"Hello, Ms. Walker, nice to meet you. I'd like to tell you about the secret of life. The secret of life is natural energy."
Originally aired on October 31, 1995.
David builds a robot as his science fair project, but it comes to life and runs amok. Wishbone is reminded of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
One tie-in book was released—Wishbone Classics #7: Frankenstein, featuring a less compressed adaptation of the original story with comments by Wishbone rather than the modern-day segments.
Tropes
- An Aesop: At the end, David sums up the message that the episode is pulling from Frankenstein:"Boy, you bring something to life, and you really have to take responsibility for what it does."
- Artistic License – Geography: When Frankenstein is chasing the Monster up to the Arctic, the travel map shows Finland occupying Karelia and the Kola Peninsula, which is something that has only ever occurred in the wildest dreams of Finnish nationalists. In fact, given the time period, Finland should still be part of Sweden.
- Bowdlerize: The Frankenstein adaptation ends with Victor Frankenstein ill in bed and the monster promising to go away and never hurt anyone. What they leave out is the part following this in which Frankenstein does indeed die as well as the fact that the monster was planning to kill himself when he went away.
- Dr. Frankenstein: Wishbone's role in the adaptation. Although in accordance with the original novel, he's portrayed as a young medical student rather than a full-fledged doctor.
- Frankenstein's Monster: Obviously. Since this is following Shelley's version, he only turns "evil" due to his creator freaking out and rejecting him.
- Halloween Episode: While there are no explicit references to Halloween, this episode did originally air on Halloween of 1995, and a Frankenstein adaptation is obviously in the spirit of the holiday. The series would later get a more explicit Halloween episode with, "Halloween Hound: The Legend of Creepy Collars," which adapts The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: As much as the episode tries to stick with the original novel, it does concede to the pop-culture version of Frankenstein when it comes to lightning being used to bring the Monster to life. This even crosses over into the real-life story, in which lightning brings David's robot to life because he made it "so sensitive to nature." But to be fair, the original book doesn't actually say how the Monster was brought to life, and they had to show something for that scene.
- Setting Update: Notably averted. Most Frankenstein adaptations update the time period to the Victorian era or later, but Wishbone actually keeps the eighteenth-century setting intended by Shelley. We see powdered wigs and tricorn hats, and the travel map has an intact Holy Roman Empire on it.
- Science Fair: David's robot is built for one. Joe also enters, with a dinosaur skeleton that keeps collapsing.
- Travel Montage: The Monster's rampage through Europe and into the Arctic includes shots of the camera panning across a map of eighteenth-century Europe.
- Truer to the Text: For the most part, the episode tries to stick with the original Mary Shelley novel, eschewing the elements that originated from the 1931 film adaptation and its imitators. Victor Frankenstein is a naive young student rather than a stereotypical Mad Scientist and the Monster does not have green skin, bolts in his neck, etc. However, Wishbone as Frankenstein still brings the creature to life by running electricity into a corpse.
"Natural energy abounds."
