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As the World Turns - 20 episode set (1 Viewer)

Elena S

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Didn't see this posted anywhere around here, but Soap Classics has released a 20-episode DVD of "As the World Turns," including 5 eps of classic villains, 5 of weddings, 5 of ATWT through the years, and 5 scandals. You can go to www.soapclassics.com and watch clips of the eps. From what I can tell, they start with 1979. Aficionados of the show will recognize characters such as John Dixon, Margo Montgomery (Hughes), Lily Walsh, Bob & Kim, James Stenbeck, Barbara Ryan, etc., etc. The price is only $19.99, which is a bargain. So, does anybody here own this set? I'm wondering if the "episodes" are actually storylines strung together to make one cohesive story, or if they are random episodes containing particular scenes.
 

David Rain

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They are full-length episodes spanning the history of the series. Supposedly, Proctor & Gamble, who own a huge soap opera archive will also be allowing releases of Guiding Light, Another World, Search For Tomorrow and Edge of Night in the near future. As well as providing streaming episodes online starting next year.
 

Charles Ellis

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My one bone with this is that it doesn't go into the show's early years nor does it highlight the show's most legendary character- Lisa Miller Hughes Eldridge Shea Colman McColl Mitchell Grimaldi Chedwyn!!! There should be a special DVD on the character alone, like the VHS tapes Guiding Light did on Roger Thorpe and Reva Lewis years earlier. Also, regarding the early years, there are a lot of kinescopes out there regarding the Penny/Jeff romance, Ellen Lowell's teen pregnancy and its long-running story that climaxed with her marriage to Dr. David Stewart in 1966 (the Paley Center has the classic episode when Ellen kills nosy housekeeper Franny Brennan in a fit of rage when she threatened to tell young Dan Stewart that Ellen was his birth mother!) , and Lisa and Bob's shaky marriage. Amazingly, there are more kinescopes in existence from the show's first ten years (1956-66) than there are any tapes or kinescopes from the following decade, as the show aired live until 1975.
Personally, I think Edge of Night should be next, as they have the last six years of the show, plus a whole lot of various color tapes archived spanning the years 1970-76 featuring some memorable characters and stories.
 

Statskeeper

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As much as I can agree that the best of Lisa could be a 20 disc set unto itself (and I would spring for that!), I'm going to guess that P&G is looking for a younger demographic, and hence the emphasis on later stories and characters. I would also love it if they released "Our Private Worlds", the 1965 prime-time show that followed Lisa after she left Oakdale and her marriage to Bob.
I think Guiding Light will be released before either Search for Tomorrow or Edge of Night, if for no other reason than it still has some audience familiarity.
 

Mark Collins

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I would spring for Edge of Night but only the Adam and Nichole storyine. She was brought back when the show switched networks from CBS and to ABC in 1976. The Brandy Nichole Adam triangle I always loved and they killed Adam off and gave us a younger Nichole in 1977.
I did enjoy Raven and Sky and taped the last show but lost it. I really had lost interest in Edge when they were going off in all directions to keep the ratings going. Strange however World and Edge were very popular in Rockford IL and they sent Raven and the Tom Hughes guy to our local mall.
Dark Shadows aired in syndication at 3:00 PM and that really killed Edge for me. DS only aired the first year however and when I tuned into Edge again I really did not like what I saw. Work Schedules and so forth kept me away from the show but I was off Christmas and New Years week when the show went off the air.
The only other daytime soap was GH and Luke and Laura because I was out of work during at that time. I look in now and they might as well cancel that show too.
 

Charles Ellis

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I first started watching Edge when it moved to ABC, and I too, loved Adam & Nicole! But who can ever forget Louise Shaffer's performance as the demented Serena/Josie as she shot her husband at the courthouse steps in the ABC premiere? My other favorite couple was Draper & April.
 

AlanP

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I remember "EDGE" when I was elementary school with Mike and Sara Karr. On youtube they have Sara Karr's death scene from the series. It was the FIRST time a major beloved character was killed off on a soap. It caused a huge controversy when she was written out of the series. CBS was flooded with phone calls and she appeared on the following days episode to let the fans know she was alive and well.
Would LOVE to see the early episodes from that series !!! It was fashioned after "PERRY MASON" originally and had a huge male following. It was on late in the afternoon on daytime television.
 

