captainsblog | Well, THAT sucks:( (Reply)

Within the past few weeks, I've become LJ Friends with a published/filmed writer in the horror genre named Greg Lamberson. He's a few years younger than I am, and took the opposite geographic path to mine- growing up here but settling downstate. He posted earlier today about a sad aspect of his 48th birthday last week, which was learning that day "of the death of Johnathan Frid, the original Barnabas Collins, at the age of 82, 83 or 87, depending on which obituary you believe (I prefer to think he was 275...)."

This brought back a flood of childhood memories, which I shared with him in comments. If you don't remember the original or haven't heard the hype of the upcoming Depp-Burton remake, Dark Shadows was a nationally broadcast vampire soap opera on ABC television in the late 60s and into the spring of 1971. These were my elementary-school years, and the timing was just perfect for my bejeezuses to be scared out of me whenever I could stand it: it aired at 4 p.m., in plenty of time to get home from school and pretend to do homework; it had none of Mom's "my stories" up against it (she and her ciggies had largely retreated to the kitchen by then for dinner to be ready soon after 5); and the good cartoon shows and 4:30 movie "monster weeks" didn't begin for half an hour.

I can't say I watched them all, and it wasn't a "fandom" for me the way stuff back then was starting to become- most of the Irwin Allen sci-fi's (Star Trek was a rare treat, usually starting past my bedtime), the campy Batmans, and Get Smart! are among the ones I both remember and will admit to)- but whenever I did watch, I was scared to death by the vampire dude.

Ultimately, over many protests by (mostly) the girls in Mr. Masone's 6th grade classroom, ABC canceled the show. In favor of a reboot of Password. Ridiculous!

Yet that's not where Greg remembered the show from. It wasn't until later, when Commander Tom, host of the long-running afternoon kid show on the local Channel 7, picked up the show in reruns and began showing them to a new generation of scarees right after his much kinder, gentler fare went off the air each day:

After DARK SHADOWS was cancelled, someone at Channel 7 ("It's 11:00 pm... do you know where your children are?") made the neat-o decision to air repeats immediately after COMMANDER TOM. I still remember the TV commercial, which showed Barnabas Collins walking toward the camera at night while a bat flew overhead. I don't remember Barnabas in the episode I saw, I just remember that I was bored to tears until the cliffhanger ending, when either an artist or the subject of an artist transformed into a werewolf. And at four years old, my life may have changed forever - which is a miracle, because so many outraged parents bombarded Channel 7 with complaints that the show was immediately yanked!

Not only did those reruns help lead Greg into a long and scary career in the horror genre, he credits it with reviving the vampire franchise (which, for most of the post-Lugosi era of being taken seriously, had fallen into camp and comedy in the fangs of The Munsters and such), paving the Transylvania Turnpike for such later writers as King and Rice.... and maybe even that sparkly one of whom we shall not speak.

His post also has some amazing comic art and Barnabas toys from the time. Some look a little too Count Floyd compared to my repressed memory of them, but if anyone tries to tell me that Johnny Depp can automatically dethrone the original, I'm afraid I only have two words for them:

Bite me.