History Headscratchers / HotelTransylvania

*** Especially as Griffin died in the original novel and [[TheInvisibleMan 1933 film]]. Unless resurrection and immortality were a side-effect of his experiment...

* How is it that, at times, Frank will fall apart at a stiff sneeze, and at other times, everything else falls apart at his passing, while he remains intact? I mean, yes, RuleOfFunny and all, but still.

** Possibly a trait of werewolves. The odds of a werewolf being born male are much higher than it being born female. Both explain why the world is not overrun with werewolves despite them breeding like rabbits, and why such e xplosive breeding is necessary to keep the species alive.

** Possibly a trait of werewolves. The odds of a werewolf being born male are much higher than it being born female. Both explain why the world is not overrun with werewolves despite them breeding like rabbits, and why such ExplosiveBreeding is necessary to keep the species alive.

** Possibly a trait of werewolves. The odds of a werewolf being born male are much higher than it being born female. Both explain why the world is not overrun with werewolves despite them breeding like rabbits, and why such Explosivebreeding is necessary to keep the species alive.

** [[OutnumberedSibling There's a trope for that.]]

** Drac has a lot of witches on staff. It's possible that they routinely provide translation spells to hotel staff and guests, to make social and professional interaction easier. Considering that Hotel Transylvania routinely hosts customers as varied as the Yeti (Nepalese dialect), Murry and his lady (ancient Egyptian), and the Hydra (classical Greek), Drac would pretty much ''have'' to use ''some'' sort of TranslatorMicrobes-equivalent to ensure every guest can comfortably speak, and hear, their native language.

** Maybe his clothes are really stuffy?
* Jonathan bringing "fun" into Mavis' rather blasé birthday party is emphasized a lot, and is what eventually causes Dracula to befriend Jonathan rather than despise him for being a human. The rush of excitement Drac gets at the end of the sequence with the flying tables even establishes that he's never had that much fun in a long time! But, you're telling me he's ''never'' knew what this "fun" business is about before this?! He hangs out with rowdy pals who play pranks! He brings down the house at dances! His friend Murray is BigFun! That sequence ended very weakly.

*** Okay, so maybe his problem is that he doesn't know when to let his daughter explore the world and be open to potentially dangerous things, rather than being "fun". I wish they wouldn't use the world "fun" repeatedly in the movie, then.

** The sequel does establish that all of Drac's friends are so out of shape that they can't really get into actually scaring people like they could before going into hiding. Also, just because his friends have fun, bombastic personalities doesn't mean Drac personally knows what it feels like to have as much fun as they do, since he's been too busy raising Mavis and running the hotel for several centuries.
** It may also be that Drac has somewhat forgotten what "Fun" is beyond what he feels is "acceptable". He's so caught up in work, and raising his daughter, and keeping her safe that his definition of "fun" has become "occasionally see my old friends, have a few drinks, talk about life, bleh bleh bleh", and he's forgotten about what it's like to really cut loose and just DO stuff, without fretting over consequences or safety.

*** Especially as Griffin died in the original novel and [[TheInvisibleMan 1933 film]]. Unless resurrection and immortality was a side-effect of his experiment...

** The Wolfman wasn't named Wayne either, folks. Presumably in ''this'' Verse, the monsters from fiction are loosely-adapted versions of the genuine article, which humans have concocted in our ignorance. Quasimodo is ''actually'' a monster, but the story of the Hunchback of Notre Dame was a human-written fictionalized account of his life from an author who didn't know anything except the name and look.

* So, are the werewolves immortal? 'Cause the wife was present when the Dracula's met over 118 years ago.
** In some folklore and modern media werewolves are immortal in both being virtually unkillable and ageless. In this case they are immortal.
* Why is there only one female werewolf pup? That seems really unlikely when you consider how many there are of them. Unless she was just the only girl with TertiarySexualCharacteristics?

** Maybe she is the only one that isn't a total mindless, destructive little hellion.

** Possibly a trait of werewolves. The odds of a werewolf being born male is much higher than it being born female. Both explains why the world is not overrun with werewolves despite them evidently breeding like rabbits, and why such Explosivebreeding is necessary to keep the species alive.
* Why are Mavis' clothes so modern, if she has not been outside in a hundred years? She's got a short skirt, t-shirt with armwarmers and...is wearing converse? How is she dressed that way and not in Victorian style?

*** It's also likely that Dracula is a very "classical" vampire. Y'know, creepy old castle, victorian clothes, big capes kinda guy. He's totally okay with Mavis learning about and dressing more like part of the modern world, just he's not keen on it

** Or he just might not want to become a vampire ''yet''. Considering that he is twenty-one in the first film there is no immediate threat of him becoming old and considering that he has a limited number of years to enjoy as a human and would have an eternity as a vampire it's not that strange that he would want to experience the first state more.

* Dracula's hypnotism apparently fails on Johnny because of his glasses, yet Drac has no problem hypnotizing that airplane pilot (who hilariously begins speaking with Drac's accent) through the windshield of the plane.....

*** Could just be that the contacts were directly 'blocking' the pupils, where as the windshield technically was not
** It's entirely possible he just bought a really weird set of contacts from some really weird people, I mean, this guy nearly got ''cannibalized'' at a Slipknot concert, this guy's done some weird stuff. It could just be his particular set. It's not established that contacts in general do that, and also, it's entirely possible it has nothing to do with the contacts at all, it's just Jonathan. But then again, the way they set it up, general writing convention mandates it be at least those particular kinds of contacts that do it, having it confirmed to not be the contacts at all would be weird from a writing perspective.

