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I stumbled across the entire Dark Shadows series on the Tubi app, so I've been watching it. So dramatic, lol! So much spooky music, lol!
Dark Shadows was a soap opera, who's main character and anti-hero was a vampire named Barnabas Collins. It was filmed black and white (at least at first) because this was before the transition to color TV. It seems the show created quite the sensation at the time.
Growing up, I lived in a rural area where the bus ride to school was about an hour. I remember getting off the bus a little before 4pm after school and watching Dark Shadows on TV. I assume by the time I was watching it, that these were re-runs because the show ended in 1971. One of my sisters, who is about 2 years younger than me, remembers it also.
I remember being fascinated by the show. And it truly was a "soap opera," meaning it was serialized, and each episode only moved the story forward just a little bit. It's interesting to re-watch such short episodes -- they were only 30 minutes each, and considering about 10 minutes for ads, then each episode really was only about 20 minutes each.
Also interesting is that the shows were not filmed ahead of time -- what you saw was live broadcast, so sometimes (often), the actors screwed up their lines. In that case, they just repeated the line correctly, and the story continued. Watching it today, I can tell that sometimes the actors have actually forgotten their line, so they fumble around with some verbiage until they remember the actual line, lol.
Another point of interest for me personally is how many actors in the series were gay. I already knew that Jonathan Frid was a gay man, closeted because of the era. But I didn't realize so many of the other men were gay as well. Maybe that is why the show spoke to me!
Here are a few pictures I snapped on the TV --
Dark Shadows was a soap opera, who's main character and anti-hero was a vampire named Barnabas Collins. It was filmed black and white (at least at first) because this was before the transition to color TV. It seems the show created quite the sensation at the time.
Growing up, I lived in a rural area where the bus ride to school was about an hour. I remember getting off the bus a little before 4pm after school and watching Dark Shadows on TV. I assume by the time I was watching it, that these were re-runs because the show ended in 1971. One of my sisters, who is about 2 years younger than me, remembers it also.
I remember being fascinated by the show. And it truly was a "soap opera," meaning it was serialized, and each episode only moved the story forward just a little bit. It's interesting to re-watch such short episodes -- they were only 30 minutes each, and considering about 10 minutes for ads, then each episode really was only about 20 minutes each.
Also interesting is that the shows were not filmed ahead of time -- what you saw was live broadcast, so sometimes (often), the actors screwed up their lines. In that case, they just repeated the line correctly, and the story continued. Watching it today, I can tell that sometimes the actors have actually forgotten their line, so they fumble around with some verbiage until they remember the actual line, lol.
Another point of interest for me personally is how many actors in the series were gay. I already knew that Jonathan Frid was a gay man, closeted because of the era. But I didn't realize so many of the other men were gay as well. Maybe that is why the show spoke to me!
Here are a few pictures I snapped on the TV --
