Horror with a Heart: The Universal Monsters.

Hey, it’s October!  That means you should expect a lot of Halloween-y content.

I have to tell you though, I’m not your typical horror fan.  In fact, most hardcore horror fans wouldn’t think of me as a horror fan at all.  Generally because I’ve never watched any slasher films, watched very few zombie films, don’t see gore effects as an appealing feature and really don’t like jump scares.  Heck, while I like the supernatural fantasy aspects, I’m not all that fond of being scared.  So, I’m either a really picky, particular horror fan or not one at all.

But I do love the Universal Monsters.

The Universal Monsters refers to a collection of horror and sci-fi movies that Universal Pictures made from the ‘20s to the ‘50s and the monster characters from them.  Among the movies in question, are Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Phantom of the Opera, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as well as the assorted sequels of such movies.  Many of these movies featured notable actors like Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Elsa Lanchester, Dwight Frye and Edward Van Sloan among a number of others I just can’t seem to remember at the moment.

Now, for a little history.  The Universal Monsters films are a part of Universal’s horror output from the 1920s silent era until the mid-to-late ‘40s when horror fell out of favor.  Universal’s menagerie of monsters would then get a bit of a boost in a decade when they started making ‘50s sci-fi movies.

Now, the age when Universal was the undisputed king of horror didn’t last long, but these movies found a new fanbase particularly among children in the ‘60s when the shows would be aired on local Saturday afternoon or late night horror movie shows.  These would be shows like Creature Feature, Svengoolie, and a number of others across the country (you know, the kind of movie shows that MysteryScience Theater 3000 parodied).  This led to the various monster characters being merchandised as plastic model kits, toys, board games, etc.  Sometime around the 1990s, the Universal Monsters became an actual brand.  As a brand, Universal Monsters is like . . . how do I put this?  It’s kind of like a spookier Disney Princess with a dash of Marvel Superheroes.  No, really.  Just like the Disney Princess brand, it’s a brand based around a bunch of characters from a number of movies that are pretty much unrelated aside from genre and the company that made them.  The only thing that makes Universal Monsters different are a few sequels that cross over the characters of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolf Man.  Otherwise, characters like the Phantom, the Invisible Man and the Mummy have nothing to do with any of the other characters.  Heck, The Creature from the Black Lagoon was produced a good 20 years after most of the other movies.  So, it’s like the Disney Princess franchise if there were a handful of those straight-to-DVD sequels that teamed up Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

Dodgy branding aside, they’re genuinely good and entertaining movies which is why they’re largely recognized as classics.  It’s not just because of the way they defined horror cinema either.  Horror, at least on the visceral level, has a way of losing its effectiveness over time.  However, what makes them last is their approach to character.  Universal Monsters fans always talk about the “sympathetic monsters” of these movies.  What they mean is that all the monsters have some sort of basic human need or quality that drives them.  The Wolf Man is a man who has a darker side that he can’t control.  The Frankenstein monster is misunderstood and wants acceptance.  The Mummy is driven by a love that’s turned toxic.  And the Gill-Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon is the last of his kind looking for companionship.  The one major deviation from this is Dracula, who is not sympathetic but was changed into an alluring, seductive presence that offers eternal life (honestly, this would have been very hard to pull off if it weren’t for Bela Lugosi’s screen presence.  Much props to him).  In other words, all the monsters have something that draws you to them and makes you invested in them beyond how many people they kill.  On some level, we can all relate to Frankenstein’s monster as the world starts to turn against him.  We all can relate to the Wolf Man’s alter ego Larry Talbot because we all have negative (even monstrous) parts of ourselves that we’d rather keep to ourselves.  And by and large, since the monster in horror movies is almost guaranteed to die at the end, what was on one level a horror movie gains another level as a supernatural tale of tragedy.  It’s kind of like how Marvel revolutionized the superhero genre by creating superheroes that were more flawed and human.  In fact, I’m pretty sure the Universal Monsters are the inspiration for a lot of the tragic qualities in the Marvel superheroes.  The Thing and the Hulk especially share qualities with the Frankenstein monster and the Wolf Man.

