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Post by Graveyardbride on Jan 5, 2014 16:09:26 GMT -5
The Birth of the Modern TV VampireWhen it comes to monsters on television, vampires have the market more or less cornered. Think about it: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries ....
The enduring popularity of vampires on TV may not be eternal, but they have been appearing on the small screen for decades. Mark Dawidziak, who’s written books about vampires and teaches a class at Kent State University on their appearances in film and television, says part of the way vampires have remained a force in popular culture is through their evolution on TV. “The great innovations, as far as vampire characters go,” he says, “always have come from either the printed page or television. Television has contributed as much, if not more, than movies ever have.”
Let’s do a little TV vampire-hunting through the decades. They’ve been in comedies like The Munsters, on Sesame Street, and of course sexy nighttime dramas like True Blood. One of the earliest TV vampires was featured on Dark Shadows. Eerie theremin music, the dulcet tones of Victoria Winters, along with crashing waves on a rocky coastline, marked the beginning of Dark Shadows, the Gothic soap opera that ran every weekday afternoon on ABC from 1966 to 1971, for a grand total of 1,225 episodes. But if you watch any of the first 200 installments, you won’t see any vampires. The show was set at Collinwood, a creepy old mansion on the Maine coast that was home to the wealthy Collins family. While the show had supernatural elements from the start, they were mostly suggested, not seen. “And the show was going down the tubes,” according to Dan Curtis, the creator of the series. In a commentary on a special-edition DVD, Curtis said that ABC was ready to cancel the series when his children encouraged him to “make it scary.” So he – and the special-effects department – introduced a ghost you could see. “From that moment, the ratings started to climb,” Curtis said. “And they got higher and higher the crazier we got.”
So Curtis added more ghosts – and then a vampire. Wearing an Inverness cape and stiff as a board, Barnabas Collins arrived on the scene to claim his former ancestral home as his own. He was played by Jonathan Frid, who wasn’t really a pretty boy like today’s TV vampires. “But housewives, college girls, teenagers ... everybody just fell in love with him,” says Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Maggie Evans on the show. “You can’t imagine the mail he got – some of it pretty erotic.” Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas was so popular, in fact, that the show’s producers couldn’t drive a stake through his heart at the end of his 90-day contract as originally planned. Instead, he became the star of Dark Shadows.
“The genius of the Barnabas Collins character,” Dawidziak says, “was that Barnabas is the first vampire who questions his own nature. Barnabas said, ‘Do I have to be like this?’” By giving Barnabas a conscience – and relationships – Dark Shadows opened up all kinds of possibilities for vampires, adds Dawidziak. “And this is where the vampire is going to become increasingly humanized, sexualized, sensualized. They’re going to become younger. They’re going to become more vital.”
More than four decades later, just about every vampire on TV still owes a debt to Dark Shadows, right down to The Vampire Diaries. The show is also a Gothic soap opera – but with two big differences: significantly better production values and its vampires are mostly teenagers. The show’s co-creator Julie Plec says the coming-of-age idea is something they got from another TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon. “Joss Whedon sort of gets the super gold star for the high-school-is-hell allegory,” Plec says. “And that was the beauty of Buffy ... This idea that the worst thing that happens is you finally give up your virginity to your one true love and the next day he turns into an evil, murderous vampire.”
But all these contemporary vampires wouldn’t exist without Frid’s Barnabas Collins, insists Kathryn Leigh Scott. “I think they all emanate from him. He’s the granddaddy of all of them.”Source: Elizabeth Blair, NPR.
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Post by Kate on Jan 7, 2014 19:06:25 GMT -5
I love the original Dark Shadows TV show, even though it was before my time, but I just can't get into any of the other vampire TV shows.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jan 8, 2014 11:25:04 GMT -5
They are stupid. I got hooked on watching True Blood even though the entire time I'm watching it, I'm thinking to myself "Why are you watching this??!!" It is seriously stupid and a waste of time, but I'm hooked. I just HAVE to see what crazy thing happens next. Thankfully this year's season is the last for True Blood.
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Post by jason on Jan 8, 2014 14:58:10 GMT -5
I was talking to a woman at a party one night and was thinking about asking her out until she said that she watched The Vampire Diaries. I can somewhat halfway understand the old Dark Shadows shows and why they're still popular and even why our group of necrophiles go to the conventions or whatever they are every year. Jonathan Frid was probably the worst actor to ever act on TV, but the shows did make a little sense and there was a definite storyline. His awkwardness and constant line-flubbing worked because he was supposed to be from 200 years in the past and so people expected him to be strange and awkward, so it worked. But these teenage vampire shows are DUMB! When I was in high school, I wouldn't date girls who watched "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." I hated teenage TV shows even when I was a teenager.
