We never drink….wine.
(that’s not true, we drink a lot of wine.)
Welcome to Episode 21, where we shanghai in Dame Cleolinda Jones to discuss all things Dracula! There’s also the moment in which we broke Cleolinda, just as she breaks Twilight Noobs. It’s delightful.
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Annotated Dracula for all your nerdy Dracula needs.
Varney the Vampire, a Victorian era Penny Dreadful.
New England Vampire Panic episode of Stuff You Missed In History Class.
The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident of 1892
Dracula 1931 with Bela Lugosi
Dracula, 1958 with Christopher Lee
Dracula 1979 with Frank Langella
Part one of a documentary/interviews about the 1979 film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTxOUETwl1Y
Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Gary Oldman
Dracula 2000 with Gerard Butler
NBC’s Dracula with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. That happened.
Van Helsing with Hugh Jackman.
Penny Dreadful, a Showtime series that is what the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wishes it could be.
Athena’s Daughters, an anthology Cleo contributed to, is now available as an ebook. The hardback will be out later this summer!
ComicCon posters for the NBC Dracula characters, or the moment we all knew we were in trouble.
The Praying Mantis because of course.
What about this Edward Cullen, Hannibal Lector connection theory you mentioned? You can’t just toss that off and then leave it!
I AM THE WORST. I completely forgot.
https://storify.com/cleolinda/edward-lecter-cullen.html
Enjoy!
Wow, Cannidad is sooo disappointed in you, Edward!
(Working on my own reply; there’s just so much to say!)
Okay, so I know this isn’t directly tied into Dracula specifically (that we know of yet) BUT because Penny Dreadful does have the Egyptology and Egyptian vampires I AM HONOR-BOUND TO BRING THIS UP: Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series. Five books, more paranormal romance than horror steampunk novels and it’s like high-end candy for my brain. There are vampires, there are werewolves, there are sparkly gay vampires with male harems, there’s diversity in character sexualities, the heroine is fantastic, the romantic elements are fantastic (and occasionally screaming at the book and throwing it against the room because HOW COULD YOU) and hedgehogs. They’re utterly fabulous, and I’ve gotten all but one of my friends hooked on this series. (She doesn’t like Parasol Protectorate, but she does like the prequel YA series Finishing School.) And to make this relevant to Penny Dreadful, the second book involves a mummy causing vampires and werewolves to turn mortal and the last book has the main cast going to Egypt to investigate things.
I’m sorry, I’m on a quest to make everyone read Gail Carriger; it’s my current crack series (along with Seanan’s books). And the main series is complete, we’re just waiting on the prequel series to finish and then the SEQUEL adult series isn’t coming out until next year. *grumblegrumblestupiddeadline* I had a specific reason to pimp these books out, I think you guys would enjoy them if you like Penny Dreadful. (And it’s either that or the Meg Cabot book inspired by Dracula, which while I like, I have a lot of things to say about that book. )
You know, at first I wanted to spoil the time-point where Breaking The Cleo occurs in my review, but then after actually listening to the whole podcast it felt so awesome it would be such a “You bitch!” worthy offence if I did that; plus I thought Cleo already broke herself pretty nicely when she expressed her disappointment of NBC-Dracula.
But the stupid praying mantis… yeah, and I thought the one in Season I of Buffy was bad enough.
Having only watched the 1992 FFC version of Dracula out of all the “proper” film versions, I was deeply grateful that the ladies had dedicated such a substantial amount of time to the Penny Dreadful series. Eva Green is my celebrity crush and also my Patronus, I endured Camelot three years ago because she was in it. I loved her 2010 indies film “Womb” the most (the dialogue in the script might only be ten pages long, the rest was all environment and body language), and I also loved her in Casino Royale and Kingdom of Heaven.
