A Great New Use for Wikipedia

I've got a new use for Wikipedia, one for which the sometimes questionable accuracy or objectiveness of it's content is of no consequence.

For reasons I can't yet fathom, I found myself recalling films about a Black vampire from the early seventies. (those were my late primary school days). His name was Blacula. I'd seen the movie posters (they were painted on canvas in those days) stretched up on the front wall of the theaters, and adverts in the newspaper. These were also the wonderful times of Bruce Lee. Ti Lung/David Chiang. Shaft. Steve Austin (Lee Majors). Charles Bronson. Chuck Norris. Clint Eastwood. .....and Dracula himself (Christopher Lee, in the classic Hammer films). How does one keep such memories from bringing tears to one's eyes?

The first Blacula film was simply titled Blacula. Blacula dies in the end (vampire style suicide, having seen the second of the loves of his extended lifespan die), and is resurrected in the second film, "Scream Blacula Scream" by a voodoo practioner upset that a lesser rival was chosen as successor to the dying voodoo cult queen. (this sounds like the corporate world to me).

As a primary school kid, I never got to actually see the films - which is probably a good thing as they would have scared the heck out of me. (I'm cursed with an abundantly vivid imagination)

But now, thanks to Wikipedia, I get to know the story line of Blacula in pretty good detail. Unfortunately, the entry for the second film is extremely short.

In the first film, we learn there was a noble reason for our anti-hero ending up in the undead mess of vampirehood. As a Prince, a ruler of an African nation, he sought help to end the slave trade. Unfortunately, he's not very smart about who he turns to for help because Dracula, the supposed helper is a racist, and not only turns the prince into a vampire but imprisons him and his mortal queen for eternity. (note - mortals die after a while in captivity, vampires don't)

Decades later, Blacula's coffin ends up in Los Angeles (read the details yourself in the wikipedia article), the two purchasers of the coffin free him and end up his first victims, and the blood sucking spree of LA begins in earnest.

Those were the days of innocence. Long hot afternoons on a bicycle meandering through kampongs and dirt tracks. Sand Bars at Changi Beach where you could walk out 100m and find starfish and shellfish and stranded baby squid and seahorses in tidal pools. Buses that had paper tickets, and conductors that punched holes into a 3x20 matrix of numbers. Black and White TV.

All this against a backdrop of war in Indochina, the fear that Communism would engulf all of South East Asia, the pull out of British forces from Singapore and the resulting economic hole that would leave, the end of the Gold Standard, the Yom Kippur war, the first oil crisis and the massive inflation that followed. Yet despite all these crises with the capability to destroy civilization as we knew it, those were really the best of times.