THE ARRIVAL OF BARNABAS COLLINS Up to this point, the show had a fairly normal soap with a few minor exceptions, such as the ghost of Josette Collins and David's mother being a "Phoenix" as a climax. The dying ratings meant the show had to do something to really be noticed. And so...in episode 211, they bring in a VAMPIRE. Yes, won't go out in the day, must suck blood with fangs, allergic to garlic, sleeps in a coffin, middle aged 1960s teen idol....WHAT? Only in the 60s.
My father has a copy of this game, and I remember having great fun playing it.
Barnabas was so popular with the kids, he spawned toy models, bubblegum cards, board games, Halloween costumes...the list goes on. Interest in him even sparked paperback novels and comic books. How many kids nowadays come home from school to watch a daytime soap?
In simple words, the plot reads like this: Barnabas loves his family. Barnabas has been in a coffin for 170 years. Barnabas has lost a few of his marbles.Willie doesn't want to play Renfield. Barnabas doesn't give him a choice. Easy to follow, right? Classic elements ala Dracula.
Willie doesn't like being Barnabas's Whipping Boy.
Bring in the girl!
Maggie has been Vicky's friend since episode 1.
Maggie Evans. Maggie looks eerily like Josette. (Or so they say. That Josette portrait is pretty fuzzy) Could she be her reincarnation? No...because the ghost of Josette is still in the old house, watching over the family. Does Barnabas care? Not after being locked in a tomb for so long, he doesn't. Apparently, he has some unfinished business.
The Collins family takes Barnabas's claim at being a cousin from England at face value, and he soon moves into the old house, much to David's disdain. (that's where his ghost friend Josette lives) But who cares what the kid thinks? He still insists he's talking to ghosts!
"You mean...You're not a ghost?"
NEXT - DARK SHADOWS: THE ABDUCTION OF MAGGIE EVANS
I grew up loving vampire lore. My favorite childhood vampire would have to be Barnabas Collins. That said, I recently began re watching the series Dark Shadows. As a child, I rarely saw much of the TV series. I don't think it was on TV at the time and I rarely saw a VHS copy, but whenever I could, I loved it. The only personal copy I had was of the movie House of Dark Shadows. Now I'm in the era of DVD glory! DVDs are inexpensive and easy to buy through the modern marvel of the Internet. I can now watch as much as I want as it comes in through Netflix! Although I'm already breaking down and buying DVD sets from Amazon.My love from the show is reconnected! True, it's badly preserved 1960s footage, often only kinoscope footage surviving, making it look decades older than reality, but there is a charm which prevails. Something romantic and slightly horrific about the clash of innocence and terror that forever curses the house of Collins.
I shall be adding arc summaries and my own personal observation and opinions of the famous dark soap from here on. I'll start with a quick overview of the boring things before the show took off. :)
Vicky looks forward to a bright new life at Collinwood
THE ARRIVAL OF VICTORIA WINTERS At the beginning of Dark Shadows, a young woman arrives to Collinwood to take on a job as a governess for the prestigious Collins family. The boy she was charged to care for, David Collins, is extremely disturbed and even tries to kill his father. David believes he talks with ghosts and loves to play in the abandoned house, known as "the Old House" which used to house the collin'sancestors.
The bright future is often gloomy and filled with psychos. Many generic soap opera things happen. Blackmail, murder, kidnapping, unintelligent romance, etc...David's mother is revealed as Laura Collins. She wants to burn him alive to make him a PHOENIX like herself. Cuckoo? A bit. Of course, she doesn't succeed and dies a horrible death. The beginning was only interesting to me as a precursor for things to come. Tragic Phoenix is Tragic.
In the past few years, I've seen a resurgence of American pulp reprints. This is exciting for me, since the stories in these pulps influenced so much of the super hero and detective stories we know today.What is a pulp? A cheaply printed fiction book, very popular in the 1920s, 1930 , 1940s and on to the 1950s to a lesser extent due to hieghtened censorship.
