Ramblings On...Dark Shadows (1966-1971) (potential spoilers)

Reboots can be fun.  Or they can be bad.  I guess I will have to just wait and see with this one. Since I check out www.collinwood.net every once in a while, I have known for quite some time that Johnny Depp intended to make a movie of the show.  After a few delays due to other projects, and a needed script, the Dark Shadows movie is finally set to be released in theatres May 11, 2012!

I’m very interested to see how this all works.  Depp is playing the iconic Barnabas Collins.  Admittedly, if anyone would ask me what Dark Shadows was about, I would oversimplify, telling them that essentially it was a soap opera with a vampire.  Eventually Barnabas became the most important character in the series, but initially, Jonathan Frid was only hired to be another supernatural character that would be killed off after about 12 weeks of storyline...

My favorite part of Dark Shadows was really the beginning, before Barnabas got there and then the Maggie Evans storyline when he first was woken up by Willie Loomis...

The story begins like one of those gothic fiction novels of old. Young Victoria Winters, much like Jane Eyre, was raised in a foundling home.  As just a baby, Victoria had been left on the doorstep of an orphanage in New York City in a cardboard box with a note attached that read simply “Her name is Victoria.  I can’t take care of her.” Victoria was taken in to the orphanage and raised there.  When Victoria was about two years old, envelopes started arriving. One each month with fifty dollars in cash in the envelope. An unsigned note read that the money was for Victoria’s living expenses.  There was no return address, but the postmark was stamped Bangor, ME.  After Victoria finished her schooling there at eighteen, she started working at the foundling home she grew up in, helping girls like herself.

In the first episode of Dark Shadows, aired June 27, 1966, Victoria has received a letter from a woman named Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, asking her to come to Collinwood in Collinsport, ME.  Mrs. Stoddard indicates that Victoria comes highly recommended, and that she wishes to hire her to be the governess for her nephew, David.  No one at the foundling home has a clue as to who Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is, or how she could possibly have heard of Victoria.  But Bangor is only about 50 miles away from Collinsport, and Mrs. Stoddard is offering a handsome salary, so Victoria decides to go.  She hopes that maybe this mysterious Mrs. Stoddard knows something about her past.

Mrs. Stoddard is played by the silver screen star Joan Bennett.  What I love about the character of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is that she is the perfect example of that idea that a happy ending depends on where you end the story.  Elizabeth got the life and the man she wanted, and then she found out it was all a lie...but moving along...

From the moment Victoria steps off the train from New York City, she is warned by everyone she meets to leave.  It seems that even the other people at the house aren’t particularly thrilled by her being there.  Mrs. Stoddard’s brother, and David’s father, Roger Collins clearly does NOT want Victoria there.  Carolyn Stoddard, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard’s daughter, runs hot and cold.  David himself doesn’t seem to like Victoria much...The house itself is very classic “old dark house” genre with over half the rooms closed off and creepy entrances for servants.

From the information I’ve gleaned surfing around the web, it seems that at first the producers weren’t sure if they were going to go all out supernatural with the show when it first began, or if they were going to use that gothic element like the Bronte sisters used in their books--weird sounds/circumstances plus the overactive imagination of the heroine equals a creepy tale. In the first months of the show, only Victoria hears the mysterious crying, possibly sees something...but then the producers decided to go all out, and the ghost of one person is seen, Victoria is saved by the ghost of another, and then we get our first supernatural creature--we find out Roger’s ex-wife is actually an immortal phoenix!

The Collins family themselves are a strange lot.  Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is the matriarch of the family. She only has the one brother, Roger.  When their parents died, the Collins fortune, along with their highly successful Cannery and Shipping operation, were split 50/50 between the two of them.  Roger squandered his portion of the fortune, and wound up coming home and live off the good graces of his sister. With him came his son, David.  He and his wife, Laura, had divorced, and Elizabeth was paying Laura a very good deal of money to stay away.  

Elizabeth loved David as if he were her own son. Because of that, Elizabeth will never throw her brother out.  Mysteriously, she has not left Collinwood in 18 years--since the day her husband, Paul Stoddard, walked out on her.  It is believed that she won’t leave the house because she wants to be there for him when he comes back.  

