Category Archives: TV

I’m not sure how I stumbled across JEKYLL AND HYDE ADAPTED: Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety by Brian A. Rose but my initial thought was AAAAAAH! My searches before I signed the McFarland contract for Jekyll and Hyde led me to conclude nobody had done a survey of Jekyll and Hyde films before me; my editorial contact concluded the same.

Fortunately Rose and I are not playing in the same ballpark. Rather than discussing all the movies, his interest is how the different adaptations express different fears in different times. Thus, Jekyll acquiring a fiancee in the Victorian stage adaptations positions not just Hyde but Jekyll’s scientific research as a threat to the domestic values Victorians prized. The 1932 Fredric March version, showing Hyde as a neanderthal, distances evil — it’s not us, it’s our awful ancestral instincts — whereas the films showing Hyde as more or less human acknowledge evil as part of us.

I find most of Rose’s conclusions unconvincing — I don’t buy Paul Massie looking human in Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is meant as a statement about the nature of evil, for instance. And he’s completely wrong to argue George Carew in the 1920 Barrymore version is a hypocrite — Carew is not at all hiding that he’s a libertine, he’s quite proud of it.

Another problem is that the book is written in heavy academese (“This is a postmodern reinscription of the traditionalist values and perspectives that ordered earlier melodramatic versions, but one that eschews earlier eschatological answers.”) which makes it hard for me to focus on Rose’s points. And some of them are good, such as noting Spencer Tracy’s version probably influenced filmmakers more than March’s superior production (small wonder — to avoid competition with the Tracy, MGM hid the March take away for 30 years). March is the last version for decades to show Jekyll doing charity medical work and up until the 1990 Michael Caine film, the Jekylls looked human rather than March’s ape-man (Tracy is also the first Jekyll to have his test animals acting strange, something repeated in several later films). This book wasn’t worth the $90 I paid for a used copy but it does have its uses.

As I mentioned last week, Tubi’s search function introduced me to a series I’d never heard of before, a 1969 Italian four-episode show called simply Jekyll. It’s another plodding attempt to adapt Stevenson faithfully and another adaptation where I see the seed of what might have been an interesting idea.

Lanyon here is a brilliant surgeon and Jekyll’s mentor before Jekyll went into research. Lanyon grumbles that Jekyll’s been seduced by the grant money available for cool research proposals and the media attention — good surgery doesn’t get your name on TV but if you announce a research breakthrough it might, even if it proves smoke-and-mirrors later. Exploring that aspect of science would have been interesting but nope, they do nothing with it.

JEKYLL: Jekyll gives Utterson his revolver just in case Hyde gets grumpy! In flashback, Hyde pressures a woman to drown her dog but she drowns herself instead! In the aftermath of this tragedy Jekyll’s friends lament his decision to tamper with god’s domain! I wondered how they’d squeeze one more episode out of it and they did it by extending Jekyll’s backstory to excruciatingly slow length. “Man created by man is the holy grail of molecular biology.”

Rewatching SCOOBY-DOO: Mask of the Blue Falcon (2013) right after seeing early episodes of the series was a little jarring: I was conscious some of the voice actors were different from the originals, which didn’t hit me when I first saw the film. That said, this is a fun adventure as the attempt to reboot the Blue Falcon TV show (in this version a live-action show) as a grim-and-gritty vigilante not only pushes the original star to the breaking point, it brings down the wrath of the hero’s arch-nemesis, Mr. Hyde. Whom I’ll note is dressed in the usual Fredric March-style Victorian outfits and top hat. This is the largest role Hyde’s gotten in any Scooby story, though it’ll still end up in the appendix I suspect.“Mr. Hyde is the monster that taught us to be afraid of monsters.”

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In 1943, Universal Pictures pumped new life into the Frankenstein series with the first ever horror crossover, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man. The mash-up of Chaney’s Wolf Man with Bela Lugosi’s Creature was the first of several such films as Universal’s horror cycle wound down, including the closest they came to a Jekyll and Hyde film, House of Dracula.

The monster-mash crossover has remained popular ever since, including a number of Jekyll and Hyde films. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, for instance, gives us Jekyll and Hyde, Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper. Here are a couple more.

THE MUMMY (2017) was supposed to launch Universal’s Dark Universe which is why Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe) shows up: as head of the monster-fighting Prodigium (a counterpart to the MCU’s SHIELD though it feels more like the BPRD) he takes great interest in Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) whose reckless antiquity-theft efforts in Iraq have awakened Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), an Egyptian mummy with issues who plans to turn Nick into the avatar of Set, God of Death (chaos, actually) which is, spoiler, a Bad Bad Thing.

Cruise’s role is one he’s played throughout his career, the shallow, out-for-himself jerk who when the chips are down proves capable of becoming much more. It works for him in a number of movies but this isn’t one of them. Nothing about this works, including Ahmanet as the kind of demonic mummy Arnold Voosloo played in the Brendan Fraser Mummy — it has a same-old same-old by the numbers quality (I wasn’t blown away by the Fraser version but I wouldn’t accuse it of that).

