The purpose of the SoapJack Project is to build a catalog of YouTube classic soap opera video links organized by their original air dates, spanning mostly from the 1950s to the 2010s. This time period essentially spans those decades when no recordings were available except as home VHS and Betamax recordings later uploaded by YouTube channel owners – for without them none of this would be possible.

The data is provided in JSON and CSV formats in a GitHub repository:

https://github.com/HamiltonBernique/SoapJack/blob/main/README.md

At present, the data is too voluminous for this website to provide links to each video. You must use the YouTube ID to construct its URL or use pre-formatted links in a spreadsheet from provided CSV files. For more information see Viewing Videos.

The repository currently has over 27,000 entries but there could be twice as many. This malleable dataset is affected by the following factors:

  • Knowable unknowns. The biggest to these is not knowing what’s missing. Please alert bruce@hamiltonbernique.com on missing classic soaps.
  • New and removed videos. YouTube channels are scanned monthly for new and removed videos.
  • Copyright maters. For the most part, over-the-air broadcasts of the older soap operas are not challenged by the original studios or networks. However, other entities such as the owners of a musical score in a scene can claim an infringement and YouTube to block the video.
  • Soaps available as collections. These include Dark Shadows, Passions, and The Doctors. These soaps are not included in the repository, except for some promos and clips of The Doctors.

It is not an objective to provide links to current soaps still broadcasting, as streaming and storage options are more available and beyond the scope of classic soap opera content of yesteryear.

Here’s a look at the current percentages by soap in the repository. Notably absent are Days of our Lives and The Young and The Restless as there seems to be only promos available (of classic content) on YouTube – so they fell into the “Other” category. Nevertheless, there are thousands of hours of delightful memories including contiguous full episodes, including practically every episode of Peyton Place and Texas!

Pie chart of soap opera videos by percentage
SoapJack current coverage

Content guidelines

Generally, content can be one of the following types:

  • Any episode or partial episode.
  • Clips of scenes.
  • Assembled clips of a storyline over time.
  • Episode opening sequences.
  • Episode closing sequences closing credits.
  • Soap promos.
  • Daytime Emmy Award content. Currently, this is only exception to soap opera content.

The following content is not included, subject to feedback:

  • Tributes (except by the soap or network itself).
  • Montages.
  • Reimagined or altered content.
  • Bumpers (too short)
  • Appearances by soap stars in talk shows, commercials, movies, fan greetings, and other venues.

SoapJack data

The repository is organized alphabetically by the soap opera codes as listed in SoapJack Soap Operas. A large percentage of dates are approximate. If only the year is known, the date is January 1st or June 1st. If the month is known but not the day, the date is the first of that month. The goal is to eventually arrive at the most likely date.

The data is presented in JSON format where each object is a dictionary about a YouTube video.

Screenshot of the JSON data for a video in the collection.
JSON data dictionary for one of the soap opera videos.

Each soap video has the following properties:

  • id
    The YouTube ID of the video. To watch a video, copy the ID from the JSON data and append to either of the following URLs, where {id} is the YouTube ID:
    https://youtu.be/{id}
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v={id}

    For more information, see View Videos.
  • parentid
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies videos that a part of a series with each video in the series given the same parentid. If not part of a series, leave blank. All videos in the series should have the same date as the first video in the series.

    The ID has the format of “P_” followed by the first eight characters of a guid.
  • soap
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the soap opera, as shown in parenthesis beside the soap opera names in SoapJack Soap Operas. If adding a new soap opera, use a consistent upper-case initialism of no more than six characters.
  • category
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the type of content. Currently, this property has three values:
    • A = Episodes, clips, Emmy awards
    • B = Promos, openings and closings
  • title
    The title of the video derived from YouTube title property. For the most part, the original titling by the channel owner is preserved but edited for length and consistency. Titles that just had the date and name of the soap are retitled as ‘Episode’, as the date will populate the date property. If the duration of the video is less than 20 minutes, it’s titled as ‘Episode content’.

    Optimally, the length of the title should be no more than 35 characters for future mobile applications.
  • date
    A SoapJack specific property not to be confused with the YouTube date, which is the date the video was uploaded to YouTube. The SoapJack date is the date the episode was originally broadcast, or approximate date. Dates when only the year is known have the date as January 1. Dates when only the month is known use the first of the month. This is a required value, even if it’s just a wild guess.

    Because of estimations, several videos erroneously have the date of January 1. This is by design. Efforts will be made to work through these to have more accurate dates.
  • part
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the part number of a series. The default is 1.
  • total
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the total number of parts in the series. The default is 1.
  • duration
    The length of the video obtained from YouTube duration property.
  • channel
    The YouTube channel that hosts the video, obtained from the channelName property in YouTube and converted to lower case with spaces and special characters removed.

YouTube data scraping

HamiltonBernique recommends the YouTube and Fast YouTube scrapers provided by Apify. They are consistently reliable and easy to use. The Fast YouTube scraper is sufficient and provides the following fields needed for the data:

– id
– title
– duration

All of the other SoapJack data properties can be derived. Sometimes date information is provided by the channel owner in a description of the video if not in the title. To get this scrape the text field, which is available only with the full (not fast) YouTube scraper.

Feedback and contributions

Send your feedback, corrections, and musings to Bruce Hamilton at this email address:

bruce@hamiltonbernique.com

The project always needs to know about channels that are hosting soap opera content, and your corrections to dates are highly appreciated. Even if you have a hunch that an episode occurred earlier or later than shown, I want to hear about it.

All the YouTube contributor channels are checked monthly for new videos and for videos that have been removed. Nevertheless, if you come across a removed video you’re welcome to report it.

In your email, you need to include only the ID of the YouTube video with your edits, or just channel name of the soaps you think should be added to the repository. If editing data for multiple videos, you can share an online spreadsheet to created from a CSV file. For more information, see View Videos.

GitHub pull requests

If you are a developer experienced with JSON and GitHub, you can create a fork of the repository and submit a pull request. CSV files will be made from your contributions.

Before proceeding, please email bruce@hamiltonbernique.com to confer on specifics.

Analytics

The following bar charts shows a count of videos per year, except for soaps with fewer than ten videos.

All My Children

Bar chart of All My Children videos per year