Count Dracula in popular culture
[3] In 1924, the British producer Hamilton Deane premiered a stage version of Dracula at the Grand Theatre in Derby, England.
"[7][8] O. D. Woodward purchased rights to present Dracula on the West Coast, and the play opened at the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles on 25 June 1928.
[11][12] A revival of the play by Leo Shull called Genius, Inc., opened in December 1942 featuring a Dracula with a Toothbrush moustache.
When the play performed in Detroit, several accidents happened on stage leading audiences to laugh at what were supposed to be scary moments.
[12] Frank Langella took on the role of Count Dracula, beginning 7 August 1967, an adaptation that William Gibson, director of the Berkshire declared to be "the worst play of the season".
[14] Variations involving Count Dracula were performed as plays in parody such as Fangs Ain't What They Used to Be in 1969 and I'm Sorry, the Bridge is Out, You'll Have to Spend the Night in 1970.
[13] Other plays like Dracula Sabbat from 1970 was basically a scripted black mass featuring nudity and simulated sex acts.
[15] On the play's reveal it was praised for its sets designed by Edward Gorey and Langella's performance which Scivally proclaimed "reclaimed the vampire from a decade of camp and parody and presented Dracula with grace, dignity and a healthy dose of sex appeal.
"[16] It was sold out for the first two weeks leading to merchandizing of the play with Gorey-themed wallpaper, a toy theatre, and short-lived fashion of men wearing capes in Manhattan.
[24] In 1998, Halifax's Neptune Theatre debuted Dracula: A Chamber Musical, which ran for six months at Canada's Stratford Festival in 1999.
[26] Joop van den Ende saw a workshop of Dracula, the Musical and opened it on Broadway in 2004 adding new songs and different staging.
[31] John Deak of the New York Philharmonic presented two scenes of his Lucy and the Count for string quintet at Cooper Union in February 1983.
A review in The New York Times declared the presentation as "amusing and a little more – intentionally absurd"[31] Composer Robert Moran was commissioned to create The Dracula Diary in 1994 which received a negative review in The New York Times by K. Robert Schwardz who found it to have "Generic chord progressions, clumsy text setting and cheesy synthesized sound effects"[32] In March 1999, David Del Tredici's Dracula premiered based on Alfred Corn's poem My Neighbor, the Distinguished Count.
Dracula in this series was described by historian Hal Erickson as removing anything potentially horrifying about the character, as it resembled The Archie Show.
[78] Variations of younger family relatives of Dracula would re-appear alter in The Comic Strip (1987) from Rankin-Bass/Lorimar-Telepictures featured "The Mini-Monsters" featuring the offspring of Dracula and other monsters at a summer resort Camp Mini-Mon, and Hanna-Barbera's Monster Tails, part of Wake, Rattle, and Roll (1990) and the Japanese Vampire Hunter D (1985).
[107] In his article on horror-themed toys and collectibles in Rue Morgue magazine, James Burrell found that in the late 1950s as a new generation of children watched Universal Pictures catalogue of horror films on Shock Theatre, which gave the series a "kid-friendly" status.
[109] In 1963, the American retailer Montgomery Ward mailed out copies of their Christmas catalog which features models of various popular monsters including Dracula made by the Aurora Plastics Corporation.
[109][110] These were followed by various bubblegum cards, stickers, board games, battery-operated and wind-up toys, rubber marks made by companies like Leaf Brands, Remco, and Don Post Studios.
[117][118][119] In 1986, Dracula was released which contained static graphics considered gory enough to become the first computer game to be rated "15" by the British Board of Film Censors.
[122] The character pushes the narrative of the games as what Carl describes as "part of the environmental mood" more than physically stalking and intimidating the protagonists.
[130][131] When Dick Clark played it on his American Bandstand television show, he requested Zacherle record a less-violent version.
[132] In the early 1960s, horror-themed spoken word albums were released, such as Famous Monsters Speak (1963) featuring actor Gabriel Dell imitating Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula.
[136] The British group Bauhaus would write the 1979 song "Bela Lugosi's Dead", a track that described an exaggerated funeral of Lugosi, with Alexis Petridis of The Guardian stating the track "would have been just another piece of post-punk experimentation had it not been for the lyrics, which depicted the funeral of the Dracula star, with bats swooping and virgin brides marching past his coffin.
"[137] Petridis declared the song spawned several similar bands to Bauhaus in its wake leading to gothic rock becoming a codified musical genre.
J. Bennett of Decibel described Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse (1994) as establishing the band as "the reigning masters of a more complex, atmospheric style of "symphonic black metal"".
In addition, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution runs a fundraising bungee jump event in the town every April named the Dracula Drop.
In one, appearing in the Mad Summer Special 1983, on the inside front cover, a cartoon sequence drawn by Sergio Aragonés shows Dracula attacking a hippie who has taken LSD; Drac staggers away, seeing colorful hallucinations including blood, bats and such.
In the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, composer Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), in a subplot, finishes his Dracula-themed rock opera titled A Taste for Love.
In the United Kingdom, discount store Poundland changes the voice of its self-service checkouts to that of Dracula throughout the Halloween retail period.
In it, an elderly man pretends to be a deranged 12 million year old sex and drug adicted version of Dracula, who raps lines ranging from the vulgar to the absurd.
