In 1983, Brian Patrick Clarke began his run as nice married guy Grant Andrews and his Russian spy doppelgänger Grant Putnam on General Hospital. But these characters really took off in the ‘80s, when daytime TV started pushing the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic all over the place. Over the next decade, the soap opera evil twin or double would become such a recognizable type that the ‘70s comedy Soap spoofed it in a season three arc involving Burt’s alien clone. Actor Gordon Rigsby played both men through the use of split-screen, a bold TV technique for the time. Ian Northcoate, whose identical twin Owen would later murder guest star Troy Donahue. Clearly it made an impression, because in 1969, a soap opera called The Secret Storm introduced us to Dr. Goatee Spock), and even Gilligan’s Island (Castaways vs. People were doing it on Bonanza ( Jud vs. In the 1960s, evil twins were what time jumps are today: the hot thing to do on TV. (It lasted a month.) The soap opera was still in the incubation period as far as showrunners were concerned, and the only tropes they had really established were “family conflict” and “widows.” But they’d get a push toward twisted sibling territory from the sitcoms and sci-fi shows of the 1960s. (It ran for just 10 episodes.) These Are My Children, which debuted in 1949, quite literally echoed Painted Dreams since it came from the same creator, Irma Phillips. Faraway Hill was the first to premiere, in 1946, and followed a beautiful widow from the city as she fell in love with her cousin’s farmer son. The initial wave of TV soap operas followed much the same pattern as its radio predecessors.
But soap operas still weren’t really biting, even as they made the move over to television.
It would also appear in comic books such as Kid Eternity. The twin trope would continue into the 1940s with westerns like Wagons Westward (1940) and Olivia de Havilland thrillers like The Dark Mirror (1946). Just a few years later, in 1939, Louis Hayward took on the saga of King Louis XIV and his twin in the Alexander Dumas adaptation, The Man in the Iron Mask. Audiences saw Boris Karloff as both the murderous tyrant Baron Gregor de Berghman and his sweet, crippled twin brother Anton in 1935’s The Black Room. But while radio soaps stuck to more conventional plot threads, movies were already getting in on the evil twin action. The show centered on a widow and her unmarried daughter who were mostly just trying to survive the Great Depression, so there wasn’t much room for surprise scheming twins.
SOAP TV SHOW HUTCH SERIAL
The first ever soap opera was the radio serial Painted Dreams, which premiered on October 20, 1930. Once soap operas hopped on the bandwagon, though, evil twins would come to rival amnesia and fake deaths as the genre’s favorite plot twist. It actually took daytime TV quite a while to embrace this storyline, which already had roots in books, movies, and other television genres. It comes out of nowhere, operates way outside the realm of reality, and gives long-time cast members the chance to wear a ridiculous goatee.īut soap operas didn’t invent the evil twin. The evil twin trope encapsulates all the wild drama essential to any soap script. Seemingly since the dawn of television, evil twins and soap operas have been inextricably linked.
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