Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome
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SORAS or Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome (less commonly called simply rapid aging) is a fan 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.
In the early days of the soap opera it was not uncommon to age a character right into his or her twenties; 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. 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 fifteen-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.
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).
Rapid aging also occurs in other television genres, especially in situation comedy 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, which usually occurs between seasons, happened with Andrew Keaton in Family Ties and Chrissy Seaver in Growing Pains. 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.
"SORAS" in International Soaps
SORAS is traditionally unheard of on British soaps, where the added degree of realism allows babies born on the show to age in real time. Occasionally, though, producers will alter a character's age for storyline purposes, such as with Ian Beale on British Soap EastEnders who gained an extra year so that his character would be more mature in a plot involving his discovery that his wife was cheating on him and that his child was not his. His original birth year was 1970 and he celebrated his 18th Birthday in 1988, but this was subsequently changed to 1969 and he celebrated his 21st in 1990. Coronation Street has also experimented with SORAS for storyline purposes, with the character of Mark Redman being aged by two years so that he could attend the school where his father Mike Baldwin's worst enemy Ken Barlow was a teacher.
Australian soaps have recently begun the trend of SORASing characters, although like their British counterparts they usually only age characters by two or three years as opposed to the five plus years that is quite common in American soaps. For example, in 1999, the character of Duncan Stewart on Home and Away was aged by two years. Recently, Duncan's niece Martha (who was a year older than Duncan) returned to the show. She too was aged, having originally been born in 1988, but coming back as a 18 year old in early 2005. 2005 also saw the arrival of Lucinda 'Elle' Robinson on Neighbours, who was now a 19 year old, even though her character would really have only been 16 in real time (while Elle was not born on the show, her mother Gail left the show pregnant with her and her siblings in 1989).
A few Neighbours characters have had small leaps in age. Summer Hoyland (Marisa Siketa) went from being 10 years old in 2003 to being 14 years old in 2005, and Jack Scully (Jay Bunyan) who was about 23 or 24 when he arrived in 2002, was said to be 21 years old in 2004. However these small jumps are probably due to scripting or continuity errors and do not seem to be deliberate attempts to age the characters, and these cases have not featured the character being recast with a much older actor.
"de-SORAS"
A similar fan term, de-SORAS, occurs when writers make a character younger. One character that has been "de-SORASed" is Erica Kane on All My Children. When the show debuted in 1970, Erica's date of birth was 1954. In 1993, it was changed to 1956. And in 2002, the year was changed again to 1962. Actress Susan Lucci, who plays Erica, was born in 1947.
A minor example of this occurred in the prime-time soaps The O.C. and Beverly Hills 90210 when the characters, who in the first seasons were implied to be Juniors in high school, were allowed to spend an additional two years in high school.
