Burton are planning a new movie inspired by the classic series.
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to give this a rating! Well, it’s pretty darn good, but there is room for improvement. So, let’s see what my handy-dandy D&D percentage dice have to say. In case you don’t know, percentage dice are two ten-sided dice used to randomly determine a number between zero-one (how can you stand it?!) and double-zero, which actually stands for one hundred (how can you stand to be without it?!). So I’ll just roll the dice like this…
…and end up with an eighty-three! Well, I guess I can live with that. I wonder if later parts of the series would rate higher? I may have to review them some time and find out!
But that’s all I’ve got for now, folks! So be sure to tune in next time when I talk about something else entirely! This is Everybody’s Buddy, Oddcube, signing off!
-----Your Buddy, Oddcube
Buy books. Mention this post when ordering any book from a Cyberwizard Productions imprint, and receive 10% off your next order.