Never imagined that I would be ahead of Cleo so much in watching a show like this one. Penny Dreadful is the second western tv series I’d had the honor to follow every week as it comes out since its inception; I did it before for the two seasons of Hannibal. I must say that as much as y’all had loved Eva’s performance as of the time of recording, I’d be surprised if her performance in episode 5 doesn’t blow all of your minds away. I’m reminded of Watchmen, when Alan Moore first handed in his early script of how the story would go down, the artists pointed out that it would fill at most six issues’ worth of material, so A.M. went back and did issues entirely devoted to character backstory. I see something very similar happening in episode 5 with Vanessa’s backstory being told. Only eight episodes per season and one of them is character backstory; that’s very telling. I hope that in a future episode the ladies might elaborate more on the series as a whole, it certainly deserves that.
That’s all for now, I think. Keep up the wonderful work!
Hey – had to rescue your commends from the spam filter. It used to catch responses that contained links, but yours doesn’t, so I’m not sure what triggered it, maybe the length or that you left two close together. Either, it’s all good now.
Thank you for saving that, Alina. Last time I commented was for episode vii, because the ladies asked for TV court dramas from China, I did and the comment was blocked, so I went back and did adjustments on the links and the next one went though. I sent an email to you asking about my comment here when it failed to show after many hours (and as you said, i was baffled because everything I said was on topic and there weren’t links at all), but all’s well now, and I’m glad about that.
But seriously, I’m very eager to know your (including Cleo’s) thoughts on the show in a future podcast, now that episodes 5 & 6 had aired. The preview for ep. 7 that involved Vanessa curled up on a chair looks promising as heck. I would say some more, but In Conclusion: Eva Green.
Two things I’d fogotten to say last time:
An honorary Dracula movie which I’d watched and enjoyed every time is Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), the biopic of the Hollywood director who infamously had the worst love-of-his-craft/actual-film-quality ratio ever. Martin Landau played Bela Lugosi, and one of the film’s important threads is the friendship Edward D. Wood Jr. had with Bela in the final years of the latter’s life. Very touching film and a strong recommend if you haven’t seen it already.
~*~
I found a video clip called “The Letter” on Youku (originating from Youtube, no doubt), which is a one-man recitation/comedy-sketch done by Stephen Fry [i hazard a guess that it was filmed in the early ’80s] about the narrator (not Renfield) setting off to the count’s castle and how Dracula was *really* destroyed. If you haven’t seen it before, I strongly urge you all to check it out. It’s just as funny as Honest Trailers (I’d watched LotR and TDK so far, but apparantly there’re more out there).
That reminds me: I’d like to request a future episode where you’d be discussing British comedy panel shows. I’d been binge-watching QI for a while, and I’d watched a few episodes of Have I Got News For You, including one back in 2010 that was hosted by Benedict Cumberbatch (the BC fan duo-lingo subtiles group made understanding all the cutural and political Things much easier). I love QI very much, and I’d come to know a lot of British/American/Canadian comedians through it. The majority of the guests are English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish, but I know at least one American (Rich Hall) and one Canadian (Katherine Ryan, she debuted in season K) in the mix, so it’s still quite relevant to the podcast’s major structure, I hope.
How can you have Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu but not Max Schreck’s original? Here I have to confess that those two Nosferatus (plus a third about “Max Schreck”, “Shadow of the Vampire”) are the only “Dracula” movies I’ve seen. They might be the only vampire movies I’ve seen if you don’t count any adaptations of “I am Legend” (the book uses vampire terminology for lack of a better word, zombies were still a fringe topic associated with Haitian voodoo rather than the undead). Just remembered Carl Theodor Dryer’s “Vampyr”, but I think that covers it.
(There will be links in this comment but I promise it’s not spam)
Alina:
I’ve been browsing your tumblr site, and I found the entry on June 24 about the bravery of Neville Longbottom and the supposed depravity of Snape. I’ve been a member of a Harry Potter forum since 2012, and recently a compatriot of mine started a thread about tumblr posts like those and many members including me joined in the discussion. Since you did not add your own words after reblogging that, I shall presume that you might not be particularly averse to thinking that Snape did not deserve this kind of hate. The link to the thread is http://thehpn.net/theforum/showthread.php?tid=1263, please tell me what you think of it if you visit there; and if anyone should want to join the discussion site, go to http://thehpn.net/theforum/member.php?action=register&referrer=51
(Eventually, an episode that incorporates Harry Potter in the discussion would be fab.)