Monday, January 26, 2015

DRAC PACKED - LAZLO DRACULA


'The Librarians'
"And The Crown Of King Arthur"


First off, I want to thank the producers and writers of the pilot episode for giving this an actual title rather than just "Pilot".

In this episode, Flynn Carsen claimed to have killed Dracula.  We saw this happen in the third "Librarian" movie, "The Curse Of The Judas Chalice".


Apparently, Drac feasted on a cholera victim hundreds of years ago, which left no more than a crippled human.  Like Flynn, he had been searching for the Judas Chalice which would not only cure him but also re-energize his vampiric powers.
 

"Vlad" was portrayed by Bruce Davison, a really good actor whom I've been following since "Willard".  However, he's just not THE Dracula for Toobworld.  That "honor" goes to Rudolf Martin, who played Dracula in a TV movie about the real life Vlad Tepes and then as the legendary vampire Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's novel in an episode of 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer'.   So he covered all the bases.

Fellow Crossoverists subscribe to the "soul clone" theory first proposed by Chuck Loridans to justify so many different incarnations of Dracula in various media.

However, I only wanted to focus on the Dracula televersions - of which there are plenty! - and so I started thinking inside the box for a splainin.

I turned to the one season vampire series 'Kindred: The Embraced' for inspiration.  In that show, there were about five different vampire species, at least one of which fit the specifics of the Dracula type. Those "embraced" by a vampire into the Life became their Sire's kindred.  As such, they usually took the name of their Sire's clan.

So it was with all the Draculas to be found on television. Rudolf Martin is THE Dracula and all of the others were turned by him.  This includes Michael Nouri's bloodsucker in a 1970's cliffhanger series, the Dracula family led by Dick Shawn in a 1980's sitcom and from the 1960's, even Grandpa of the Munsters family!

(Sam Dracula was actually an inventor from Brooklyn named Carrari who utilized a time machine to go back to the early years of Vlad the Impaler as vampire to become a vampire himself.)



And this is how Professor Lazlo (treated as an alias in "Curse of the Judas Chalice" but which was in fact his real name back in the Middle Ages) could be considered as Dracula. Like so many of the Dracul kindred, he came to consider himself The Dracula and passed himself off as such to Flynn Carsen.

And as far as Flynn was concerned , Lazlo Dracula was the real deal.

BCnU!

No comments: