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Have you ever tuned into a soap opera that you've never seen before and
tried to make sense of it? Viewmaster manages to successfully transfer
this pleasurable experience from the small screen to the even-smaller
screen in their adaptation of Dark Shadows. In a stunning coup,
they even manage to impart the same feeling of confusion to both
newcomers and long-time viewers alike.
When it came time to adapt Dark Shadows to Viewmaster format, it
was plain that Viewmaster's regular formula of adapting a single
episode of a show would not work. In a soap opera, where a storyline
might be spread over 50 or more hours of film, rather than 30 - 60
minutes, not enough would happen in any one episode to make it work as
a stand-alone product. It was decided instead to take highlights from a
series of episodes. Since Viewmaster had to take their own pictures
anyway (existing film could not be converted to 3-D slides), they
could have recreated virtually any sequence in the show's
then-2-year-run that they wanted, but decided (no doubt for both
financial and marketing reasons) to just adapt the shows that were
on the air at the time so as to have a sequence that was as fresh in
the audience's mind as possible. This is actually a good idea, since
so much had to be chopped out that the Viewmaster presentation actually
makes no sense whatsoever standing on its own, and so needs the memories
of the reader to fill in the blanks.
Unfortunately, many plot details are not only omitted, but actually
altered from what was presented on the television show. Why was this?
To make it more comprehensible to the nouveau reader? No, not really.
Much of it still makes no sense even after the alteration. It appears
in many cases that the prime effect of the changes is, not to make the
story comprehensible, but to reduce the amount of space that it takes
to say something incomprehensible!
In one sense, this makes sense. If you're going to make no sense, at
least try to keep it brief. The problem is that by altering details
presented onscreen, it can really bollix the poor reader attempting
to supplement the missing information from his own memory. The newcomer
is still barraged with a slew of names of people who are never
introduced, doing things for reasons that are never explained. And the
oldcomer thinks he knows what's happening, only to keep being hit by
cases where it turns out he doesn't.
Viewmaster's solution to this problem was to increase the Melodrama
Factor tenfold. Granted, Dark Shadows has always leaned a
bit towards the melodramatic anyway, but it's nothing compared to
this. To illustrate, let's say this Twinkie represents the normal
amount of melodrama in an average Dark Shadows episode. In the
Viewmaster version, it would be a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing
approximately 600 pounds. Everything everyone says and does is said
and done with the same seriousness as if they were discussing dropping
a bomb on Hiroshima. The idea being that people will get so wrapped
up in the emotional intensity of the moment that they'll fail to notice
that what's actually being said makes no sense (a favorite trick of
attorneys, politicians and salesmen).
To make things even more confusing, Viewmaster shows us neither the
beginning nor the end of a story. Nor even the middle. Instead, it
picks up in the home stretch of a long running storyline, but doesn't
quite make it to the end.
The Viewmaster Dark Shadows covers a portion of the
"Adam Story",
one of the show's longest-running storylines, which had begun in
Episode 461, and continued through Episode 636. So where did Viewmaster
choose to pick it up? Episode 605, of course. Over 80% of the way
through. And continued through Episode 629, but cut it short before
you could at least see what happened to Adam. But this is not as bad
as it sounds, as the Viewmaster version really isn't about him anyway.
Instead it just touches on a half dozen plots and subplots without
really explaining or resolving any of them.
It would be possible to explain everything in advance so that it would
make sense, but what would be the fun of that? Instead, let's forget
everything we know about this show (if anything), go into the whole
thing cold, and see how it comes across. Take a deep breath now...
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