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YMMV / Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: After regaining consciousness, was Sandra free of her mind control, and trying, and failed, to save Wilbur, or was she trying to control the monster and tried to get him to back off?
  • Common Knowledge: There's something of a tendency among people who have never seen the film to dismiss it as a self-parody that marked the nadir of the Universal Monster films. While the film features plenty of comedy from the titular duo, the monsters are played just as seriously as they were in their original films.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • In a scene set immediately after Larry Talbot first shows up, Chick and Wilbur walk into his room the morning after he wolfs out and find it completely wrecked. Chick comments, "Man, what a bender he was on!" In Real Life, Lon Chaney Jr. had a drinking problem and, according to the film commentary, spent his weekends getting drunk and getting into room-smashing brawls with a friend.
    • Robert Lees, who wrote the screenplay for this and several other A&C films, was murdered in 2004 at the age of 91, by a homeless man who broke into his house and decapitated him in an apparent drug-fueled rage.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Vincent Price's cameo in the end is even funnier now than it was back then. While Price had starred in The Invisible Man Returns several years earlier, it was a one-off and Price was not known at the time as a horror film star. It would be another five years after this movie before he was cast in another horror film (House of Wax), and it would be another five years after that before he began to regularly star in them. Today, Price's cameo feels like the passing of the torch from one generation of horror film stars to the next.
  • I Am Not Shazam: Aside from the title, Wilbur calls the Monster "Frankie" when he tries to reason with it, but otherwise the characters who should know better (such as Dracula) correctly refer to the Monster as "Creature" or such.
  • Older Than They Think: Believe it or not, this isn't the first time Bela Lugosi played Dracula (sort of) in a comedic work. He did so earlier in the 1933 Paramount short film Hollywood on Parade No. A-8, appearing as a wax statue of himself dressed as the Count which comes to life and menaces a live-action Betty Boop.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Vincent Price as the Invisible Man.
  • Salvaged Story: After Dracula's limited roles in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula where he didn't get to interact with the other monsters, he's firmly the Big Bad here with Bela Lugosi returning to the role he originated in Dracula (1931).
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: Dracula's transformations to and from a bat are genuinely impressive pieces of animation.


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