FAMILY FEUD: THE SKORZENYS

I think most people know that Chris Carter gives credit to 'The Night Stalker' as the inspiration for 'The X-Files'. And in the past decade and a half, that inspiration was then passed down to other shows - 'Strange Luck', 'Strange World', and currently, 'Supernatural', among others.

But it wasn't just the rumpled hero bucking against the system in a search for the dark Truth that has inspired other TV series. The villain of 'The Night Stalker' has also served as a "role model".

In 1987, the creators of 'Werewolf' named Chuck Connors' character "Janos Skorzeny" as a tip of the hat to the vampire played by Barry Atwater.

That's the Trueniverse story. Here's how it could have played out in Toobworld......

Captain Janos Skorzeny had been "embraced" into the werewolf bloodline by Nicholas Remy less than two thousand years ago. Skorzeny must have been from the Balkans, perhaps of coarse peasant stock. Unlike Remy, he didn't use the immortality he gained to better himself, but instead he became as hardened and depraved and as vile as the most rabid of beasts.

At the same time, the Family Skorzeny must have prospered in Romania over the centuries, so that by the end of the 19th Century, there was some fortune attached to the name as well as prominence.

However, the Skorzenys tempted Fate when they named their child after the legendary forebear who mysteriously disappeared more than a millennia before - Janos.

If the records cited in the TV movie 'The Night Stalker' wre to be taken at face value, Janos Skorzeny II was born in 1899, making him over seventy years of age when Kolchak confronted him in Las Vegas. But if Skorzeny's physiology was preserved at the time he was "embraced by the Kindred", then it must have happened back in the 1950s, as Skorzeny had the appearance of a man no older than in his mid to late fifties.

I may be wrong on this, but I think Janos Skorzeny had been a vampire for far longer than just a couple of decades, perhaps even a century or more. So I believe that he created his own paper trail back in 1899, choosing that date to be "born" with an eye to the future. He must have foreseen, perhaps after an encounter with Sherlock Holmes, that eventually everyone would be filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered.

So it's possible that he had already been a vampire for centuries, but not documented by the modern world until 1899. As such, it makes for interesting speculation that at some point in the long stretch of their "lives", the vampire Janos Skorzeny eventually crossed paths with the werewolf Janos Skorzeny. But even though they may have been bound by blood, each of them would have realized that their own existence in the shadows of the human world could be compromised by any notoriety attached to the other's identity.

If they did meet, I doubt that it would have been a very amicable family reunion.

And even though "Underworld" exists in the comic book and movie universes, perhaps this encounter sparked the long-running enmity between these two supernatural races.

It's interesting that within the framework of this theory, the character who was created first in the real world came into existence after his namesake in Toobworld.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby