DaVinci Kills Dracula

Did you know that Leonardo DaVinci killed Dracula with his own hands?  To think that I, a lifelong student of history, missed out on such an amazing fact blows my mind.  Fortunately for me, a cable TV series called “DaVinci’s Demons” filled that gap in my knowledge.  Of course everything on the show has to be true because it’s a cable series.  I’m a big fan of DaVinci, the artist/inventor/Renaissance man, so I figured that watching “DaVinci’s Demons” would be an entertaining and informative way to spend my scarce free time. This show is remarkably similar to “The Borgias” and “The Tudors.”  Like the other two shows, this one tells a version of history using gratuitous sex scenes (gay and straight), plus a very generous amount of graphic violence and torture. Most of the characters in these shows are depraved and the one or two good people get trampled on, thrown in the dungeon, and most likely executed in a horrific way.  The implicit message to the viewer is to not even try to be a good person, because if you do you will be crushed. 

In this show, DaVinci wears tight leather outfits with an open shirt and looks more like a hipster from Asheville, NC than a man of the Renaissance.  His hair obviously has gel in it and sticks straight up in the middle, a popular look among millennials and Starbucks baristas. He has weird mannerisms, like Captain Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean.”  I’m guessing they couldn’t afford to have Johnny Depp play DaVinci.  But I digress. What’s really important to discuss here is DaVinci’s killing of Dracula.

It is well into Season One that DaVinci and his sidekicks decide to stop by Dracula’s castle. The two historical figures actually did live at the same time. In the show, DaVinci rides by horseback to the castle of Vlad Dracul, also known as Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler.  At the time, DaVinci was living in Florence, Italy.  Out of curiosity, I did a Mapquest to find out how far it is from Florence to central Romania, where Vlad Dracul lived.  It is over 1,000 miles, roughly the equivalent of riding from Charleston, SC to Dallas, TX or from Los Angeles to Seattle, WA.  So according to the show, DaVinci and his assistants rode on horseback across Europe on trails and across mountains. Renaissance Europe was an extremely dangerous place to travel.  The system of roads was lacking and there were plenty of murderous thieves to be encountered along the way. He supposedly made this trek to rescue some guy from Abyssinia, who was held captive at the castle.  The Abysinnian was supposed to have knowledge about a magical key or book or something. The very unpleasant visit to the castle ends with DaVinci killing Dracula.  I won’t say how, because I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who watches. It was around that point that the show lost all credibility with me.  The stuff in Florence was somewhat believable, but DaVinci fighting Vlad Dracul? Are you freaking kidding me?

The show also devotes almost no time to DaVinci as an artist, but depicts him to be more like a mix of MacGyver and Sherlock Holmes. You rarely see him actually creating art, you just see him tinkering with new gadgets, solving mysteries, and engaging in sword fights.  It’s a shame that the producers of the show decided to go this route.  The special effects, sets, and the costumes are, overall, top notch.  I can tell that they spent a lot of money making this.  However, the producers missed out on a golden opportunity by bastardizing the story of DaVinci and throwing in porno scenes.  When I was growing up, I remember watching movies and TV shows that took place in the past.  My dad would explain the history behind the shows we were watching.  That’s how history is passed down.  But shows like “DaVinci’s Demons,” “The Borgias,” and “The Tudors” are filled with so much depravity that no child should ever watch them. What a waste! These shows could have made history more fascinating for the next generation, but, because of their content, cannot be shown in any classroom. In fact, these shows are too depraved even for a lot of adults. 

My Milestone Birthday

I’m having a milestone birthday this weekend. For my birthday weekend I’m getting a paid trip to Fort Jackson, SC to do Army reserve training. Hooray! I’m not going to say my age because it’s an obscene number and this is a family-friendly blog; but from reading this you’ll probably be able to take a guess.  To say that I’m not where I expected to be in life at this point would be an understatement.  On the other hand, I’ve seen and done a lot of things in life that I never expected to, many of them positive things.

The world has changed in a lot of ways since I was born. When I was in elementary school, they were still showing documentaries in class on reel-to-reel projectors.  I saw “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” when it was in theaters for the first time.  I remember seeing “Raiders of the Lost Ark” at the movie theater, which got me really hooked on history. I saw it about fifty times. Growing up, we had a rotary phone in the kitchen and one in my parent’s bedroom.  If you wanted to take your call into another room, you had to stretch the cord. It didn’t matter much to me at that age because I almost never talked on the phone. When I was a teenager, I got to have the crappy old rotary phone in my bedroom, while the other phones in the house were high-tech push-button phones.  There was only one line in the apartment, so when one phone rang, they all rang.  If a friend called at midnight, the phone rang throughout the house and my mom or aunt would pick up to find out who the hell was calling at such a late hour.

I remember 8-track players. We had one but almost never used it. We did, however, use our record player throughout my childhood.  Back then they were called “records,” not “vinyl.” I don’t care how trendy “vinyl” has become, those things were ****y. One scratch could totally ruin a good record, and if you picked the record jacket up the wrong way, the record slipped out and shattered on the floor.  I know this because I shattered quite a few records accidentally as a little kid.  Ask my dad, he’ll tell you.  Cassettes were better, unless the tape got jammed in the machine or the motor on the tape-player was slow.  Then, all of your music sounded a little off.  There’s nothing like hearing your favorite song drag or sounding like something from beyond the grave.  Only people who lived through the 80’s truly know the aggravation of trying to carefully extract tape from a machine that decided to eat it.  You’d try not to rip the tape and then use a pencil to wind the tape after it was out.

However, even with all the drawbacks, I was still listening to cassette tapes as a teenager, mostly because they were in the discount bin, and were cheap as hell because of CDs.  My brother and I had a few CDs in high school, but they were expensive, like $15 apiece in the 90’s. I’m a creature of habit and still listen mostly to CDs, although I do occasionally listen to satellite radio and live streaming online.

Getting back to the early days, the first TV I used had a knob and antennas.  Whenever you got tired of watching a channel, you had to get up and turn the knob. You also had to play with the antennas if the picture was fuzzy or distorted. It was so annoying. I think we had about five channels. Eventually we caved and got this newfangled thing called “cable,” which included a couple of new channels like MTV and Nickelodeon.  It even came with a remote, so we could flip through all 30 channels without leaving the couch.

Whenever Dave (my brother) and I reminisce about the old days to my nine-year old niece, Summer, she looks at us like we’re talking about an alien planet. It’s kind of funny, because I remember being her age and listening to stories from my parents about their childhood and thinking how old they were and being amazed that human beings could even live for thirty or forty years. My aunts were about forty at the time. Forty was so old! To me, that was ancient.