Tag Archives: Barnabas

My Memories of Dracula

6 Feb

February 6th, 2013

Vlad Dracula

The story begins with a man named Jonathan Harker. We know his name is Jonathan Harker because it turns out that we are not reading Dracula at all, we are reading The Diary of Jonathan Harker. (This book is totally misnamed.) Anyway, Harker is on his way to Transylvania, a wild and desolate place that in the distant place was the center of the US automobile industry but now stands deserted, with crumbling buildings and rampant crime and horror. Oh, sorry, that’s Detroit. Take out the part about the auto industry and the rest still stands. Neither is a place any sane person would want to visit.

Harker is going to see a man named Count von Count Dracula. The Count loves to count things and lives in a filthy castle full of his beloved trash. He is also a vampire, although Harker doesn’t know that. What Harker does know is that every single person he meets tells him not to go to Detroit- I mean Dracula’s castle. They urge him to turn back, they warn him of the evils and horror that await, they tie him up and try to ship him back to England in a box, all to no avail. You see, Harker is a traveling salesman and he is there to sell Amway to Count von Count Dracula and those Amway salesmen don’t take no for an answer.

Things got off to a strange start when Harker’s ride to the Count von Count’s castle arrived. The coachman was wearing a hood pulled low over his face and a pair of Groucho nose/glasses. As Harker later found out, it was none other than The Count himself. Turns out he had fired all of his servants when they ran out of blood.

Things did not go well in Count von Count Dracula’s castle. The food was spoiled, the days were boring and the nightlife sucked… so to speak. Eventually it became clear to Harker that Dracula was not interested in buying any Amway. Problem was he didn’t realize it until Dracula had already departed for London and left Harker locked in the basement with his ex-wives.

Meanwhile, in another book I mean back in England, Miss Lucy Westenwhore was torn between her three lovers. One was a rich American Texan, one was a rich English nobleman, and one was rich, nothing else matters, does it? Well, yada yada yada, nothing much happens for a long time except that Lucy’s friend Mina, who happened to be Harker’s wife, began to wonder where her husband was. She didn’t wonder too loudly, however, being surrounded by rich single guys.

Meanwhile, in a complete and total coincidence of the sort only found in these types of novels that feature complete and total coincidences, right next door to our main characters is an insane asylum. Now if you are anything like me you’d think having a nuthouse next door would be a deal breaker and no way would I live there, but back in those days it was considered pretty cool and as more and more areas of London got gentrified insane asylums popped up everywhere. They were the Starbucks of their time.

About now I should mention that Dracula has been printed all over the world in dozens of languages and editions. If you are reading the black and white 1931 Universal Studios edition, Dracula wears very elegant evening clothes, as if he is on his way to dinner with the Queen and not actually on his way to dig himself out of his filthy grave. If you are reading the 1958 Hammer Studios version, Dracula is written in color and looks like Christopher Lee.  In neither version does he sparkle.

Count von Count“Long story short” is an often overused cliché but in this case it is totally accurate. Depending on the edition you are reading, and this is true, Count von Count Dracula does not appear in the middle of the book for almost 200 pages. This is no joke. A lot of the dialogue is like “where’s Dracula? We have to find Dracula” and “where can Dracula be? We have to find him before the sun comes up.” See? Long story short. I just saved you 200 pages. (And somewhere along the way Lucy dies and comes back as a vampire and then really dies. That’s a spoiler, sorry.)

Here is the story in convenient bullet point format. (Convenient for me- less typing.)

  • Dracula comes to England by boat and gorges on the all-you-can–eat buffet
  • Dracula is invited into the mental asylum by one of the inmates and- hold on to your hat- one of the main characters is a doctor who also lives there, giving Dracula free reign of the house.
  • A lot of people get attacked, including the residents of a ghetto who see Dracula in his bat form and try to capture “the black chicken.”

Meanwhile, Dr. “Van” Helsing, the one important character whom I should have mentioned long before this arrives and teaches the Scooby Gang how to defeat a vampire.

HOW TO KILL A VAMPIRE

  • Drive a wooden stake through his heart
  • Cut off his head
  • Trap him under running water
  • Expose him to sunlight
  • Force him to watch Twilight
  • Didja notice the bullet points again? I am so lazy when it comes to typing. Which begs the question of why I am still typing this thought. Hmmmm….