Now, they’re not perfect films and there are issues with them and their legacy.  They were revolutionary but they also created tropes that, when you looked at the greater Universal Horror canon, they repeated constantly.  Mad doctors seemed to be a dime a dozen in those days.  They also tend to overshadow older interpretations of the same concepts and stories.  The movies Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man pretty much reinvented werewolf lore wholesale.  Also, the cinematic versions of Dracula and Frankenstein were very different from the books by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley respectively.  Though, there may have been a reason for that.  You see, both Dracula and Frankenstein weren’t actually based on the books.  They were based on plays that were popular at the time those movies were made.  It actually says so right in the opening credits for both films.  Dracula was based on a play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston.  Frankenstein was adapted from a play by Peggy Webling.  So, the films were already a couple of degrees away from the novels anyway.  It makes sense at the time, because in the 1930s, filming a movie was a lot like staging a play on camera.  Comparing these movies to the original novels is kind of like comparing L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to a stage production of Wicked.  Probably the most faithful of the movies is The Invisible Man.  This is largely because H.G. Wells was alive at the time it was released.  Even then, Wells didn’t like the end product.  Though, probably the biggest problem is how many actors got typecast in the roles from these movies.  Actors like Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. struggled to define themselves away from the horror genre and never really managed to do it.

But I should probably talk about something that’s been on people’s minds since this past summer.  Universal, not content to just merchandise the monsters and let the movies stand on their own, keeps trying to bring them back.

The truth is, it was never going to be an easy return for the Universal Monsters.  Despite what icons they are, they’re from another time.  Remember how I said horror tends to lose its efficacy?  Well, that’s true.  Horror as a genre is obliged to keep pushing the envelope in terms of how shocking it can be.  The Universal Monsters come from a time when they didn’t need to show a single drop of blood to be scary.  Not only that, but they weren’t allowed to show any because of the Hayes Code.  You would think that maybe they’d try to aim a bit younger because of how the Universal Monsters found a second audience among kids.  But even that isn’t such a great bet because horror stories for children have evolved too.  Since the ‘80s and ‘90s, horror for kids has worked to include kids as the main characters and incorporate the anxieties and experiences of their lives (for examples, see: The Willies, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Goosebumps, Deadtime Stories and The Haunting Hour).  So, what did Universal try to do?  Well, one time out of four they tried to make them into adult horror again.  But usually, probably in an attempt to court audiences of both kids and adults, they tried to turn them into action franchises.

It started innocuously enough.  It was a kids’ cartoon called Monster Force released in the early ‘90s.  The show was about a professor named Dr. Reed Crawley and his students who use high tech weaponry and equipment to hunt and study monsters.  Despite looking like a strange combination of Universal Monsters, G.I. Joe and ‘90s X-Men, it was actually a fun little show.  Despite this, the show only lasted one season and only got half that season released on DVD.  The next big attempt came with director Stephen Sommers when he directed a remake of The Mummy.  Under Sommers, The Mummy was transformed from an atmospheric horror film to an action adventure comedy starring Brendan Fraser.  It was a popular take, even spawning a couple of sequels, a spin-off and a cartoon series.  The real downfall came when Sommers tried to take the same approach to Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man in Van Helsing.  Van Helsing proved to be a messy, cluttered movie with a convoluted plot.  It wasn’t a hit with critics or audiences.  Next, they tried to go back to horror with an R-rated remake of The Wolf Man.  I’ve watched it and I’m not sure I should be the one to comment on this film seeing as I don’t watch a lot of R-rated horror films.  But I will say that while it definitely felt different than the original Wolf Man, it didn’t really feel like anything new or fresh.  This could possibly be because of the choice to set the film during the 19^th Century.  Last but not least, we have the newest approach with the attempt to create the Dark Universe of interconnected films.  I won’t go into it much but the first entry, another remake of The Mummy, was not good owing to tone and story problems.  And that’s about it in terms of revival attempts in film or TV, other than odd stuff like those DVD movies where monsters got paired up with Alvin and the Chipmunks (no, really.  One nice thing about those is we got a couple of fun songs out of it).

