20 minutes in transylvania
On his fully equipped “Monster” hoverboard Mike, the teenage werewolf, speeds through “Transylvania,” the October 2016 version of “Subway Surfers”. Under a full moon von Frankenstein’s creature is close on his heels while Mike collects the last remaining ghosts of the weekly hunt. This Let’s Play video is meant as a showcase of version 1.62.1 … a bit spiced up with material matching the theme and ambience. Namely scenes from the movie “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” (1943), the first of a series of so-called “ensemble” monster films doing crossovers by combining characters from several film series. The movie is public domain and can be found e.g. at The Internet Archive. Also appearing are drawings and paintings (public domain, too) by 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), generally considered the most important German artist of his generation – and tremendously influential on the design of movie-sets and all kinds of pop-culture artefacts. The early monster-crossover movies almost immediately got spoofed by several “Abbott and Costello” comedy films – in the first, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” (1948) the pair encounters the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula. In the 1960s according TV-series followed: “The Munsters” (1964-1966) and “The Addams Family” (1964-1966). Contemporary visions and ideas of Halloween costumes and themes, and of course the design of this version of “Subway Surfers,” all are legacy to the monster crossovers of the 1940s. The whole concept and its heritage finally was brought full-circle and upon literary heights by Alan Moore’s outstanding graphic novel “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”.