There were countless monster toys I never had and that's saying a lot because my late great Folks provided me with a healthy supply of spooks and grue almost every week in the Sixties and early seventies.
But some trinkets from the dark nursery did elude me and one of those was Dracula's Soil.
Now I'm unsure if that was its correct name, it may have been Dracula's dirt or something but essentially it was meant to be a small quantity of soil from Dracula's coffin.
I recall seeing this stuff advertised all the time in comics. Like those other tantalising sensations Sea Monkeys and Dim Mak, Dracula's Soil offered young boys and ghouls the chance to own, yes own, a pinch of the Count's bed muck! Who could resist!
Well despite the Master's transatlantic allure I did resist and never possessed his heinous loam. God knows what would have happened if it had inadvertently spilt onto my Mum's prize begonias. They may have bitten her and turned her into one of his floating Brides!
Like Renfield I did conjecture the depth of the Dark Prince's power though. Could the mail-order soil bring insects back to life? Would dead flies fly once more into the vapona only to rise and fly again? Would demised woodlice reanimate to become small crabs of the undead! Yuk!
I was also baffled by the logistics of the dirt's availability. Just how much of it was there? How big was Drac's coffin? What if million's of kids everywhere bought some and loosened the very foundations of Castle Bran? What if Transylvania itself vanished from the face of the earth as billions of tons of land was dug up for budding vampires everywhere!
My final thoughts on the soil that never was can be summed up as the dilemma of packaging. In Bram Stoker's toothy tale the Dark One's native humus is shipped through Europe in huge crates to arrive at Carfax House near the Thames. Is this where the comic book muck would end up, a sort of Amazon-like pick-up point where you took an empty Smarties tube or Screwball cone to get filled?
Dracula's own coffin went by sea on the Demeter making landfall in the Yorkshire sea port of Whitby. No-one on board the Demeter survived except for a large black dog, which leapt from the dead hulk and pelted towards Carfax hundreds of miles south, no doubt to stop all his favourite detritus being sold to young comic fans with Smartie tubes!
Back to reality and I always assumed the soil was sold in small bottles but they may have been miniature coffins. I forget. Whatever it was it can't have been big. Imagine Wickes pulling up and dropping off one of those massive builders' sacks on the kerb and your Mum saying ' What on earth is that Woodsy?'. 'What? that? Its just three tons of Count Dracula's coffin dirt Mum!' ha ha.
The mind boggles or maybe I should say, the mind bottles!
I never did succumb to buy Vlad's bedding. I left his soil alone and like Bram said, the plot thickened!
Like the Count I shall reflect no further. Did you purchase any of the Impaler's litter?
I always saw it in the mail order section of Famous monsters Magazine.It was advertised heavily around 1979 when Dracula starring Frank Langella was in theaters here, although there was no commercial tie in.They were sold in little sealed plastic coffins that I've occasionally seen at collectible shows,sometimes yellowed with age or scratched up pretty badly. And yes, I was tempted but never did "bite":)
ReplyDeleteso they were coffins Bri. Thanks! Somewhere is a huge crate full of them guarded by wolves! ha ha. For some reason I keep imagining the tannis root thingy that Mia Farrow is asked to wear in Rosemary's Baby. That could be a bottle on a string. Maybe.
DeleteSadly no Dracula Soil here either as a kid, Woodsy... although I admire how you've dug up the dirt on such soiled scenes of vintage vampirism.
ReplyDeleteAlas for me, it was just a pair of plastic vampire fangs and a turned up collar on an old school shirt. Worked well at the time though :)
the simple stuff is always the best Tone. Reminds me of the play for today you recommended,'Vampires'.
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