I actually tried to watch True Blood one night because it's set in Louisiana, but the whole point of vampires is that they feed on humans and the synthetic blood thing didn't make any sense at all.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jan 8, 2014 16:12:18 GMT -5
Dark Shadows had class. It was not silly teenage drama.
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Post by natalie on Jan 10, 2014 13:02:29 GMT -5
I've never seen Vampire Diaries or True Blood, nor Buffy. With True Blood though, from what I've heard, the vampirism's in the background, and the graphic sex is the main "storyline". Like I said, I wouldn't know since I have never seen it, but that's what I have been told.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jan 11, 2014 16:53:29 GMT -5
Actually in True Blood, there isn't ALOT of sex shown. There is some, but not what I would call overly so. Some episodes have more than others, but I wouldn't say the show is entirely focused on that. There is actually more graphic death and violence than sex, and I'd say that's what it is more focused on.
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Post by pat on Jan 11, 2014 17:07:08 GMT -5
I tried to watch True Blood a few times, but it just didn't hold my attention. Someone said that the vampires on True Blood had learned to drink synthetic blood, so why are they killing so many people?
I agree with whoever said that Dark Shadows had class. I can't explain why, but there's something about Dark Shadows. I was a kid when it was on TV and everybody was talking about it. People really got into soap operas back then and I remember hearing women talking about some of the people on the shows like they knew them and that's the way it was with Dark Shadows, except with Dark Shadows, people of all ages were talking about the characters on the show like they knew them. I'm not surprised that it turned into a cult classic.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jan 11, 2014 18:35:29 GMT -5
There are many types of mythical beings besides vampires on True Blood, like werewolves, fairies, shape-shifters...pretty much any creature you can dream up is on there. The whole premise is that most vampires and other creatures are trying to live in society and be accepted by humans, but are fighting against prejudice. Mostly the killing on True Blood isn't because of vampires drinking the blood of humans, though that does happen occasionally. The killings are mainly between "good" and "bad" characters, the most graphic deaths usually happening to vampires.
It's all very cheesy and the plots are convoluted and twisted just like a bad soap opera.
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Post by catherine on Jan 13, 2014 2:01:44 GMT -5
When True Blood first started, I watched it one night because it was supposed to be set in the South, but as soon as I saw the producers were more interested in political correctness than they were in telling a good story, I switched channels. But even if it hadn't had the obligatory, politically correct garbage, I wouldn't have watched it because what I saw of it was as dull as dishwater.
I think that part of the appeal of Dark Shadows is that it is how we imagine that people should live, not how they do live. Of course, they lived more like that in the 60s than they do today because back then, people dressed a lot better. Both the men and women on the show dressed decently, they didn't go around in jeans and T-shirts, or half-naked, like they do on True Blood. You had the strange family living in an old, dark house, which is classic Gothic horror, and even though Barnabas Collins was a vampire trying to keep a deep, dark secret, he lived in the "old house" on the estate, wore a cape and carried a cane -- a real gentleman. He acted and dressed like a vampire is supposed to act and dress and he spent his days in a coffin.
There's nothing mysterious, or even interesting, about the vampires on modern TV shows because the people who write vampire stories and make TV shows and movies now think that they have to make the vampires more human. I read somewhere that a girl on one of those crappy vampire shows, or maybe it was a movie, got pregnant by a vampire and that's just ridiculous because vampires are dead. The appeal of vampires is that they are "undead" or the "walking dead" and dead men don't get women pregnant!
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Post by madeline on Jan 22, 2014 1:23:14 GMT -5
I've tried to find the answer to how a vampire got a woman pregnant and I found on one of those sites where teens ask each other questions, someone asked how Edward got Bella pregnant in the book Breaking Dawn and someone else gave the answer that I've copied below. It still doesn't make any sense to me because venom doesn't get women pregnant and how could the baby be a half vampire? If the baby was half vampire, it would have to be half dead and that's ridiculous. Babies grow and the dead can't grow. The person who gave the answer said that it made complete sense, but it's one of the dumbest things that I've ever heard. She talks about incubi, but that's something totally different from a vampire. But here's the answer. Maybe it will make more sense to others than it did to me. I'm sure I would understand it better if I read the book, but I'm just not into teenage fantasy and I don't think that I could read it from cover to cover if my life depended on it.
It is possible! Everyone always says stuff like “Stephenie Meyer lied.” or “She broke her own rules” or “vampire venom is magic” but if you actually read the book and are able to comprehend stuff, then you would realize that it all indeed makes perfect sense. Of course there’s the whole “Bella is human, humans can get pregnant.” But as you know, you need two people to get pregnant. So how exactly does Edward get Bella pregnant? Brace yourself because I’m about to explain:
It all starts on page 27 of Breaking Dawn. No need to grab it, I’ll write the part I’m referring to right here:
(Some stuff about Edward making sure Bella’s okay with staying eighteen forever.)