It is also interesting to note that any and all of those methods will also kill a mugger, except maybe that sunlight thing. Just throwing that out there in case you get into trouble.

Anywho, for no reason other than he’s running out of places to hide (in London of all places!) Dracula flees back to his trash-filled Transylvania castle, pursued by the rich white guys who follow his every move by using a strange psychic connection between Mina and the Count. It turns out that they came up as matches on J-Date and that site is never wrong.

Dracula makes it thisclose to his castle and freedom when, again depending on the version you are reading, he gets his head cut off outside the castle, he gets staked in his coffin, or Peter Cushing chases him into the castle where, using a pair of candlesticks held together as a cross, forces the Count into the sunlight where he crumbles into dust, except for his ring, which somehow later turns up later in Detroit on Hardcore Pawn.

This is the first of a series of Count von Count adventures, in which Count von Count Dracula moves to a typical American soundstage and takes up residence in a trashcan, emerging only to teach kids how to count before draining their blood on public television.

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Dark Shadows

14 Dec

December 13th, 2009

I’ve had some free time on my hands lately. You know, since they’ve taken all the coal from the ground, and they’re closing all the factories down. Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time, filling out forms, standing in line, whatever else Billy Joel wrote about in Allentown. Not that I live in Allentown, but the point is that I have enough time on hands to write blogs quoting from Billy Joel songs for no good reason.

So I’ve been looking for something to do and crack is just too expensive so I settled on watching old episodes of Dark Shadows on DVD. It is cheaper than crack, less addictive, and some of the old black and white episodes are so boring I can fall asleep on the couch, which is a real boon to a guy like me who can’t seem to sleep when he is supposed to, i.e.: at night, and not while driving to Best Buy to pick up a set of Dark Shadows DVDs.

There were 1229 episodes made and so far I have seen the first four. Only 1225 more to go! Truthfully though, this isn’t the first time I have watched this show. Several years back, in the 1990’s, I watched almost a whole season of this show on the Sci-Fi channel. That was when it was actually a good place to find science fiction TV shows and movies, as opposed to what it is now, a good place to see films like Mega-Croco-Shark vs. Prehistoric Alligator IV: Revenge of the Fish.

The problem then was that the show got my interest. Why is that a problem? Here’s why. When I tuned in a girl named Victoria Winters (how do I know she was named Victoria Winters? Because every episode started with a voiceover beginning with “My name is Victoria Winters.” Damn egotistical if you ask me.) had been transported via séance into the past to become part of the Collinswood household of the 19th century. I got to know all the characters, like Angelique the witch from the West Indies who was much hotter than Jossette Du Pre, and that caused a big problem for Barnabas because while he was schtupping Angelique behind Jossette’s back in the Indies, back home in Maine he was supposed to be marrying Josette. Which is why Angelique killed him and turned him into a vampire. Simple.

I got to know the rest of the cast, from Rev. Trask to Willie to Jeremiah Collins, etc, and eventually all good things came to an end and “My name is” Victoria Winters was pulled back to the 20th century where not a single character (save Barnabas)  was on the show. Oh sure, the actors were all the same, but they were all playing different characters! I had no idea who anyone was. Why was Jossette called Maggie Evens and working in a diner? Why was Jeremiah now called Roger? Who was this woman cleaning the chimney?

And even worse, they picked up as if nothing happened! As if the whole past season didn’t happen. “As I was saying, that is why the cows didn’t give milk this year,” said Roger. WTF?

So I stopped watching.

Now though I’m determined to get through it. I’ve gotten the first set (of 36 freakin’ sets!) and I’m almost entirely through the first disc (out of 6.) So that is 6 discs per set, for 36 sets, that makes about 4,500 discs to get through. Or 216, whichever one is mathematically accurate.

At this rate I can expect to be finished with Dark Shadows by the time I am 65, just in time to retire. Then I am sure to have some more time on my hands. Having already seen Dark Shadows, maybe I’ll move on to something shorter, like rare kinescopes of Al Jolson singing Mammy. Or maybe I’ll just do crack.

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