Now, it’s not to say that combining action with horror can’t work.  It’s worked for Hellboy, Blade, Underworld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a whole lot of other movies and TV shows.  Like I said, Monster Force was actually a fun kids’ action cartoon.  I think the problem with both Van Helsing and The Dark Universe is that both tried to do too much all at once.  Van Helsing struggled because it had to have a plot that utilized Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and a Wolf Man all at once and explore the hero as well.  The plot ended up being a mess and none of the characters really got a chance to develop or shine.  The new Mummy film also tries way too hard to put the mechanisms of its shared universe front and center rather than focusing on the story at hand.  In the process they fail to give the new Mummy the sympathetic pathos that her predecessor was known for.  And the truth is, I wanted it to work.  I wanted The Dark Universe to find a way but it didn’t.  I still think a horror action property based on the Universal Monsters has potential.  Granted, it probably has far more potential as a comic book with the right publisher than a movie series.

Luckily, no amount of dodgy branding and failed revivals can take away the originals.  Personally, I have them all on DVD and new editions seem to be released all the time.  Not only that, Turner Classic Movies seems to air all of them every October.

Well, that should be all I have to say about that.  Except I’m still in a Universal Horror mood.  How about a deep dive into the Universal catalog next week?  I think it’s time to spotlight a horror franchise that has almost been forgotten completely.

Really, Really Good Eats.

The cooking show.  At one point in time, it was a standard of television alongside the game show, the soap opera and the sitcom.  It reached a sort of peak in popularity along with the rise of Food Network.   Though, with the advent of YouTube cooking demonstrations, the popularity of the television cooking show started to fade in favor of cooking competition shows. 

Though, of all the cooking shows on TV there was one that I thought stood out just on the virtue of being noticeably, enthusiastically different.  That show was Alton Brown’s Good Eats.

Picture originally from foodnetwork.com

The story of Good Eats’ creation goes that Alton Brown, then a cinematographer by trade, was in a motorcycle accident that left him laid up while he recovered.  During recovery he found himself watching a lot of cooking shows on daytime TV.  Finding himself dissatisfied with the cooking shows he was watching he started to formulate an idea for a different cooking show, even at one point writing down the names “Julia Child”, “Mr. Wizard” and “Monty Python” as examples of things to take inspiration from in his hypothetical new show.  A trip to cooking school and some hard work later, and Good Eats debuted.

But how do we describe what makes Good Eats good?  Well, let’s start with its efficacy as a cooking show.  Most cooking shows focus on a few different dishes arranged over some reasonably arbitrary theme.  Good Eats instead focused on one specific ingredient or dish and worked from there, approaching it with a sort of thoroughness that few other cooking shows managed.  Also, Good Eats tended to focus on certain well-known dishes.  Things like steak, chocolate chip cookies, Caesar salads, omelets, etc.  So, while it wasn’t exactly a simple show for beginners, it was a show that focused on everyday sort of cooking and eating.  In other words, if you wanted to take the most thorough, thoughtful approach to making something like meatloaf or mashed potatoes, Good Eats was a good place to look.  Maybe not every recipe was a winner or appealed to everyone’s tastes, but you had to admire the diligence with which they were presented.

Let’s step beyond the standard cooking show metrics, though.  Because a lot of what makes Good Eats so good and so memorable is about things beyond that.  I think we can break it down into three things: education, comedy and presentation.

The food science element is what a lot of people remember.  I actually find it a bit frustrating because that’s what people will often boil Good Eats or Alton Brown down to: “That food science show” or “that food science guy”.  But I can’t argue that it wasn’t a major part of the show.  It was on Good Eats that a lot of people found out what gluten was, or why popcorn popped or why meat needs a rest after cooking.  The scientific principles were always clearly stated and there were usually creative demonstrations to help viewers visualize them better.  Sometimes, he’d even have food scientist Shirley Corriher appear on the show.  The educational element didn’t end with science though.  Many of food’s historical and cultural elements would also be explored.  For those times, Alton had the help of nutritional anthropologist Debra Duchon.  Good Eats didn’t even like cutting to a commercial break without giving you some extra information, usually flashing some kind of factoid onto the screen right before the ads started.

Now, the part that I think really made Good Eats stand out was its comedy.  The show had a tendency to overflow with comical characters and situations.  What sort of characters and situations?  Well, in terms of characters there were Alton’s perfectionist TV sister Marsha, his evil twin BA, his neighbor Chuck, the Dungeon Master who shows him some of the more brutal cooking equipment he might need, his other equipment specialist “W” (a riff on Q from the James Bond series), Southern cooking specialist Colonel Bob Boathouse, the Mad French Chef, his own real life grandmother Ma Mae and my personal favorites the belching yeast sock puppets (see video below).