Crowe’s Jekyll/Hyde is a headscratcher. He describes himself as a good man whose buried darker side “grew into an overwhelming desire, an unquenchable thirst for chaos, and the suffering of others.” which he now controls with constant drug injections. That could mean Hyde results from the usual experiment, or that he’s naturally schizoid, or something else; he could be the Victorian Jekyll with an unnatural life span or it could be there was no Victorian Jekyll. I honestly don’t care except for the purpose of my book. “This is not some common cold you have. Chicken soup and a good night’s sleep won’t make it go away.”

The TV series The Munsters was a monster mash from the first, with the Munster family consisting of Herman (Frankenstein’s Monster), Lily (Dracula’s daughter, visually), Grandpa (vampire/mad scientist), Eddie (kid werewolf) and Marilyn (the ugly cousin — actually a pretty blonde). The 1995 reboot film HERE COME THE MUNSTERS tells the story of how the family came to America and throws in Jekyll and Hyde to boot.

When the torch-wielding mobs back in Transylvania start wielding rocket launchers, Fred (Ed Herrman) and Lily (Veronica Hamel) decide to emigrate to America where Herman’s sister in law Elsa (visually the Bride) and her husband Norman Hyde (Max Grodenchik of DS9) can sponsor them as immigrants.

Of course it’s not that simple. It turns out something happened to Norman in a recent lab experiment; he’s disappeared, Elsa is comatose so there’s nobody who can sponsor them. Worse, an anti-immigrant politician, Brent Jekyll (hmm, could it be?) is holding out the Munsters as the type of immigrant filth who should be deported ASAP.

Forget torch-wielding mobs — if this came out today we’d have shrieking mobs on X denouncing the Munsters for going woke on immigration. A running theme is that we’re already a nation of immigrants as the family interact with a Sikh customs officer, a Polynesian limo driver, an Irish employment agent and others. When a cop, Warchowski, grumbles about these freaky foreigners, his partner quips “Right. Warkowski’s an old Apache name isn’t it?” Where the original show and the various revivals portray the Munsters as social outcasts, this has them fitting into the community, including Grandpa (Robert Morse) sparking neighbor Dimwiddy (Mary Woronov) and everyone at school thinking Eddie’s cool for being able to grow fangs and fur.

As for Jekyll, it turns out an opportunistic campaign manager saw the perfect opportunity when he stumbled across the transformed Hyde — a politician who never existed so he has zero scandals in his past (the film references post-smoking and draft dodging, both of which Bill Clinton had admitted to). While Hyde’s anti-immigration rants are depressingly prescient, it turns out the campaign manager didn’t need to find a spotless candidate after all … “We must ensure that foreign influences do not infiltrate the American way of life!”’

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MAD, MAD, MONSTERS was a 1972 episode of ABC’s cartoon anthology show Saturday Superstar Movie. Produced by Rankin/Bass in the style of their Mad Monster Party, it has Baron Frankenstein inviting the great monsters to attend the wedding between his Creature and the Bride; terrified by the people’s he’s delivering to, a jittery mailman decides to quit and work for his brother’s hotel — oh, guess where they’re going to hold the wedding! This qualifies for the appendix by having the mailman pour out his terror to his shrink, Dr. Jekyll. Otherwise unmemorable. “The Creature’s Bride was run over by a lawn mower?”

KARUTHRA RATHRIGAL (1967) was the first film made in India’s Malayalam language; as I don’t speak Malayalam and the versions I found streaming didn’t have subtitles, I’m guessing about a lot of what’s going on. It’s clear the online sources are right about it being a Jekyll and Hyde version as I recognize lots of elements — worried servants, a pleading fiancee, Hyde sheltering behind Jekyll’s respectable face — but there’s a lot I don’t know such as why the doctor Santhan came up with the formula in the first place. I’m also puzzled why the Hyde makeup looks almost like blackface — I’m guessing it’s some aspect of Indian culture I’m not familiar with.

Rewatching HORROR HIGH (1973) I’m inclined to see it as kin to Willard in its story of an awkward young loser getting revenge on his tormenters (mean janitor, cruel teacher, bullying jock). That wouldn’t qualify it for my book except that we open with the high school English class studying Jekyll and Hyde and later the protagonist, Vernon (Pat Cardi), describes Hyde as an atavistic ape man lurking inside all of us. Which is apparently what he turns into, so they know what they’re adapting.

Vernon starts off as a tragic figure: the janitor bullies him, then forces Vernon to drink the formula he’s been experimenting with. We don’t get a good look at the Hyde version of Vernon — I doubt the movie could have pulled off a good one — but his face appears bigger and heavier and his shambling movements suggest an ape moving awkwardly along the ground. Unfortunately after that first accident Vernon begins using the chemicals to transform and avenge himself on his tormentors, which doesn’t end well for anyone. Mediocre acting but not uninteresting (though I might be uninterested if I wasn’t working on this book). “I’ve been working on an experiment — it seems to have gotten away from me, I think.”

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