Spyke

He could have done it all in Katz's Deli, opened 1888. At that point, the house band could've been rocking out on Zildjian cymbals that were already 250+ years old.

44

Well Katz's doesn't serve blood. Clearly he's there for a delicious corned beef sandwich.

8
aussie.zone

A reminder that there is an actual wild west gun slinger (sort of) in Dracula. He's the perfect stereotype of a Texan cowboy.

Also an invitation to our Dracula bookclub in ![email protected].

35
Crashumbcreply
lemmy.world

TBF, I think movies made old pirates look a lot cooler than they really were.

21

TBF, you probably also got scurvy if you were a regular sailor. If anything, pirates had an easier time because they don't have to go on intercontinental voyages, and caribbean pirates also had a huge leg up over sailors who were active in arctic regions.

1

If you look at old drawings and depictions, they do look like we know them, but they may have been embellished even then. But Hollywood didn't invent the image.

5

Every time I hear the Samurai, Cowboy and Pirates thing, I get upset that Pirates, Vikings and Knights didn't get a second sequel or spinoff using Cowboys and Samurai instead of Vikings and Knights.

22

Coke was originally among many other "tonics" pushed back in the day, but it also wasn't marketed under the name Coca-Cola while it was sold as a patent medicine tonic. It also was only was sold in that form for a few months before being made nonalcoholic and marketed as a beverage later that same year. Sales were initially poor and only picked up with aggressive advertising campaigns, which I suppose is a strategy that Coke never left behind and leads us to the world where we are today.

17

Yes, but a coked out, hanafuda playing Yakuza dracula would be terrifying.

7

A gun-slinger, a samurai and a pirate fighting Dracula? What is this, the new JoJo?

20
programming.dev

It should be "playing with Nintendo" instead of "playing Nintendo" toe be fair. To be honest, "playing with Nintendo cards" would be the most accurate, but "with Nintendo" is still accurate enough and still gives the sentence the desired effect. But no, "playing Nintendo" isn't correct. Unless they made some specific game variant and included the rules with their cards or something.

17

Guy who invited his friends over to play Nintendo, and when they arrive pulls out a deck of hanafuda cards.

8
zarkanianreply
sh.itjust.works

He would be playing hanafuda, which is the Japanese card game that Nintendo was producing at that time. Not as funny as imagining Dracula trying to beat Ninja Gaiden or whatever.

7
JackbyDevreply
programming.dev

Was that a general game or something they designed? If it's something they made "playing Nintendo" works.

I'm really overanalyzing this joke, it's funny either way, obviously.

2

They're traditional Japanese playing cards. They existed for centuries before Nintendo.

Fun fact: Nintendo still makes these! (Although they might be hard to find, because I think they're only sold in Japan.)

1

They probably said either the name of a specific game or "playing karuta", which is a word derived from the Portuguese word for card (carta).

5
lemmy.world

Well, did they have their own proprietary game for their cards? Or were they just making poker cards?

1
lemmy.zip

Samurai at this point were samurai true, but mostly just office workers at this point. Not exactly the armored warriors most people would think of as a samurai.

Where would the pirates be from? Golden age of piracy had long past in Europe afaik. Or are we just being amorphous with the fact there are always pirates?

10

I think that's your B story right there, the fact that they're all misfits, too out of step with their times, driven by a wild yearning and a sense of romanticism. The movie itself is 0% anachronistic, but the protagonist are anachronistic in spirit.

Dracula meanwhile as a villain represents postmodernism, apathy, and the banality of evil. He's ironic, sleek, with it - a Londoner par excellence, rich and idle, but his life is a living death, figuratively as well as the whole undead thing.

The third act sees the protagonists combine their fighting styles excellently, but without avail. However, their foolhardy spirit and absurd heroism inspires Dracula to an inner awakening, and they come to an understanding in the end.

Post credits stinger: Van Helsing and Captain Ahab combine forces to take down a were-whale.

3

Well that's just sounds like something someone has to make, book, series, movies, whatever im not picky

9

And nothing much has changed since, just more, more jeans, more coke, more blood suckers

9
lemmy.world

While the Old West goes back a few centuries, I'd say the "gunslingers era" isn't until the first Colt revolver becomes available in the mid 1830s. It took a bit of digging to find pirates that would have definitely been around late enough into the 1800s that they'd be contemporary with gunslingers and samurai (class abolished in 1870), but old school river piracy lasted, even in just the US, into at least the late 1870s, so I guess that all checks out, as long as you weren't expecting Blackbeard or anything.