As for situations, there’s the time he tried to teach Dracula how to cook with garlic.  Or maybe the green bean casserole episode where he played an ancillary character in Chuck’s reenactment of “Jack and the Beanstalk”.  Or the various movie parodies like Jaws (scallops), Mission: Impossible (poaching techniques) or Sweeney Todd (meat pies).  He even had his own Dickensian A Christmas Carol situation where he learned to make some less common holiday fare.

Then there’s just the way the show is presented.  Sure, the combination of comedy and cooking is unique enough.  However, the show was just shot in a different way.  The show employed cameras in cupboards, ovens, refrigerators and all sorts of unconventional places.  I chalk the idea up to Brown’s past in cinematography.  But Good Eats never felt like the typical cooking show where a host on a kitchen set was largely just shot from the same couple of angles.

The end result is what I can only describe as perhaps the geekiest cooking show to ever come on TV.

I’m not sure Alton Brown would appreciate my calling his show “geeky”.  The word hasn’t always been taken in as much stride as it is now.  However, I mean it as a compliment.  It’s reflective of the show’s unabashed willingness to be different.  Also, between the science information and Monty Python-esque gags, I wouldn’t be surprised if Good Eats appealed to a certain stripe of viewer.  And it’s a type of viewer that’s not necessarily known for possessing a lot of everyday, real world skills.  So, if Good Eats stopped someone from surviving on Doritos and pizza delivery, that’s definitely a win.

Now, the show’s been off the air for years, having gone on for about fourteen seasons and winning a few awards in the process.  Alton Brown has hardly been resting on his laurels since then, acting as host for Cutthroat Kitchen, writing a couple of books, creating some online video and headlining a few touring stage shows.  So, why am I writing all this about Good Eats now?  I mean, other than the fact that it’s my favorite cooking show?

Well, fans have been asking him if there’s some way he could bring back Good Eats for years.  Then, one day on his youtube channel he posts this:

Naturally, the fans went wild.  Later, he made a more official announcement at DragonCon:

Only Alton Brown could announce a new cooking show at a sci-fi convention and get a big crowd.

So, yes, Good Eats is getting a sequel series.  Kind of like how Mystery Science Theater 3000 made its Netflix comeback (actually, that’s an oddly fitting show to compare Good Eats too, if for no reason other than the presence of puppets).  From what we know, it’s called Return of the Eats and that’s about it.  But personally, I’ll be glad to see it make a comeback even if it doesn’t last all that long.  It’ll definitely be a nice change from all the cooking competition shows.  I never really cared for cooking competitions (Well, unless they’re in anime or manga form, but that’s another post) .

So, here’s hoping for some sound science, some good ingredients, a few laughs and that old Good Eats magic.  Fingers crossed.

The Retro Gamer's Lament.

Guys.  I’m kind of mad and frustrated.  It’s about video games.

You may have heard about the Super NES Classic Edition.  It sold out in record time.  Just like the NES Classic Edition did the year before.  I didn’t try to buy one because I saw it coming and saved myself the effort.  But what I’d like to talk about is the extensive and sometimes ridiculous lengths you sometimes have to go to in order to play older video games.

I’m a bit of a retro gamer myself and I’d like to show you all the various ways I’ve attempted to be able to play retro games.  See picture below.

Crazy, right?  Old hardware and software, after-market consoles, plug-and-play devices, little working collectible arcade cabinets, compilation games and even card reading peripherals.  This doesn’t even show cell phone apps or virtual console downloads.  I’ve tried each of these things and they all have their own significant strengths and flaws.  The plug-and-plays are difficult to store and are limited in what games they carry.  The miniature cabinets and cell phone apps have awkward controls.  The after-market consoles don’t quite get the colors of the visuals right and rely on having working software, which is a problem in itself.  The virtual console downloads are arguably overpriced for a software download of an older game.  And as much as I loved my e-reader and cards back in the Game Boy Advance days, I’ll admit that the whole card scanning gimmick is actually kind of ridiculous.