What sort of things did they print? Everything from disturbingly morbid sci fi-horror to stories for the bored housewife about steamy romances. The covers were often beautifully painted teasers, half naked attractive young people being tormented by wild deformed cannibals on a space ship? Sounds pretty normal.
One of my favorite parts of the original pulps are the aforementioned covers. Many of the subsequent reprints are of the text only, and lacking in the marvelous full cover paintings that madeup each issued book, or the beautiful black and white pen drawings, often very detailed, that were scattered throughout the actual books. Occasionally I see a reprint that contains these aspects, and those are the ones I find myself drawn to buy.
I've read quite a bit of the Weird Tales reprints, although the variety tends to lack, since H.P. Lovecraft tends to dominate as much as possible. Cthulhu sells apparently. To be honest, I'd rather read a good ghost story or a unique take on an folklore. No offence to the Cthulhu Mythos, but you just don't make it to my nightmares. That said, H.P. Lovecraft was a genius at the pulp genre, but as a 'junk fiction' writer, he never did see his fanbase peak.
The pulps created a new outlet for crime writers. Endless detective stories, adventure, romance, and horrors could be released every month and easily bought by the average person. A pulp book averaged about 10-25 cents - a far cry from the $15 average of today. (Just one of those 10 cent books of yesteryear now will put you back a good $80-$300) Every month, and sometimes twice a month, a reader could pick up their favorite crime titles cheaply at even grocery stores, or so I'm told by those generations who witnessed it.
In an era without television, and with limited radio channels, reading was one of the few ways to find stories that were guaranteed to peak your interest. Me? I buy every reprint of The Shadow I can find! The dialog might be dated, the titles mellow dramatic, and the subjects politically incorrect, but I enjoy a good detective story sluthed by an invisible spy with an endless repertoire of tricks! Who Knows...What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men? Nothing like a good maniacal laugh.
Speaking of racist, if a character wasn't white, you can bet they'd carry most of the dark stereotypes that aren't allowed in fiction today. Fu Manchu was probably the most infamous evil asian, fullfilling the role of the mad scientist and classic antihero of his own books. His popularity spun dozens of evil asian titles. The racism doesn't stop there, it often portrays savage indians (both Native American and East Indians alike), and uneducated manservent blacks are fairly normal. While reading anything from another time, it's important to remember that values and ideals have changed a lot over the past 50 years.
Pulps have brought us many famous heros we associate with other media, such as Tarzan, Flash Gordon , or lessor known cult stars such as Buck Rogers and John Carter of Mars. Famous heros such as Batman were admited by their creators to be inspired by The Shadow. Film Noir took many of it's formulas and cliches from the detective pulps of the 1930s. Where would we be without our cheap fiction?
So, being a non-traditional college student, I'm reminded on a near-constant basis of the passage of time and how it pertains to me-- essentially how old I am compared to the people I'm surrounded by. It's always a little bit jarring when I reference something from my childhood in passing and nobody understands what I'm talking about. My mental self-image tends to be of me about five years younger than I actually am, so when I realize that the people I'm friends with were kids when they were watching the same stuff I was watching in high school, it throws me a little off-kilter.
So, of course, when you get to be my age, and surrounded by people who don't know what a Smurf is (seriously), you start waxing nostalgic about the 'good ol' days' of Saturday morning cartoons, monolithic rental VCRs (the kind that weighed about fifteen pounds, came in a big, padded briefcase, and had the tape compartments that popped up out of the body), and a time when 16-bits was an exciting leap forward in videogame technology. So in honor of this milestone (sort of like menopause, but on a purely psychological level), here's my top-5 list of things that still, at the age of thirty, make my inner-6-year-old gasp and flail with excitement.
This was a show on Nickelodeon way back in the day, and I was hooked on it like smack. My mother, having flashbacks to when my older brother was my age and hooked on Speed Racer, forbade me from watching it for fear of it giving me nightmares. Of course I watched it anyway when she wasn't looking, and if it gave me nightmares, I don't remember them. Over the years, the show faded from my memory entirely, until not too long ago when I stumbled across some fanart or other on DeviantArt and for hours afterwards I was unable to get the theme song out of my head. Seriously, I think the part of my brain most people use for things like remembering how to do math problems is being used to remember music from 80s cartoons.