One of Elizabeth’s husband’s friends comes by to stay with a new best friend...It is very clear he is blackmailing Elizabeth about something...I don’t want to give too much of the storyline away there, suffice it to say that this friend’s friend, Willie Loomis, overstays his welcome.  He is about to be forced out of town.  In an effort to make a quick buck, he found out certain members of the Collins family were buried with their expensive jewelry.  He decides to try a little grave robbing in one of the family crypts. While inside, he happens on a secret room.  In this room is a coffin with chains and padlocks around it keeping it shut.  Greedily, Loomis breaks the chains, imagining that the reason the coffin was secured must be because jewels were buried within.  As he opens the top of the coffin, a hand reaches up and wraps around his neck.

My understanding is that the vampire storyline was only supposed to last about three months, but the fans were so crazy about Barnabas he became the main character.  Barnabas was the Collins ancestor who about a hundred years before was believed to have gone to England and died there.  He had actually been turned into a vampire by the evil witch, Angelique.  His father couldn’t kill him, but instead imprisoned him in his coffin while he slept.  Dark Shadows adopted the old vampire tradition that vampires were quite literally “dead until dark” when they would rise from their coffins to drink human blood.

The Barnabas storyline ushered in another character I loved, Dr. Julia Hoffman.  Leave it to a soap opera to have a doctor working in a sanitarium that specialized in psychology and hematology.  When Maggie Evans is brought to the sanitarium after her escape from being Barnabas’s prisoner, Dr. Hoffman tries to “cure” her.  Maggie had reverted to a seven year old girl over the ordeal and has totally blocked it out.  Dr. Hoffman is actually not trying to help her remember, but she is sure that Maggie holds the key to what she is really looking for—proof of the existence of vampires.  

Make no mistake, Dr. Hoffman is not a Van Helsing character.  She wants to “cure” Barnabas.  She is totally obsessed with him, actually.  Dr. Hoffman was played by Grayson Hall on the show and I totally called who would play the character in the reboot!  Hall took the job to help out her husband who was a writer for the show.  She also was only supposed to be on the show about three months.  She wound up staying on board and became another main character on the show.

Since I’m mentioning favorite characters, I have to mention Burke Devlin.  Well, the original Burke was played by Mitchell Ryan.  Unfortunately Mitch had a drinking problem at that time and wound up getting fired from the show.  He was replaced by Anthony George, but the character wound up getting killed off really not too long after.  I doubt I’m the only one who was not happy about a new “Burke” being hired.

Burke is an awesome character--Mitch played him all swagger and bravado, and I loved that about him.  Burke was the Count of Monte Cristo character on the show--ten years before, he was working at the cannery, trying to save up to buy a ship.  His best friend was Roger Collins and Laura Murdoch was his fiancee. One night Roger, Laura and Burke were out partying.  Burke was blackout drunk but he was pretty damn sure he was not driving when the person on the side of the road was hit.  At court, everyone testified against him, and he went to jail for five years for manslaughter.  Laura married Roger the day after his sentencing. He got out, and mysteriously earned a fortune before returning to Collinwood hell bent on revenge. He doesn’t expect to fall in love with Vicky though...Burke finds out that revenge isn’t as sweet as he thought it would be...and keeping Vicky safe is really a full time job anyway since Barnabas is obsessed with her.

As the show began summer of 1966, television was just beginning to be colorized.  Daytime television was the last to make the conversion.  The first almost two years of the show are in black and white.  The show lost something for me after it turned to color, and getting all the episodes, hundreds and hundreds of them over the five years it was on five days a week, is quite costly. I can’t speak to the storylines when they started jumping back and forth through time...I know there was also a leviathan storyline (Collection 19...I looked it up and may buy for the novelty of it)...But anyway it was all before my time!

With the upcoming movie just wanted to get a little something out there about the original show.  I looked up the new movie and am very happy to see that there will be cameos by several of the original cast members!

Epilogue: I still haven’t watched the movie, but I have marathoned THE WHOLE ORIGINAL SERIES. The beginning two years is still my favorite. NMM 2020