“Never changing… never moving forward.” (Edward)
“What does that mean?” (Bella)
He answered slowly. “Do you remember when we told Charlie we were getting married? And he thought you were… pregnant?
“And he thought about shooting you,” I guessed with a laugh. “Admit it-for one second, he honestly considered it.
He didn’t answer.
“What, Edward?”
“I just wish…well, I wish that he’d been right.”
“Gah,” I gasped.
“More that there was some way he could have been. That we had that kind of potential. I hate taking that away from you, too.”
It took me a minute. “I know what I’m doing.”
“How could you know that, Bella? Look at my mother, look at my sister. It’s not as easy a sacrifice as you imagine.”
“Esme and Rosalie get by just fine. If it’s a problem later, we can do what Esme did-we’ll adopt.”
He sighed, and then his voice was fierce. “It’s not right! I don’t want you to have to make sacrifices for me. I want to give you things, not take them away from you. I don’t want to steal your future. If you were human-”
Okay, that’s a pretty big chunk to take in. But you have to notice it! Read it again and again until you realize that it really, really, really makes Edward sad that Bella can’t get pregnant.
Now, on page 126, (Bella just realized she missed her period and the bump on her belly and such) Bella mentions the myths she read online when she first discovered Edward was a vampire. The word INCUBUS comes to mind. The definition of incubus is: the ability to father children with his hapless pray. From more detailed definitions, it leads to this: certain incubi have the DESIRE to be able to produce children. So like in the passage from the book above ... it is obvious that Edward wishes to have that ability. Well, lucky for him, he does. But it doesn’t mean all vampires do. It’s kind of like his mind reading. It was a gift chosen for him, not all vampires have it. There is a possibility that Carlisle, Jasper, or Emmett might also be incubi, but let’s hope they don’t do anything to find that out.
But for Edward, it’s not so much that he wants a child, it’s more just him wanting the option. You see where I’m coming from?
It’s starting to get pieced together right? But there’s more. Remember how Edward is totally and completely just pissed off at him self that Bella is pregnant? Well that’s why. He had the desire to get her pregnant, so it really is his entire fault. Maybe if he didn’t care about taking the ability to reproduce away from Bella, then Renesmee would have never happened. The fact that he knows this is totally and completely his fault, and his own selfish wish makes it that much harder on him, because he knows that if he didn’t think about that, she would never had gotten pregnant.
Now there’s also the matter of Renesmee. With what I’ve given you so far, it probably seems like with the way that Edward got her pregnant, Renesmee wouldn’t be half vampire because it just had to do with the incubus. Wrong. Because going back to the more detailed description of incubus, they still need sperm. But incubi have their own special form of sperm depending on what kind of a creature they are. For Edward, it just happened to be venom since he is a vampire. There are legends and stuff about horse blood being the sperm therefore the baby is half horse. So if Edward’s sperm is vampire venom, then clearly the baby will end up half vampire.
So, basically, it is extremely possible for it to happen without Stephenie Meyer going against what she said before. I know it’s a lot to take in, but it honestly does make total sense. Just read over it again and you’ll realize that I’m right. I’ve told my friends this over and over, and they realize that it is true. And this is not just another theory. It’s not like I just said “Well, I think this is right so it is.” It truly does make sense with what Stephenie Meyer meant. I’m sure this is what she meant in her books, but people are just too stubborn and blind to be able to notice that. (No offense).
I hope I helped more than people who just say “Vampire venom works magic in a vagina.” All you have to do is read the book. Seems like a simple answer, but next time you read it, pay more attention. It’s amazing what you notice when you read it over and over again. You discover new thin
Source(s): Breaking Dawn - Read it again, and think about what I told you when you do. It will make complete sense.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jan 22, 2014 11:46:49 GMT -5
I guess I'm not able to "comprehend stuff".
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Post by pat on Jan 22, 2014 18:58:12 GMT -5
I read the person's answer a couple of times and I still don't understand it. Maybe if I read the book, it would be clearer. I love Anne Rice's vampire books and I love watching the old Dark Shadows shows on DVD, but I find all this teenage stuff boring.
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Post by Joanna on Jan 23, 2014 0:20:53 GMT -5
You can add me to the list of those who don't "get it." I believe we discussed this in our predecessor group and I didn't understand it then either. One thing I do recall is that Stephanie Meyer is Mormon and she admits that her faith has influenced her work, but how that relates to vampires getting women pregnant, I don't know.
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Post by aprillynn93 on Jan 23, 2014 11:38:56 GMT -5
The thing here is that many of today's authors of vampire tales are forgetting the whole undead part about vampires. They are treating vampires as if they are just another race of beings with magical powers who like to drink human blood. This is why for me it makes no sense. These beings aren't vampires at all if they are not creatures that have died and then become undead, with all that entails.
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