DARK SHADOWS: Dig 13 of the Classic Show’s Grooviest Characters
1966 WEEK! Vampires, warlocks and monsters — oh my! — Welcome to 1966 WEEK — a 60th anniversary celebration of an extraordinary, landmark year in popular culture. For seven days, we’re bringing you a whole host of features on everything from Star Trek, to Batman, to the Beatles, to the Monkees, and much, much more. (Just check out Walt Grogan’s latest fab banner, above!) Click here for more of the far out fun! — Dan — — UPDATED 9/11/26: Dark Shadows premiered June 27, 1966. We’re reprinting this piece from April 2022 because we wanted to make sure we included it in 1966 WEEK. Dig it! — Dan — Hey, dig this Shadowy ones – our man Jim Beard has a new book out: a series of essays on the classic TV show Dark Shadows called, appropriately enough, Running Home to Shadows. The book, which is also edited by Charles R. Rutledge, is similar to Jim’s classic Gotham City 14 Miles and features a coterie of contributors, including a foreword by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Maggie Evans on the supernatural soap. You can get the 150-page paperback from Amazon for a startlingly affordable $8.99. Writers include Greg Cox, Mark Dawidziak, Dave Dykema, Bob Freeman, Ed Gross, Rich Handley, Nancy Holder, Tina Hunt, Katherine Kerestman, Mark Maddox (with Ed Catto), Elizabeth Massie, Kimberly Oswald, Martin Powell, Dana Pride, Mark Rainey, Michael Rogers, Chris Ryan, Frank Schildiner, Duane Spurlock and Jeff Thompson. Cool, eh? Well with the book burning up the sales charts (it’s in Amazon’s Top 10 for TV guides and the like), Jim is here with a fun piece in which he pays tribute to 13 of the show’s grooviest characters. Dig it. — By JIM BEARD Sometimes I wonder if most people who aren’t die-hard Dark Shadows fans realize how cool the show really was. Just like my beloved Batman ’66, there’s a lot of short-handing about TV’s first supernatural soap, but not a lot of digging below its surface. If you know anything, you know about Barnabas and Angelique and maybe some of the goofs and gaffes and the low-budget atmosphere, but I’m here to tell you there’s a whole lot more, stuff that may surprise a lot of genre fans. The show itself dug deep, even if many of us today do not. Here’s a list of 13 of my favorite Dark Shadows characters, of...
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