In the second half of the 1960s, several US television programmes became cultural phenomena - Star Trek and Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In immediately come to mind. Many of these programmes had an international impact. However one such one series, Dark Shadows, remained largely a US-based phenomenon, with an almost exclusively teen audience. This Gothic soap opera sent high school students in droves running from the bus to the living room every afternoon, and catapulted its hero, the reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins, to iconographic status as an unusual (and, some would say unlikely) heart-throb.
The series - the world's first daytime soap to handle themes such as vampires, werewolves, witches' curses, and time travel - was broadcast between June 27, 1966 and April 2, 1971 and ran for half an hour every weekday; two feature films were also made during the show's run. But, as with the original Star Trek, the story doesn't end with the show's cancellation. 34 years after Barnabas bit his last victim, Dark Shadows books are still being written, trivia exchanged, DVDs sold, and conventions attended.
In 2001, Dark Shadows was honoured with a special retrospective at the American Museum of Television and Radio, a tribute to the longevity of the series' cultural impact.
