| rdfs:comment | - Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome (SORAS) is the practice of accelerating the age of a television character (usually a child or teenager) in conflict with the timeline of a series and/or the real-world progression of time. Characters unseen on screen for a time might reappear portrayed by an actor several years older than the original. Usually coinciding with a recast, rapid aging is typically done to open up the character to a wider range of storylines, and to attract younger viewers. The process originated in (and is most commonly used in) daytime soap operas, but is also often used in prime time shows. SORAS generally refers to cases in which a character's rapid aging happens off-screen without any explanation, rather than to storylines in science fiction and fantasy in which a character
- SORAS or Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome (less commonly called simply rapid aging) is a term for when an infant or young child in a soap opera is aged very quickly by the writers. It is nearly always done by recasting the role after the character has been absent for a number of weeks, months or years, with the new actor of the age the character has been SORASed to. This is done to permit an older actor to portray the character and to involve the character in different - usually more adult - storylines.
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| abstract | - Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome (SORAS) is the practice of accelerating the age of a television character (usually a child or teenager) in conflict with the timeline of a series and/or the real-world progression of time. Characters unseen on screen for a time might reappear portrayed by an actor several years older than the original. Usually coinciding with a recast, rapid aging is typically done to open up the character to a wider range of storylines, and to attract younger viewers. The process originated in (and is most commonly used in) daytime soap operas, but is also often used in prime time shows. SORAS generally refers to cases in which a character's rapid aging happens off-screen without any explanation, rather than to storylines in science fiction and fantasy in which a character ages rapidly due to technology, magic, or non-human biology. At least one whimsical effort has been made to describe the SORAS effect as time dilation due to "soap opera physics". Coined by Soap Opera Weekly founding editor-in-chief Mimi Torchin in the early days of the magazine, the term is now widely used in the soap opera media. Torchin has jokingly called it "my one greatest contribution to the world of soap operas."
- SORAS or Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome (less commonly called simply rapid aging) is a term for when an infant or young child in a soap opera is aged very quickly by the writers. It is nearly always done by recasting the role after the character has been absent for a number of weeks, months or years, with the new actor of the age the character has been SORASed to. This is done to permit an older actor to portray the character and to involve the character in different - usually more adult - storylines. The term was coined by Soap Opera Weekly founding editor in chief Mimi Torchin in the early 1990s. In the early days of the soap opera it was not uncommon to age a character right into his or her 20s; for example, this happened to the character of Tom Hughes on As the World Turns in the late 1960s. One day he was a preteen, and the next he was shipped off to Vietnam. (This caused the actress playing Tom's mother, Eileen Fulton, who was then only in her late 30s, to have it written into her contract that her character could never become a grandmother; a noteworthy by-product of this is parents of SORASed characters -- often portrayed by actors in their late 30s or early 40s -- becoming grandparents or even great grandparents.) However, in the past few decades as soap producers have introduced more and more teenagers into soaps in order to attract the lucrative teen audience, it is now common practice to only age a character into the mid teens, with 15 and 16 being the most common ages that a character will be "SORASed" to. Eight-year-old Sami Brady on Days of Our Lives was aged to a 15-year-old when she was reintroduced in early 1993 (played by 16-year-old Alison Sweeney). Some child characters literally mature faster than others. For example, Billy Abbott on The Young and the Restless was born on the show in 1993, yet was 16 years old by 1999 (played by 21-year-old David Tom), while his niece Colleen Carlton (born 1991) was only 14 years old in 2001 (played by 14-year-old Lyndsy Fonseca), meaning that Billy had changed from being two years younger than his niece to being four years older. Perhaps the character with the biggest impact is Nicholas Newman. He was born at the end of 1988 and was sent off to a "Swiss boarding school" as a preteen, only to return as a late teens/early 20s grown man only a few years later in 1994, and has since been featured as a prominent character. On the other hand, Phillip Chancellor IV, a child born several months prior to Nicholas remained at his real age until he was finally aged in 2000. Phillip however, was only aged by about two years. On All My Children, Erica Kane's daughter Kendall Hart was retconned/SORASed at the demand of fans. When Kendall (played by 16-year-old Sarah Michelle Gellar) arrived in Pine Valley in 1993, she was a waifish teen, despite the fact that she was the result of Erica's rape at the age of 14, before the show even began in 1970, 23 years earlier. Fans protested, and so the show's producers's immediately aged Kendall to "over 21". One of the few American soap children allowed to age in real time was Patti Barron Tate on Search for Tomorrow, first played from 1951 to 1961 by Lynn Loring. Her character did not have any jumps in age from the first episode until the last (in 1986). Another was Amy Ames Brittain on The Secret Storm, played from 1954 to 1974 by Jada Rowland (although she was off the show from 1971 to 1973). Her character was eleven years old when the show debuted and thirty-one when the show ended. Rapid aging also occurs in other television genres, especially in situation comedy and science fiction series, usually to age an infant character to a four or five year old to allow a greater range of storylines involving the child. This transformation often occurs between seasons.
* The characters of Andrew Keaton in Family Ties and Chrissy Seaver in Growing Pains underwent rapid aging.
* On the show Star Trek: Voyager the character of Naomi Wildman rapidly ages from infancy to preadolescence, however in this case the rapid aging is explained as a genetic trait from interspecies parents. On the other hand, no explanation is given for the rapid aging of Molly O'Brien between her birth in the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and her in the following year of that show and on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where the character (played by Hana Hatae) is already several years old. Further, Worf's son Alexander was born on Next Generation in 2366, yet he appears as a young adult/late teenager in 2374 on Deep Space Nine, as a young recruit serving in the Klingon military (he'd be only 8 years old, though this could be loosely explained away by saying that Klingons age faster).
* On Degrassi Junior High, Spike Nelson gave birth to Emma Nelson between the second and third seasons. By Degrassi High, Emma also rapidly aged into a toddler. However, by Degrassi: The Next Generation, the rapid aging seemed to have not happened.
* At the end of season two of The 4400, the character of Isabelle (as of season three played by Megalyn Echikunwoke) instantly aged from an infant to a young woman approximately twenty years old.
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