Before I saw Star Wars for the first time, my sister, who had seen it, was telling the family that we’d all love it, and in particular was telling my grandmother that she’d really like it because it was a real good vs. evil story where the “bad guys even wear black hats.”
I remember being very confused during the opening battle when everybody had white hats, on both sides! The thought process was something along the lines of “Well, those guys have white hats, and those guys have white hats. How’m I supposed to tell who’s wh-- oooooh. This guy. He’s a bad guy.”
I don’t know why thwey’d say that. I watched SoD only a few months ago – it’s on the Universal “Legacy” collection DVD for Dracula – and it’s pretty clear that it’s sunlight that does hi in. But I’ll check again.
Haven’t read the books nor seen the movie and have no desire to do either, but this doesn’t sound all that awful. What’s wrong with having them avoid sunlight because…
…the way the sun reacts to their skin make it obvious they aren’t human? There are species that “glitter”, aren’t there? Why not vampires?
This was one that used to confuse me. To my mind, “black hats” were ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic Jews. So when I’d hear the term “black hat”, I’d think Jewish guy.
While we’re on Trek, they were on a mission to boldly go where no one had gone before, but most episodes involved planets that they already new about and lifeforms that had already been encountered.
In addition to the ‘vampires die in sunlight’ trope, I’ll pipe in that there is no ‘reincarnated long lost love’ in Bram Stoker’s original novel “Dracula.” Mina Murray-Harker is not a twin double of the living Count’s “beloved Elizabeta” or anything like that. While Dracula does bite her, and she’s in mortal jeapordy of becoming a vampire after her own death, the evil count has no vested interest in her, other than sating his bloodlust and perhaps thumbing his nose at Van Helsing & Harker who are his principle enemies.
The bit about an evil supernatural undead creature who sees a woman who resembles his long-dead lover actually did come from the 1938 version of “the Mummy.” That plot-point was lifted & adapted to several vampire stories, including the late 60s soap opera “Dark Shadows” (waitress Maggie Evans is a lookalike for the vampire Barnabas Collins’ long-dead Josette). The idea worked it’s way into Werner Herzog’s 1979 version of “Nosferatu” and by the time Francis Ford Coppola adapted released “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in the early 90s, most vampire fans (who never bothered to read the original novel) simply accepted that this was part of the original story.
Humphrey Bogart never said the line “Play It Again Sam!” in “Casablanca.”
“Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!” OK, Eve Plumb DID once utter that infamous line, but only one single time. It was not an oft-repeated catch-phrase.
You left out a significant version using this idea – Richard Matheson’s script for the Dan Curtis TV version of Dracula, starring Jack Palance. If Francis Ford Coppola lifted it from anywhere, that’s where I’d place my bet. Curtis, of course, is responsible for Dark Shadows, too, so it’s not surprising the trope shows up in two of his productions.
The name of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant in the 1931 Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein was not Igor (nor was it Eye-gor). It was Fritz.
One NPR critic said that, in Stars Wars The First, the good guys, mostly, were Americans, and the bad guys were British.
I haven’t seen it, but a certain killer told me of an off-beat vampire flick set in the southwest US, called Sundowners, or something. The vamps wore big sombreros and sunglasses, and they lived in a little town in the middle of nowhere.
The dim back of my brain tells me, when the good folks are fleeing the eeeevil folks, the leading lady always turns her ankle. Is that really a pattern?
Dwight Fye came back to play a twisted asistant in the second film, Bride of Frankenstein, who wasn’t named Igor, either. Ygor was the deformed shepherd in the third film, Son of Frankenstein, played by Bela Lugosi. He was twisted because they tried to hang him, and didn’t kill him.
He was tough to kill. Even though he died in Son of Frankenstein, he came back again in the next film, The Ghost of Frankenstein.
There was an assistant named “Fritz” as early as the 19th century in stage adaptations (and in Peggy Webling’s 20th century play that was nominally adopted for th 1931 film). He isn’t in Shelley’s novel, but Dr. Frankenstein needed someone to talk to onstage. “Fritz” is a pretty generaly, all-purpose German name, so it must have seemed natural. I suspect it didn’t sound EVIL enough, though, to American audiences (“I am Dr. Frankenstein, and this is my Evil Hunchbacked Assistant… Fritz!”), so comedians and the like used the name of the later assistant, Ygor.
Of course, since Young Frankenstein was practically a spoof of Son of Frankenstein, it made sense to use Ygor, but I’ll bet they woulda used it anyway.
