I keep forgetting about this, but I suppose I really should give proper credit (if that's the word) to the show that inspired most of the quotes I wrote. (Glad you liked them, btw, Sara.
)
Like I said, I used to watch a soap with my mom. The show was All My Children, and most of the quotes there were summaries of some of the kookier AMC storylines.
Going back over things... the first one is fairly generic. The second is from another show entirely. I think we all know which one.
The third is also fairly generic, though somewhat less so.
AMC has done the split personality thing more than once. I think I was thinking of Janet at the time, who (sometimes) seemed sweet but had an evil side that would talk to her through the mirror.
Janet was the younger and slightly unattractive sister of Natalie. Janet was horribly jealous of her sister and did all sorts of things to her. Ultimately, she ended up trapping Natalie down a well in an old abandonded mine shaft or something, bringing her food every once in a while when she came to taunt her sister. In the meantime, Janet had put on a wig and disguised herself as her sister, fooling everyone, including Natalie's husband. I don't remember how it all ended, really. I thought the hunting her down line sounded funny, so I just threw that in.
A couple years ago, a star from another soap joined the AMC cast. She'd been a cop on the other show (Port Charles, I think), but her character had been killed off. She came in as a different person on AMC. Or so we thought. Then weird things started to happen, and we found out that Alex had been an superspy who'd gotten too deep undercover. The explosion which had seemingly killed her Port Charles character had, in fact, only given her amnesia, making her adopt one of her other undercover identities. An evil British orginization came after her, trying to kill her, and she gradually remembered her spy skills. After that whole thing was resolved, they brought in a long-lost twin sister. Then Alex was killed. And then Alex's sister was killed, and the actress moved on to... something else, probably.
While Alex was around, however, her love interest, Edmund, got amnesia, and one of the things they tried to do to help cure him was reintroducing him to his horse (which had actually belonged to his half-brother before he died). I thought my way was a more fun twist. Actually, I'm a little fuzzy on this one. I think I also remember Dimitri, having come back from supposed death with a case of amnesia, being reintroduced to the horse. I wasn't really watching closely at the time, so I'm not really sure who it was.
In any case, while we're speaking of Edmund and his half-brother Dimitri... Edmund was first introduced to us as an old resentful stableboy, who had been absued by Dimitri's father. When Dimitri's father died a little while later, his will revealed that Edmund was, in fact, his bastard child. He'd beat the boy because of his shame, but, in his guilt, he'd left everything to him. Edmund kicked Dimitri out of the mansion, but eventually forgave him.
In a completely different storyline, let's talk about Liza, Tad, and Adam. Liza and Tad were an item years back, but then she left the show. She came back, and ended up marrying Adam. She had a child by him and then left him. They've had a sort of love/hate relationship ever since. Adam happens to run a big powerful corperation. Tad happens to be an ex-private investigator with a long and complicated background. Adam and Tad hate each other's guts, and have fought over more than one woman. At one point, Liza had Adam's board declare him insane. For reasons I don't clearly remember, she couldn't take charge herself. So, she somehow managed to get the board to put Tad in charge of the company. She and Tad were sort of having a relationship (they'd become friends, but around that time, they were flirting with other possibilities), but basically, she just wanted to drive Adam up the wall.
I have no idea where I came up with the ferret thing, except that I think it was vaguely inspired by a couple of soap opera parody movies I've seen. Soapdish, with Sally Field, and Delirious, with John Candy. (Soapdish was really fun. Delirious had its moments. At least, IMHO.) Both included storylines about bizzare exotic medical conditions, so I figured, why not?
Moving on... Erica Caine has two daughters. One, we knew since she was born. The older sister, however, was introduced years later. It turns out that Erica's father, a Hollywood bigshot, had thrown his then teenaged daughter a birthday party. Only he'd invited his friends instead of hers, and they got drunk and bad things happened. The result was a baby, whom Erica gave up for adoption. She then proceeded to repress the memories so thoroughly that they didn't come up until the writers decided to RetCon the daughter into the story. The daughter came in to ruin Erica's life, and things happened. She eventually left again, to go back to a relatively happy life with her adoptive parents, but years later came back, and is currently on the show (being played by a different actress). After the original actress left the show, my sister went out to California to work for the summer, and came across a studio sale. They were selling off old cast member clothing and such. So, she decided to buy a shirt for my mom. It was the shirt that Kendall, Erica's older daughter, had worn basically every day. A couple years later, the actress who had played Kendall got another job on another show, and now I think it's even cooler that Mom has one of Sarah Michelle Gellar's old shirts.
In any case, I didn't want to go through the whole thing with Erica and Kendall, because it's not very funny. I did like the idea of the long-lost adopted baby, however, so I tried to think of a funnier way to write it up. Not sure if I succeeded but there it is.
The last one is, as I said, my own combination of generic overused plot points, thrown together in the funniest way I could come up with on the spur of the moment.
So, there you go. Credit where it's due, even if that credit is overdue.
Oh, and one that I didn't quite figure out how to include (although I did sort of try with the first quote) was the Tad/Ted storyline. Tad was originally introduced as a bad guy, but the audience liked the actor (whose name happens to be Michael E. Knight... He aparantly gets a lot of requests for pictures of his car, which he is happy to grant, even if the car in question happens to be a regular 4-door sedan...) so much that they decided to rewrite him as a good guy. He's got a long, complicated history, involving three sets of parents (his birth parents, his adoptive parents, and the people who took him in during the storyline I'm about to try to sum up). The character was killed off years back. He was fighting with a bad guy and fell off a bridge.
Well, after about a decade, they decided to bring Tad back to the show. But how to explain why he wasn't dead and hadn't come back? Amnesia, of course! (Which was also used a couple years later to explain the return of Edmund's wife, Maria, who'd aparantly died in a firey plane crash.) He'd hit his head on the rocks below, and then been swept away by the river. It was simple, really. Too simple. So, they threw in another twist. He'd been taken in by the Orsini family, a couple of wealthy Napa Valley vintners, who had mistaken him for their son, Ted. Ted had disappeared years back, but Tad looked just like him and amensia. So, Tad came back to Pine Valley (where the show takes place) thinking he was Ted. Just as his wife was starting to bring back his old memories, guess who showed up? That's right. Ted. He'd been lost in the wilderness for years. He'd had amnesia, too, but, without anyone to rescue him, he'd been forced to resort to the primitive life of a half-crazed woodsman. Ted and Tad fought, and eventually, Ted overcame Tad and tried to take over his life. But Tad escaped right around the time that Ted was marrying Dixie (the love of Tad's life, who had thought herself to be Tad's widow). Stuff happened, I don't remember exactly, and Ted died. Tad and Dixie were remarried, and lived happily for the next few years until Dixie was killed off. She's still dead.
Speaking of characters who are still dead, I just remembered Jillian. She was the soulmate of Ryan, but she died. And then they decided to keep her around for an extra few weeks. How? As an angel, who came back to try to keep Ryan from going insane with grief. Only Ryan couldn't really see her, and few times when they did connect were driving him more insane. Eventually, she came to see that she couldn't really do any good directly. I think she managed to help him a bit, and then finally ended up leaving Earth forever to take her place in Heavan. Ryan eventually recovered from his grief and, from the bits I've seen while Mom was watching, he's got a couple of new love interests now.
I thought of those 2 storylines, but couldn't figure out how to sum them up briefly enough to be of use.
So, those are the strangest storylines from the show that I can remember offhand (there is some vague memory of a storyline involving an evil voodoo priestess, but I've managed to repress those memories. Or maybe I just have amnesia...). Have fun writing the story, Sara.
Looking forward to seeing it.
Paul
