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 attracted the ardor of America’s children.
That success seemed accidental. Beginning on June 27, 1966, on ABC, Dark Shadows was at first just a gothic story of the type consumed in paperback form by the housewives who 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. But 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 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 show 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.
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| Dark Shadows became a newspaper comic strip as well as a comic book. |
Dale Hopson wrote:
ReplyDeleteCurtis discovered a "flaw" in the plot line and corrected it using a ghost! When the viewers didn't complain and bought the bit is when he decided on using a vampire...
Bob Doncaster wrote:
ReplyDeleteEven though I was one of the kids that ran home to watch it, I’m surprised the comic lasted so long after the show was canceled. Some concepts just never say die.
Tim Pendergast wrote:
ReplyDeleteI was a bit young for DS the first time through but I was a big fan of the reruns. I remember watching it again via VHS in the 90s and while I still enjoyed it, the silliness and cheapness shown through! Much like Doctor Who that somehow made it better. 😉
Alex Grand wrote:
ReplyDeleteTrue it seems to precede the 1970s anti-hero and resurgence of the horror monster genre in one swoop. Also, the two early 1970s movies of Dark Shadows were pretty intense.