I'd love to see his complete Dracula given the full Hollywood treatment, as long as Tim Burton isn't the one who does it. It was a very faithful adaptation to the original book, and Frank Langella played the Count.

I saw a little of the Langella "Dracula", and maybe I happened to stumble in at the wrong moment, but I recall a scene where Dracula was active during the day, and expositioned at Van Helsing that it's always night somewhere in the world, or some such.

Bottom line, I don't know that it's all that faithful to the original. I read the original, and prefer to call it by its original title: "An Excruciating Guide to Train and Carriage Schedules Across Europe, and If You Can Get Through That There's a Pretty Boring Vampire". Bear in mind that, at the time, "Dracula" included one more vampire than most novels, so it could grow famous by that virtue alone. These days we have so many vampires to choose from, we can be choosy vampire shoppers. Bort prefers "Blacula", which is not exactly a "great" movie but I can get behind a lot of aspects of it (William Marshall, the eternal love thing, Dracula being a racist dick, Gordon Pinsent as the film's token white guy).

It's a travelogue to a place the author has never actually been. Stoker famously pointed out an inn that was in a travel guide he had found, and then wrote what Jonathan Harker ate, which was exactly what the travel guide suggested eating when visiting.

Yeah, but ... surely the vampire at the end of the trip is the part you'd want to get to as quickly as possible.

Kind of like the "Left Behind" reviews over at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/, where the blogger can't get over the authors' priorities. The sudden unexplained disappearance of a third of the world's population -- including every child -- is pretty much forgotten. But man, they love to write at length about telephones and the calls that are made on them.

Bort,

Whatever you do, don't read Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein."

The first third of the book consists of letters home from a guy who is neither Frankenstein nor his monster.

The next third is a highly detailed account by that guy about his meeting Frankenstein and finally getting Frankenstein to tell the actual story of creating a monster.

Also, in Stoker's "Dracula" the Count was indeed able to go about in daylight though his power was diminished and he could only assume the form of an distinguished white-haired gent with a big moustache.

In Langella "Dracula", he was at full power during daylight so long as he stayed indoors (I think the scene I remember was in a basement). And I seem to recall that, in the "Dracula" book, Dracula was operating during daylight only because Van Helsing and friends were successfully messing with his safe houses -- he was on the move only because he had to be. (He sure wasn't going to movies and shit like in Bram Stoker's "Dracula", the movie.)

I remember at least on eyewitness account in the novel had Dracula walking around in broad daylight.

Also, I should note I have a special place in my heart for the Langella Dracula. He's the actor I most associate with the character because it was the first serious live-action version of Dracula I saw as a kid.

Actually, I did see this movie called "Dracula vs Frankenstein" when I was five. It was the last movie poor Lon Chaney Jr. ever made. Dracula in that movie was hard to take seriously, though.

If you ever get a chance to see that movie, watch it. It's wild and weird as Hell. I don't think they ever covered it on MST3K, but if they did, it would be epic.

Walking around in daytime vs. being at full power in daytime (because he's in a basement and therefore in shadows or some such).

I don't doubt that the Langella "Dracula" is good. Indeed, it's probably better than the original novel. I'd be surprised if it weren't (an opinion that should not surprise you by now).

I still prefer "Blacula" unironically; I'm pretty sure that's where we get the notion of vampires being noble, tragic, lovelorn figures. Vampire writers have gone to that well a little too often since, but I'm good with "Blacula" getting there first.

Same here. I found the show boring and uninteresting back then at my early age. Now I'm intrigued by most mystery stories.

I remember watching the intro to the show on at least 2 or 3 different occasions as a kid and being repeatedly disappointed that the rest of the episodes didn't continue the animation.

Exactly the same for me, too. When I was a kid my local PBS station played reruns of Carmen Sandiego right before prime time for some reason, so it would often be followed by Mystery. I'd always stay to watch the cool intro, then immediately switch it off.

I've actually watched a few episodes of the Inspector Lynley Mysteries since then. It's good, but it's also ridiculous. Lynley is a freaking British lord of some kind (5th Viscount of Hartfordshire-on-Dunwinmoor-on-Toast-With-Hash-Browns or something) but he inexplicably works for the London police department instead of living it up in his castle in Europe. Let's just say he...hates crime.

Which reminds me. There's an "Elseworlds" I'd like to see, where that Zorro movie by Park Row was sold out, so Thomas and Martha Wayne lived to a ripe old age and their son Bruce grew up to be a slightly bored socialite. But he always had an interest in detective stories, so in that "Elseworlds", he would be yet another one of Gotham's second-tier private detectives (along with Slam Bradley, Jason Bard, etc). Besides having wealth and social status, Bruce's gimmick would be that he's -- and prepare to be amazed -- a purple belt in karate. That's right, he can defeat up to ONE assailant at a time! (Provided he's fighting by tournament rules.)

This would not be a really great "Elseworlds", except that we could see a happy (albeit vaguely dissatisfied) Bruce Wayne just for once, and that would be a thing. Maybe a story where Batman finds himself on that world and has to stop supervillains from emerging, but he has to do so without anyone even knowing he's there.

Mystery was just an anthology, so the quality depended on what was being shown, really. Some of those shows were actually pretty good. My mom was super into mystery shows and she watched the Poirot and Mrs. Marple ones religiously which kinda got me into them as well. When they are really well acted and written, they were actually pretty superb little movies. The Mrs. Marple ones in particular were pretty good, what with the entire concept that these dark and grisly murders were being solved by this unassuming old woman who was like someone's gran or something. I haven't seen the later ones (like Inspector Morse, etc.) but a lot of that stuff is streaming now, so I should probably dig back into it.

Xenocide: Sounds like Campion, which starred Peter Davison post-Doctor Who as a crazy billionaire who solves mysteries, but only ones that result in the reconciliation of separated lovers. It's very dumb.

What would Campion do if he solved a mystery but then it unexpectedly resulted in two lovers breaking up? Would he un-solve it?

That happened at least once. He was devious.

It's okay, she just fainted.