David Rain

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It's rather unlikely that you'll see any episodes released that pre-date the late 70's. Soaps originally aired live before eventually being taped. But even after taping became the norm, networks for years would destroy or record over the tapes. As a general rule soap opera episodes were not intentionally saved until the late 70's.
If P&G happen to have any earlier episodes (even kinescopes) then it would be great to have those streamed online. I would never expect any of these to be released on DVD since they likely could not be cleaned up well enough or would simply be too expensive to clean.
I fully expect Guiding Light to be the next DVD release since it was cancelled just a couple of years ago. I assume the earliest episodes on its box sex will be from the late 70's as well. Most likely the Roger/Holly years. My main interest would be in seeing episodes from the 80's, one of the show's true high points. I would also love if they would release a DVD version of Reva: The Scarlet Years.
I know little about Edge of Night, Another World, Texas or Search For Tomorrow but am hoping to see these streamed online. For people who don't know, many of P&G's shows were streamed online a few years ago at AOL Video. They were also apparently downloadable. The shows were removed abruptly and P&G made a statement saying they had "other plans" for their archive but at the time would not say what those plans were. I guess now we know.
 

AlanP

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I wonder why the SOAP channel does not buy some of the SOAPS up like "ANOTHER WORLD", "Search, "EDGE", and others and run them ??? Soap channel has become very dull showing the same old.....
 

Albert71292

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AlanP said:
I wonder why the SOAP channel does not buy some of the SOAPS up like "ANOTHER WORLD", "Search, "EDGE", and others and run them ??? Soap channel has become very dull showing the same old.....
SOAPnet apparently isn't long for this world... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAPnet
Disney-ABC announced in 2010 that SOAPnet would be closed in January 2012 and replaced with Disney Junior, which was the rebranding for the Playhouse Disney block on Disney Channel.Reasons for the closure of SOAPnet are due to the network's low ratings, the cancellation of many soap operas, and Cable TV top boxes with digital recording capabilities reducing the need for a network devoted to airing reruns of soap operas. On July 28, 2011, Soap Opera Digest announced that the closure of SOAPnet, that was planned for January 2012, was pushed to Spring 2012. Then, in September 2011, the closure was pushed back to February 2012.
 

Mark Collins

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Hi Albert,
I want to thank you for the EDGE history page. I always liked the show. I wish however we could get the Nicole Adam episodes. I would spring for those. My Mother would watch the show in it's late time slot. She began working afterward and I picked up oh sometime around the late 60s it was up against Dark Shadow at 2:30 CST and then moved 1 hour back. I believe I just caught some episode's but I do remember the late night airing when it went to ABC.
Two storylines that scared me as a kid were this guy pushing his wife off something in a old hotel. The Phil Capice double was another.
 

David Rain

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I think it goes without saying that SoapNet was always a disappointment for true soap fans. Their only real interest was in pushing the newest episodes of current soaps.
I'm hoping that the new soap classics site (that's selling the ATWT DVD's) will stay true to it's word and become the new home for P&G's soap archive. If this turns out to be popular then perhaps ABC will follow suit and put their classic soaps online, too. Perhaps at Prospect Park. There's an audience for classic soaps.
 

Mark Collins

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Hi Alan,
Here is the one I have looked at over the years plus the history page you asked for.
http://members.fortunecity.com/eonman/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAPnet
 

David Rain

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A recent article in Soap Opera Digest confirms that the company distributing the ATWT DVD's have indeed gotten the rights to the entire P&G archvive. They say it totals 22,000 hours of televsion. They are currently "digitizing" every single episode. This means they can potentially release the entire archive in some form either through continued DVD sets or, most likely, streaming them online.
All in all, it's wonderful news for soap fans.
 

Lord Dalek

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Originally Posted by David Rain /t/315748/as-the-world-turns-20-episode-set#post_3865485
It's rather unlikely that you'll see any episodes released that pre-date the late 70's. Soaps originally aired live before eventually being taped. But even after taping became the norm, networks for years would destroy or record over the tapes. As a general rule soap opera episodes were not intentionally saved until the late 70's.
If P&G happen to have any earlier episodes (even kinescopes) then it would be great to have those streamed online. I would never expect any of these to be released on DVD since they likely could not be cleaned up well enough or would simply be too expensive to clean.

To the best of my knowledge the situation is this...

Guiding Light: Live from 1951 debut to about 1967 (these shows are either lost or in kiniscope format in the archives of the Paley Center), Mid-1967-1980 [Unknown, many differing accounts as to how much of these years exist, some say they were wiped, possibly still intact in the CBS vaults (CBS typically did not wipe their tapes at this point unlike their two competitors), earliest existing color episode I know of dates from 1970], 1981-2009 (intact in P&G's own archive).

