Friday, October 16, 2015

Young Fears 16: The Bride of Dracula

Each October I like to run a series of Halloween-themed posts on this blog. All this month, I'll be telling anecdotes about things which frightened me while growing up.

Strange as it may sound, I didn't really enjoy Marvel super-heroes while growing up - I much preferred the DC heroes. Still, I would entertain just about any super hero with a TV show so I tried to catch Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends whenever possible. More than any other Marvel program of the 80s, it opened up the paths and byways of the Marvel Universe to characters who were otherwise unfamiliar to non-comic book readers.

In one such episode, "The Bride of Dracula!", that proved to include Dracula himself (seen performing his Elvis routine above), who was, naturally, a Marvel Universe resident. Here, he attempted to seduce Firestar (just as he'd targeted Storm in X-Men #159) and brought along the Frankenstein Monster and a Wolfman. This was the first big monster team-up I can recall seeing and the sight of the Wolfman particularly creeped me out because of my earlier fright at the Lon Chaney, Jr. film. Sure, this episode's adventure turns out be "just a dream," but that didn't make the monsters any less scary to my sensitive soul.

At least the DC super heroes would never insert monsters into their cartoons. Or so I thought.

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