8
lemmy.world

Piracy pretty much always exists. As long as valuables are being transported by ship there will be people who want to capture those ships.

4
feddit.org

Yeah, but modern pirates with small motorboats and automatic guns don't have the flair that hollywood pirates are known for.

1

They did live on sailboats, sail the caribbean and wear 17th/18th century clothes.

1
lemmy.zip

They might've all existed, but did they all exist in the same place at once?

7
lemmy.world

Japan was opened up by American gunboats in 1853 at which point Japanese-American trade was present. That puts Nintendo in reach of American sailors. Levi's was founded in the west coast port city of San Francisco as workwear. This makes it plausible for a laborer to wear them while working as a deckhand or other skilled labor job where they may pick up a taste for Japanese card games while gambling in Japan. If they find themselves on the Atlantic route any time in the southeast and they're likely to run into coca cola which was a refreshing and energizing beverage owing to the sugar, caffeine, and cocaine. If they keep some bottles on board for a special occasion they may very well have some left by the time they arrive in England where Brahm Stoker is writing Dracula.

Now, why is a Gothic writer gambling in a Japanese game with an American sailor and noticing his curious pant choice? I couldn't tell you enough about Stoker to say if that's normal, but add some emotional abuse and a bisexual baccanal and it sounds exactly like some Lord Byron bullshit and Percy Shelley may join in.

14
lemmy.world

Samurai, gunslingers, and pirates are even more reasonable. There was an age of piracy located in the Caribbean and gulf of Mexico a few decades before the wild west. They're unlikely to be fighting at the time, but as New Orleans settles down it's plausible that a pirate may want to open a saloon or brothel outside the reach of the government and polite society. During the wild west the Japanese government underwent the Meiji Restoration which ended the feudal system and put a lot of samurai out of work (they had a rebellion about it). A samurai deciding to hop a ship to America to seek ronin work is something I feel like i would've heard if it had happened, but it is within the realm of "yeah I wouldn't question if a mostly reputable source said it happened". And well I suppose one or two western style gunslingers may have been in the West at the time.

6

Colonization made strange things happen. Once, for example, Spain recruited indigenous warriors from Tlaxcala (Central Mexico, allies of theirs since their battles against the Mexicas/"Aztecs") and went to the Philippines, and there they fought Japanese pirates and samurais, basically.

Accurate info here.

4
lemmy.world

Pirates? The heyday of pirates in the Caribbean was around 1700, during the Spanish Succession Wars, IIRC. (Okay, I went to Wikipedia to be sure and it says the time from 1650 to the 1730s is considered the Golden Age of piracy)

To be sure, piracy still exists in various places in the world even today, e.g. near the Horn of Africa or the Straits of Malacca. But it seems odd to date it to the late 19th century...🤔

3
lemmy.today

Golden age of piracy for the western world ended in the 18th century, but piracy in the China and Indian sea was booming in the 19th century.

There was a us military action in Korea in 1875. During that expedition you could reasonably have had a western gunslinger have a run in with Japanese samurai and Chinese pirates? Not sure how Dracula gets worked into the scene though.

5
jaybonereply
lemmy.zip

But were these Chinese pirates anything like we think of western pirates, with peg legs and hook hands and eye patches and parrots and walking planks? I imagine that’s what we’re thinking of in the RPG party we’re assembling. Though much of that would have been fiction as well.

Now I’m thinking of the Archer episodes where he becomes pirate king.

3

imagine that’s what we’re thinking of in the RPG party we’re assembling.

Think that's more of a failure of imagination than anything. Nothing is saying that rpg characters are standardized strictly by western interpretation. That would be a bit chauvinistic.

2

They probably dressed differently, but the weapons and medicine should have been roughly similar. Maybe the have steam boats instead of sailing boats, but adding a bit of steampunk vibe doesn't hurt the RPG party. And no reason to believe they were any less boozy than golden age caribbean pirates.

1

... and we thought present day action films were over the top.

2

Not a woosh. You just said a dumb thing that was irrelevant to what I said.

0