Dark Shadows was neither fish nor fowl, though it might arguably
have been bat. Neither a traditional soap opera nor a prime-time broadcast
fantasy program, the show had a quirky freshness that captured the interest of
America’s kids in the late 1960s.
That success seemed somewhat
accidental. Beginning June 27, 1966, on ABC, Dark Shadows was at first just a gothic story of the type
frequently consumed in paperback form by the housewives who presumably still
made up most of the audience for daytime soaps.
The brainchild of producer Dan
Curtis and a descendent of the Jane
Eyre/Turn of the Screw school of literature, the show featured a mysterious
Maine mansion and a vaguely imperiled governess named Victoria Winters. Curtis
purportedly came up with the idea for the show in a dream about an enigmatic
young woman on a train.
It wasn’t until 200 episodes into
its run that kids began to race home from school to catch the show, which aired
at 3 p.m. central time. That’s when vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) arrived
to kick the show’s most outré elements into high gear.
The Universal monsters of the
1940s were popular with children through Late Show airings and the Famous
Monsters of Filmland magazine, and the soap opera capitalized on that, offering
not only a vampire but witches, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, time travel and
parallel universes.
The show had various
reincarnations in other media, including a contemporaneous Gold Key comic book
series illustrated by long-time Martian Manhunter artist Joe Certa. Frankly,
the soap, with its cheap production values and windy plots, was never quite as
good as we wanted it to be. The comic book, freed from the show’s protracted
story lines, was better, and in fact outlasted the TV show by five years,
running through 1976.
The semi-sympathetic portrayal of
Barnabas marked something of a milestone in popular culture, pointing the way
toward all the subsequent stories that would present vampires not as mere
monsters but primarily as tragic victims.
Barnabas’s nemesis, the witch
Angelique (a/k/a Cassandra), was a favorite of mine. She was played by the beautiful
Lara Parker, who also left a legacy in another milestone of fantasy television.
Parker portrayed Laura Banner, the wife of Dr. David Banner, in the 1977 pilot
for The Incredible Hulk TV series.
Never heard and seen only in an opening dream sequence, her role nevertheless
provided a touching and powerful dramatic impetus to the story. Because Dr.
Banner (Bill Bixby) hadn’t had sufficient strength to save her during a car
crash, he became obsessed with the research that would trigger his tragedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment