Bad Vlad: Narrative
or Novelty?
By Christa Starr
As my first assignment for MIT's Popular Culture class, I decided
to review the online episodic cartoon Bad Vlad. Presented by content
provider Distant Corners, whose other offerings include Nightmares,
Destination Unknown, and Wish You Were Here, Bad Vlad is yet another
retelling of the ever-popular Dracula myth. But before I get to that,
I want to warn potential viewers of the extreme difficulty I encountered
trying to access the Distant Corners website.
When I first aimed my browser at www.distantcorners.com, I was immediately
redirected to a splash page with a wonderful graphic of a screaming
man in a straightjacket telling me I needed to upgrade my Flash plug-in.
I wasn't convinced, since I had installed the latest version, Flash
Player 5, just two weeks before. Still, like a dutiful monkey I clicked
through the gruesome icon and was sent to Macromedia's Plug-ins page.
After downloading the Flash installer, running it, and restarting
my browser, I returned to www.distantcorners.com only to be shown
the same screaming man telling me to download the plug-in. There was
no way around this page, and no hint as to how I could access the
main site beyond it. After double-checking my plug-ins, making sure
I was indeed running the latest Flash Player, I tried again. Screaming
Man was really starting to annoy me now. This time I rebooted the
machine before restarting the browser. No dice. Finally, I fell back
on the tried-and-true web voodoo maneuver of switching browsers from
Netscape to Internet Explorer and was finally redirected to the actual
Distant Corners home page. Both my browsers, of course, had the same
exact version number of the Flash Player installed. I copied the name
of the real home page (www.distantcorners.com/enter.html), pasted
it into Netscape, and defeated Mr. Straightjacket.
Others who've tried the site say they had no problems whatsoever
accessing it. Still, it points towards a larger problem in deploying
web-based entertainment, the problem of compatibility. There are so
many browsers, plug-ins, and options available on the web today, it
is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure that content will be
viewable by any given web surfer. The best advice, content providers
say, is to always keep your software up-to-date. However, this does
not guarantee that everything will work flawlessly, and the frustration
of fighting to log on to a site could drive potential viewers away.
If I hadn't already agreed to review this web site for an assignment,
I would have given up after my second encounter with Screaming Man
and surfed over to www.shockwave.com for the latest Radiskull &
Devil Doll installment.
The Distant Corners site offered two viewing options, a high-resolution
full screen version and a lower resolution option. Since I have broadband
access, I chose the higher resolution. The site's navigational scheme
was well designed, sinister enough in its motif, sporting gravestone-like
navigational buttons and mad-scientist inspired transitional elements,
to support the disturbing content provided by the various Distant
Corners series.
When I reached the Bad Vlad entry point, I saw that only two episodes
had been released. The first is mainly exposition, introducing the
main character Vlad Dracul, his nemesis Lord Kretchik, and his true
love the king's niece. Vlad's father has recently been executed for
treason, and Vlad is ordered to prove his loyalty to king and country
by transporting the king's niece to a convent. En route, they are
attacked by hordes of monsters, which Vlad dispatches skillfully,
saving the girl and winning her affections. After completing his task
and returning to the castle, his father's enemies throw him into the
dungeon. In episode two, Vlad manages to escape the dungeon by befriending
and bedding the king's sister. She frees him, forcing him to marry
her, and as a wedding gift impales the treacherous Kretchik outside
their window.
Though two episodes is not much to base a review on, I have to report
I was thoroughly unimpressed by Bad Vlad. Technically speaking, the
animation was slow and jerky, looking like a poorly executed cel animation.
It also suffered from the typical Flash problem of video losing sync
with the audio track (this problem is supposedly fixed in the new
Flash 5 development environment, but so far I haven't found any sizeable
animation that successfully syncs on the first download). Even when
I switched from the full screen cartoon to the small window version
for faster download, the soundtrack was running far ahead of the characters'
lip movements.
Beyond the technical issues, I found the storyline to be dull and
unoriginal. Although the introductory page allows access to historical
information about the real Vlad the Impaler, the story so far has
not added anything novel to the traditional Dracula storylines. The
second episode in particular seemed little more than an excuse to
show something unthinkable in traditional televised cartoons - animated
breasts. In abundance. Almost half of the second episode is devoted
to sex scenes between Vlad and his new bride. And unfortunately, the
previews for the next episode seem to promise more of the same.
In Mark London Williams's article "Cartoons Shed the Censors,"
he echoes the opinion of Mondo Media's CEO John Evershed, forecasting
a day when web cartoons will shed their novelty status and viewers
will be able to "review content from the standpoint of 'Do you
really like it?'" In that spirit, I must say, I didn't like it.
Lacking the cuteness of other online cartoons such as Radiskull &
Devil Doll or the intelligent sarcasm of The God and Devil Show, and
failing to contribute (so far) anything useful to the Dracula mythos,
I find it hard to recommend Bad Vlad. Watching it, I found myself
longing for an interactive option, some way to click on the screen
to tell them I was getting hopelessly bored. Though, as Mark Schubin
mentioned in class, that could have backfired horrifically, with no
good way to let them know that "I'm bored" translates to
"deepen the plotline," and not "please add more jerkily-animated
topless cartoon women." And then, Bad Vlad would have been truly
terrifying.