Tuesday, October 28, 2003

As many nerds know, Bram Stoker's Dracula (go here to read the whole book) takes his name from Vlad Tepes, a Romanian Nobleman famous for his taste for the brutal punishment of his enemies. More reading about Vlad can be done here.



But my favorite part of this, as I was telling Jamie just the other day, is how we've turned this 15th Century guy into, 1st, a horrific creature of the night. It's not enough this guy did a bunch of horrific stuff 600 years ago, but we've immortalized him as a bizarre member of the legion of the undead.

From book, to play to silver screen, Dracula has wowed folks for over 100 years, and will probably continue to do so long after you or I are around.



But as a figure of Popular Culture, Dracula has been routinely co-opted in a less than respectable fashion. From cartoons to greeting cards to comedies starring George Hamilton, the memory of the original Vlad Tepes has somehow dwindled in the imagination and has been replaced by something not nearly as frightening. However, perhaps Vlad has carried on to teach us all...?

But to be immortalized as a cereal character... truly, that must be the ultimate achievement. To know that hundreds of years after your death, some twinge of your memory, some part of who you once were as a great ruler, a feared and dreaded master of all you survey... indeed, to have that changed into a wacky character on the side of a cereal box (sharing an unholy alliance with a pink monstrosity and a blue ghost), is the kind of immortality most of us can only dream of.

So Vlad Tepes, this Halloween, I salute you. Unlike hundreds of thousands of others who dreamed their memory would linger on, the butchery which occured at your hands and at your command has been memorialized as a deliciously chocolatey treat that's a part of this complete breakfast.

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