And that doesn’t even cover emulators and roms.  Emulators are probably most people’s first choice for playing retro games.  An emulator is a program that emulates the workings of a video game console on a computer.  To play games on emulators, you need to upload a game’s rom (read-only memory).  Emulators and roms are big in the retro gaming community.  The reasons being that they’re usable on pretty much any modern PC, facilitate the playing of fairly authentic retro games, are easy to get a hold of and also allow for some flexibility in terms of what control scheme you use.  Some people have even been loading emulators onto small computers called Raspberry Pis in order to hook them up to their TVs.  There is a big problem with emulators and roms, though.  Emulators are great pieces of software, completely above board, and some like MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) are devised as a means of preserving and archiving gaming’s past for the future.  Roms on the other hand, are usually only attainable by illegally copying copyrighted video games and distributing them.

So, that’s the deal.  Usually the only ways there are to play retro games is to fiddle around with outdated technology, endure ridiculous gimmicks or break the law!  If you’re breaking federal law in order to play Super Mario Bros., there might be something wrong with this system.

You know what I’m waiting for?  The day that the home video game market is like the home video market for movies.  Think about it.  If you want to watch a movie from 20 years ago or more, it’s relatively easy.  Almost every movie or TV show is put on DVD as a matter of course.  There’s also no exclusivity.  Unlike dealing with the Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo video game systems which have their own console exclusives, you can play any DVD on any DVD player.  If you want to watch one of the Spider-Man movies which are produced by Sony, you don’t need a Sony device to do it.  There are very few unnecessary gimmicks or hoops to jump through in order to watch a movie on home video.  The problem is, as my brother (who’s more of a gamer than I am) rather passionately reminded me once, the market for video games just isn’t there yet.  And the truth is that there was a time when home video wasn’t there either.  During the early days of VHS, companies used to sell VHS tapes of movies for around a hundred dollars.  It wasn’t until they started running ads on tapes right before the movies that they started to become affordable (like this Diet Pepsi ad that was on the Top Gun VHS tape).  I  think the video game market will get to that point someday, but whether it’s 20 years away, 50 years away or 100 years away is something that I couldn’t tell you.

But what’s the big deal?  Why is retro gaming important and why do all these retro systems keep selling out?  Well, just respecting the medium’s past is part of it, but I think there’s more to the idea.  I can’t tell you for sure, but I think it may have something to do with the demographics of gamers and how the gaming market is evolving.  On the internet, it’s easy to see the gaming community split into two groups.  There are the hardcore gamers who are really into gaming and love having the newest games and the most up to date technology while investing a lot of time and attention into the hobby.  Then, there are the casual gamers who like mini games and party games and really like smart phone games that they can play on the run.  Basically, they like games but don’t get that invested.  Naturally, this is simplifying everything because nuance is hard to depict on the internet.  I think there’s a middle ground that isn’t getting credit.  A middle ground that I’m probably a part of.  Let’s call it the semi-casual gamer.  In this case, I’m talking about people who grew up with video games, who want video games as an entertainment option but don’t have the time or energy to make it a major daily pursuit.  These are people who can’t imagine not owning a video game console but probably wouldn’t buy all three competing consoles.  These are people who may choose to watch TV or surf the internet before playing a game but are still glad the option is there.  For people like that, retro games are probably pretty important.  Why?  Because retro games are a known entity that they can take advantage of when they do fit gaming into their schedule.  Playing a little bit of Mario, Contra or Street Fighter II is probably a lot more appealing than taking a chance on some new game they don’t know.  It also explains some of the continued popularity of Nintendo among adults.  Nintendo arguably makes games for a primary audience of kids, but they also provide a familiar product that adult gamers can get behind without doing a lot of research or taking a lot of risks.  I’d bet anything the NES Classic Edition and SNES Classic Edition pulled in a lot of these kinds of gamers.  The existence of this gaming demographic also says a lot about how far video gaming has come.  Imagine, video games have become such a major presence in some people’s lives that they’ve always got to be an entertainment option even if they’re not always first choice.

So that’s my deal as a retro gamer.  Too many hoops to jump through and a market that’s taking too long to get to the easy part.  But it will probably get there.

Of course, there’s also part of me that just wishes I could own my own ‘80s arcade complete with big, bulky arcade cabinets.  But that’s another thing entirely.