Search For Tomorrow: 1950-1967 (live years, kini if they're still around), 1967-1980 (similar situation to Guiding Light), 1981-1987 (intact, the last few years when the show moved to NBC were rerun on the USA network in the late 80s and early 90s)

The Edge of Night: 1956-1974 (live and gone, save for kiniscopes), late 1974-November 1975 (EoN switched to pre-taped for its final months on CBS, how much of this exists is anyone's guess , the christmas day 1974 episode is in the P&G archive), 1975-March 1978 (EoN moved to ABC in 1975, aside from the 90-minute-long premiere and a few other episodes on the tape trading circuit, this part of the show is wiped), April 1978-1984 (intact, episodes from 1978 were seen on AOL's In2TV service a few years ago)

As The World Turns: 1956-1974 (live and gone, save for kiniscopes), late-1974-1980 (possibly intact much like Guiding Light), 1981-2010 (intact)

Another World: 1964-1978 (wiped, save for a smattering of kiniscopes), 1978-1998 (intact)

Somerset (wiped)

Texas (intact)
 

Ethan Riley

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I remember Susan Lucci giving an interview stating that a lot of early AMC's were erased. I'm pretty sure that ABC has General Hospital at least from the mid-70s. They reran quite a few of them back in the 90s.
If we're talking soaps, I wish they'd put popular storylines like "The Ice Princess" on dvd. I still think those were the most exciting times the soap medium ever enjoyed.
An underestimated show was "Edge of Night." I came late to the party (circa 1980) but oh, yeah--it was a fun show. I wish they'd put some of the Raven/Schuyler storylines on dvd. Maybe the story where Raven was being chased across the countryside by Frank Gorshin's character--that was a great one. Someone--I think USA Network--was rerunning EoN from that era back in the 90s. I wish to heck that I'd taped them all...!
"Sunset Beach" was so popular in Germany that they actually managed to put out a dvd of the first 12 episodes back in '08. Apparently it didn't sell well, because that was the end of it. B&B is coming out in Germany, in whopping 25 episode packs, and in chronological order to boot! It always amazes me that the European market can support such projects, but the shows' country of origin cannot. Then again, with soaps you're always going to have the problem of the shows having too many episodes to make such projects viable to completists.
For an hour show, I theorize that you can cram 5 forty-minute episodes onto one side of a disc, and then if they're flippers, you can get 10 eps on a disc. Maybe more. And if it's a five-disc set, there's 50 episodes per set. But that's still not covering a lot of ground; you'd have to have five such sets to get a year's worth. I don't know how to solve the problem, unless they ever look to bluray as a high-storage format for videotaped shows, rather than a hi-def format. But for some reason I don't think that's gonna happen either.
 

Charles Ellis

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Actually the first seven years (1963-70) of General Hospital have been archived in B/W kinescope form in the UCLA archive. Prior to 1978 there's no color shows in the ABC archive, though the show had been in color since October 1968. UCLA does have a few color shows from 1971-73 in its own archive, though. As for Somerset, a couple of shows from its last year (1975-76) are at the Paley Center in color videotape. Those are from the P&G archive, so they do probably have more items from various shows than we may think. Also, there are a smattering of Edge color tapes in existence from 1970 onwards before P&G began to archive its episodes from April 1978 to its end in 1984. These include the 90-minute ABC premiere from 1975, the 1974 Xmas episode and the show from the same year when Geraldine was pushed down the stairs. The oldest color Edge tape I know of is from the 1970 Keith Whitney/Jonah Lockwood storyline. So it is more feasible to dig deeper into the Edge archives as it is for Search for Tomorrow. The Roger Thorpe VHS tape of years ago proves that there are a good deal of Guiding Light material from the mid-late 70s- perhaps they'll re-release it on DVD as a tribute to Michael Zaslow.
 

Mark Collins

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Hi Edge Fans,
Here is what I think you requested Alan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_of_Night
I believe GH was and is the only daytime soap to go retail. I have the first two on Luke and Laura
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_4_9?url=search-alias%3Dmovies-tv&field-keywords=luke+and+laura+general+hospital&sprefix=luke+and+
 

Mark Collins

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I also wanted to add a few things on Edge. Edge had a vampire dream sequence with Orin as the Vampire complete with fangs in Julie's dream. Dark Shadows was a ratings hit at the time the episode aired. Edge was in "Driving Miss Daisy" as the actors watched the tv in the kitchen. I believe Edge was the last soap to do LIVE Broadcast. I wondered if they were the first soap ever to do lyrics??? The new theme on ABC. I also wondered why ADAM Don DRAKE received star billing on EDGE??? I remember he showed up on a Dallas episode playing a lawyer. Did he quit EDGE over the return of Nicole which I read some place.
USA network did broadcast EDGE and SEARCH but I would only watch Edge and very little I am afraid. USA also broadcast Peyton Place.
I know there are many episodes out there on pre ABC Edge but where???
 

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