*** Either that, or Vampires have got some SERIOUS hair products.

* What monster were the fleas or whatever they were? Everyone else was iconic in some fashion.

* How on earth did the humans manage to kill Martha? Vampires in this movie are established to have the powers of shapeshifting, wall clinging, possibly something that seems to border on teleportation that Mavis keeps using to ambush Johnny, telekinesis, and the ability to petrify people indefinitely in less than a second. Their weaknesses? A minor aversion to garlic and that they burn up (very very slowly) in sunlight. How did any of those humans, who attacked at ''night time'', mind you, manage to get a stake through her heart, even with all of the fire?

** Martha could easily escape the mob, but Mavis couldn't since she's only an infant and has yet to learn how to use any of her powers. Martha died trying protecting her baby.
** That still makes no sense whatsoever. She could easily have taken the baby Mavis in her arms and jumped out the window, clinging to the sides of the castle with her wall clinging powers. There were so many ways she could have avoided that, the idea that she was utterly powerless against a mob of mortals is impossible to take seriously.
** Just because someone (anyone, vampire, human, or whatever) is powerful doesn't mean they're invincible when they're massively outnumbered and have a helpless child to protect. Remember, we don't know ''what'' else besides sunlight harms vampires in this universe. If they're vulnerable to sharp steel or iron weapons (like Stoker's Dracula, or humans for that matter -- "Who ''wouldn't'' [a stake through the heart] kill?"), and if Martha was ambushed by a crowd of humans armed with projectile weapons like spears or arrows, or if they trapped her somewhere before burning the place down, or if they ambushed her indoors with nowhere to fly... there's a million ways that could have down, none of them pleasant. Having super vampire powers just means they would have had to kill her in a much more extreme, gruesome way than they would a normal human.
*** From the way the movie presents the death of Martha, she was basically taken by surprise while alone in a room with the baby Mavis, Dracula being busy trying to talk down the angry mob at the front door. Since we see her hand hitting the floor, she was most likely killed either by the semi-traditional stake or by the equally-traditional beheading. Both are rather quick -- and if she was attacked from behind, she would have had almost no chance to defend herself.
* So, Zombie!Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven. They technically used to be human, but every zombie is treated like a regular monster. So does that mean any dead human is A-OK? Or does every human just have a zombie counterpart or something?
** I think the key words there were "''used'' to be human". Dracula, Wolfman, and the Mummy were all presumably human. (And Frank was ''several'' humans)

** And the Invisible Man is actually STILL human (invisible but human).
** I don't think they were the actual Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, just some zombies dressed up as them.

** As noted on the {{Fridge Brillance}} page, the monster guests aren't really nice to the zombie help. With that in mind, it might be that the zombies compared with other monsters have a more of a human "aura" with those other monsters being just a bit wary around them. Fantastic Racism and all.
* For most of the movie we get the HumansAreTheRealMonsters story where the monsters are all being unfairly hunted for being different. But then during the scenes where Quasimodo is trying to cook Johnny and Murray suggests scaring the people, the movie implies that monsters are the PunchClockVillain kind and scaring people is their job. Uuuuhhhh, you can't do BOTH, movie.
** When they needed a way to get through the crowd quickly, Murray assumed scaring people would work based on how people usually react to monsters; that doesn't imply they do that on a regular basis. Just because Quasimodo eats humans doesn't mean other monsters do.

** Dracula and other monsters agreeing with him having such a hostile attitude towards humans doesn't mean we're supposed to agree with them. The humans back when Martha was still alive were obviously from a notably older time than the modern world (with later movies showing that indeed, modern humans and monsters can share a world together). There are plenty of villains across the series with the tv show who are monsters with no obvious {{Freudian Excuse}} for their behavior (Quasimodo, Bela, Aunt Lydia). The few human major villains in the movies (the Van Helsings) do see where they went wrong and become open to friendship with monsters. One could even say from the example of Lydia or Bela that indeed, there ARE legit dangerous monsters whose actions incite humans to fear their kind just as there are hateful humans who incite monsters to fear their kind, leading to a {{Vicious Cycle}}. All considered, the series has a nuanced portrayal of {{Fantastic Racism}} where BOTH sides have to make an effort to be better than they were in the past.

** Yes, it seems to be LensFlare included to make it more self-evident that the scene is playing on a TV screen in-Verse.
* For a movie that takes place in what I presume is around 2012-2013 Romania and with monsters that tend to live semi-isolated from human society, a lot of monsters seem to talk with standard American accents in English, despite the fact that many of these monsters don't seem to be of American origin or from English speaking countries (except for possibly Frank or Griffin), and it doesn't seem like they would be influenced by the now-widespread use of English in the modern world due to their own isolation. So what gives? Is it just {{Translation Convention}} and Johnny can actually speak fluent Romanian, or what?
** Drac has a lot of witches on staff. It's possible that they routinely provide translation-spells to hotel staff and guests, to make social and professional interaction easier. Considering that Hotel Transylvania routinely hosts customers as varied as the Yeti (Nepalese dialect), Murry and his lady (ancient Egyptian), and the Hydra (classical Greek), Drac would pretty much ''have'' to use ''some'' sort of TranslatorMicrobes-equivalent to ensure every guest can comfortably speak, and hear, their native language.