“You drift away, love, you’ll drift back sadly changed.”
And then sometimes everything comes together, and they make all the right choices, and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it lately but Dark Shadows is my favorite television show.
Tag Archives: records
Episode 786: The Blog Post About The Original Music From Dark Shadows with The Robert Cobert Orchestra & Featuring Jonathan (Barnabas) Frid and David (Quentin) Selby
“Listen carefully, and you’ll hear my dream.”
Charity Trask dreams of sexy scoundrel Quentin Collins, just like everybody else in the summer of ’69. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he says. She replies, “I feel so lonely when you’re not here.” This isn’t the part of the dream where he closes his eyes while she gets murdered by a werewolf. This is the other part.
Charity’s father has suddenly decided that she should marry Quentin, for reasons that are mostly product placement-related. The Dark Shadows soundtrack album dropped on Friday, and today’s episode serves up a full-length music video of the feature single, “Shadows of the Night (Quentin’s Theme)”. By music video, I mean that they play the whole song while Quentin and Charity pose and make thoughtful facial expressions. It’s 1969; they haven’t figured out how music videos work yet.
Episode 768: Number One with a Bullet
“I can’t take my mind off this bullet.”
Yesterday, somebody found a silver bullet outside Collinwood, and now Quentin’s taking it super personally. As a Werewolf-American, naturally he’s sensitive to displays of lycanphobic sentiment. Trying to explain that anybody could be killed by a silver bullet is not at all reassuring.
Episode 722: Uncle Deadly
“Grandfather always said that I would be killed by a woman, and he was right. A woman murdered me!”
“Please, Quentin,” says the young set, staring straight through the television screen, their eyes glazed with grief. “Don’t be dead. Please, don’t leave me alone!”
They move, as one, to approach their antiquated music machines — the gramophone, the turntable, the cassette player.
“You liked that music,” they say. “It was your favorite! I’m going to keep playing it, over and over again!”
Maestro? If you would?
Episode 719: Haunt You
“Anyone who believes in voodoo must believe in me!”
Let’s talk for a moment about the tremendous advantages of having a gypsy on your television show.
Number one, obviously, ethnic, which means there’s all kinds of comic value just sitting there for the taking.
Number two, ethnic, which means you can always kickstart a plot point by showing her something that she wants to steal.
And number three, ethnic, which means that if you can’t think of an exciting way to end an episode, then she can just run into the room, point at a cast member, and scream The MARK! The mark of DEATH! Soon! SOON! You will DIE! and then you superimpose a Chromakey skull over the guy’s face.
And yet I can’t think of a single other show that has a gypsy. I swear, it’s like people don’t even want to make good television.
Episode 689: The First Theremin Era
“It’ll be a lot easier to deal with him if he isn’t here to kill you.”
So here’s the score for the first couple months of 1969.
Paperback Library has released a novelty joke book called Barnabas Collins In a Funny Vein, which we’ve discussed at some length. They’ve also published another in the series of Dark Shadows gothic romance novels. This one’s called The Secret of Barnabas Collins, and it tells the story of Barnabas in 1870s London and his love affair with Lady Clare Duncan, who follows him to France and then to Boston, as he tries to find a witch doctor to free him from the vampire curse.
Meanwhile, Gold Key has published the first issue of the Dark Shadows comic book, which involves Barnabas and Angelique alternately killing and reviving three attractive college students for basically no reason except they felt like it.
So that’s three new Dark Shadows products, all on sale this month, and each of them is aimed at a different subset of the Dark Shadows audience: the novel is for the housewives, the comic book is for the teenagers, and then the young set get the joke book. None of them are very good, but that doesn’t seem to bother anybody. In February 1969, if it says Dark Shadows on it, somebody is going to buy it.
And then — busting into the party like a belligerent gatecrasher — here comes The First Theremin Era.
Dark Shadows Every Day 