Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Guiding Light: 1937-2009???? Part Seven!!

A truly wonderful, but brief clip...the video comes from You Tube and it's a scene from 1970 where Sara McIntyre's been knocked out cold on the attic floor and Joe Werner is in a battle with Sara's lethal husband, Lee Gantry...who shall we say said his farewell in this scene...



I made a comment asking if the video up-loader had more clips...preferably longer clips of GL from that time period.

I found some more pictures on-line and I scanned some pictures from my collection earlier today. All Guiding Light related, of course.

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Alan Spaulding and Hope Bauer...considered daytime's most passionate couple according to the article contained within the issue. I wish I had this issue...I went to eBay and looked up Soap Opera Digest in the "eBay Stores" section and found that there are sellers asking anywhere from $15.00 to $35.00 for issue's from the early to the mid 1980's. There are several issues being sold on that site that I have in my collection. When I was buying back issues directly from Soap Opera Digest, they cost $5.00 per issue...regardless of how out of print the issue happened to be or who appeared on the cover. When I looked at eBay and saw quite a few issue's going for $25.00 from the mid 1980's I was amazed. It appears Soap Opera Digest has a cult collector's following the way TV Guide does.

This little morsel of a picture is something I scanned...it's Alan fighting with a one-eyed stalker when Alan was on the run from Mike and the police. Alan and Hope fled to the island of Tenerife, Alan's idea of getting away from their troubles, and soon they were being watched by the one-eyed man...who turned out to be Lucien Goff, a disgruntled former employee. The story took place in late 1981 and reached a climax in early 1982. Hope went back to Springfield alone while Alan remained on the run. Alan and Goff soon encountered one another and they got into a violent fight...click the image below...the scan wasn't the best in the world, though, but it's okay...

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After Alan and Goff fought, Goff vanished...Mike had been closely keeping a track of Alan and he, too, ended up in Tenerife...and eventually Alan and Mike caught up with each other and they got into a fight. Mike was injured and Alan fled to his helicopter and was about to flee for Springfield when he had a change of heart and had his pilot go back and get Mike. Upon their return, Alan confessed to his previous crimes which included aiding a fugitive, Roger Thorpe, in 1979 and 1980. Mike put Alan on trial and the resulting sentence was a little over a year in prison...but...as things are likely to happen in a soap opera, Alan didn't vanish for that many months. He did go to prison...but he was granted a release due to a Spaulding Enterprises gala and in spite of heavy security he was abducted by none other than Lucien Goff. Alan's helicopter pilot was revealed to be a partner with Goff...and soon Mike was on the trail...he tracked Alan down with the help of a newcomer, Ivy Pierce. Mike and Goff got into a fight on a tramway...Goff fell off the tramway to his death and everyone returned to Springfield. The pilot was sent to prison where he later died. Ivy discovered that Goff and the Spaulding pilot weren't alone in their vendetta at Alan and soon it was revealed that Amanda's lover, Mark Evans, was part of the scheme. Mark wanted to kill Alan and Amanda and take over Spaulding Enterprises...that's a story for another day.

Here's a picture of Ed Bryce...full of beard...during his 1977 appearance on the show. Ed Bryce had played Bill Bauer off and on since 1959...he portrayed the role on a consistent manner throughout the 1960's. His character was often being written off the show...usually the result of plane crashes. I can think of three times he'd been presumed dead but returned. Anyway...here's Bill Bauer looking at his family from a distance...he hadn't made his presence known yet...

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Here's a younger Bill Bauer with Maggie Scott...there was a time in the mid 1960's where Bill began an affair with his secretary, Maggie. This was also during a time when Bill was dealing with his alcoholism...on top of that he had to endure the over-protective nature of his father, Papa Bauer. Maggie was the estranged wife of super obsessive Ben Scott who indirectly led Maggie into having an affair with Bill in the first place. Bill was so different than the strict and possessive Ben and the couple always fought. Ben and Maggie's daughter, Peggy, was in a relationship with Johnny Fletcher and it drove her father absolutely crazy...driving a wedge in his relationship with Maggie in the process. It was Peggy, ironically, that heard about the affair first-hand. Bill had been drinking and he attempted to confront Maggie and in his sorrow he continued spilling out his thoughts of regret about the affair...but in reality he wasn't talking to Maggie...he was talking to Peggy, who was horrified and shocked. Ed later discovered the truth about the affair. Ben eventually worked himself up so much that he assaulted Johnny and Ben later died of a heart attack due to all of the stress. Maggie, too, died not long afterward under Ed's knife. Maggie had started to have intestinal ailments and died on the operating table. Peggy, in the 1970's, would become involved with Roger Thorpe.

Photobucket A small sampling of the Bauer family. Here we have Ed Bryce as Bill Bauer, Ellen Demming as Meta Bauer, and at bottom we have Charita Bauer as Bert, and Theo Goetz as Papa Bauer. Meta's action was confined mostly to the radio episodes and early television broadcasts when Lyle Sudrow was playing Bill Bauer. Papa was never in a front burner story...he was usually just there...commenting and reacting to the goings-on in his family's day to day life. Bill and Bert, along side the Fletcher family, and the Grant's, were who got the lion's share of storyline's in the 1950's.

Guiding Light once had a reputation for keeping a hold of their actor's and actresses. This is why popular characters typically had two, usually no more than four, actors/actresses playing the same role throughout the character's tenure on the show. For example, there were only three actors to play Bill Bauer. Lyle Sudrow originated the role on radio and played it on radio and later on TV from 1948 through 1959. Ed Bryce took over the role and played it until 1963 before being written off on a business trip...an actor by the name of Eugene Smith took over the role in 1964. Ed Bryce returned in 1965 and stayed with the role until 1969...killed off in a plane crash. Bryce returned in 1977 and stayed around for about a year, where his complicated double life was revealed and he admitted switching flights at the last minute and he admitted he wasn't in the plane his family thought he was at the time of the crash. He revealed that he'd been married to a woman named Simone Kincaid and they had two children, a son named Paul, and a daughter everyone in town was getting to know, Hillary! Bill would later return to Canada...later moving to Chicago after Simone divorced him. It was in Chicago where Bill was last seen in 1983...hitting the bottle and worried about a fishing incident twenty years earlier that came back to haunt him. Bill was murdered in the fall of 1983 by Eli Sims, a central figure in the fishing trip secret.

There is also the scenario where an actor or an actress will take on a role that's been played by a long list of others and through longevity or character impact will become the definitive face of the character. The character of Hope Bauer had a series of actresses playing the role until Elvera Roussel took over in 1979. She appears with Chris Bernau on the Soap Opera Digest I wrote about earlier. This period in Hope's life, 1979-1983, provided the character with the most impact and so she is noted as the definitive Hope Bauer...although others have played the role longer.

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