This is another one that, like many, many skits from Sesame Street, has stuck with me vividly through the years. I am still unable to hear this piece from Carmen without thinking of this orange, imagining the singer making the same rubber band contortion with her mouth, and so forth. I will probably never be able to see an actual performance of this opera without having to excuse myself to giggle in the ladies' room during this number. Jim Henson's legacy lives on, indeed.
Everyone has a movie they loved so completely and passionately as a kid that they'd watch it over and over again, to the point that their parents would hide it for the sake of their own sanity. This was that movie for me. Whenever one of my parents, usually my dad, would take my siblings to get a few movies over the weekend, this was nearly always the one I would pick. I knew exactly where it was at the rental store and would beeline for it as soon as we came in. Not only would I rent it just about every single time I was able, but I'd watch it as many times as I possibly could before it had to go back. My love of this movie has actually persisted-- where most of my favorite childhood shows and films have not held up exceptionally well upon later viewing, I still love this one, warts and all. It's another one where I was still able to recall nearly perfectly all the music, including the background music, well into my late-teens when I was able to find a copy on VHS and relive my childhood whenever I wanted. I'm a bit miffed that this one hasn't made it to DVD yet.
(Okay, I tried really hard to find a clip of Optimus Prime just talking, but evidently nobody on Youtube gives a crap unless he's dying at the same time, and while that certainly brings back loads of memories for me, none of them are happy. So instead you get Peter Cullen doing the Prime voice at a con.) Optimus Prime was one of the big, big heroes of my childhood, along with He-Man and She-Ra. Oddly enough, the Transformers theme song doesn't fill me with the wave of nostalgia of that those other shows' songs do, but Peter Cullen's voice sure does. I was going to marry that big, hulking robot from beyond the stars when I was six years old, and the sound of that voice still, to this day, fills me with the adoration of my six-year-old self. I remember doing a double-take when Cartoon Network started using him as a narrator for their Toonami lineup and squealing at the nostalgic memories that stirred up. Peter Cullen was by far the biggest draw I had to see the Michael Bay movie a few years back and is pretty much the only draw I have to see the new one in a few weeks. And even at the age of twenty-nine, sitting in the exact same theater I'd seen the original Transformers movie in, way back in 1986 at the ripe old age of eight, as soon as Peter Cullen's voice boomed at me out of the speakers, I was gripped with a sudden and profound terror that I was about to watch him die again. I think I white-knuckled my armrest until the ending credits. I will probably do the same thing with the sequel.
Putting aside all disputes about what show was better, this or He-Man (which I was also absolutely obsessed with), this one wins out for me because She-Ra was, bar none, my defining role-model as a kid. This, He-Man, and Transformers were the triumvirate of shows that guaranteed an absolute tantrum if I missed a single episode, repeat or not. To say that I loved this show is an understatement: I was obsessed with it for years. I can remember being ten years old and drawing one of the characters on my desk at school over the entire school year and being so incredibly proud of it, since it was probably one of the best things I'd ever drawn up until then. I had a good number of the action figures, but my best friend had most of the playsets and the harder to find figures like Peek-a-Blue and Mermista. Unfortunately, on their annual trip to Costa Rica, they'd somehow run into money problems and had to sell her collection, which I think deavestated me more than it did her. On retrospect, there was a really interesting story there but to my 8 year-old self, all I knew was that the really awesome toys were gone. (My priorities were a little messed up at that age.) But between this show and He-Man, just the sound of the Filmation logo that preceeded every show is still enough to make me perk up with excitement. Can't really watch the show itself for more than a few minutes, but that opening will forever make me happy.
So there's my childhood in a nutshell, pretty much. Sure there were other things outside of TV that happened and influenced me, but they're (thankfully) impossible to find on Youtube, so there you go.
THE ARRIVAL OF BARNABAS COLLINS
