this sums up why i do not like or even think about the hotel transylvania film series enough to have previously acknowledged it. My picture is terrible and compiled from several terrible pictures since I did not want to look like I was photographing it, and also the stop and shop granola bar shelf is arranged like a mosh pit but this is all it deserves. “it” being just another bland story of pixar-derived normal boring people with a single unusual trait that happens to manifest itself in appearance + celebrity voices. Legally Adam Sandler still has more than enough money to be considered a celebrity and is not at risk of being called an actor. In fact the “moral” is probably don’t judge a book by its cover! Maybe the MONSTERS are not the REAL monsters! Like every computer movie that has ever come out. in fact pixar has a series that is literally also “monsters” that are just like “us.” And also the Addams Family did that half a century ago and the Munsters even used Frankenstein. I don’t know why the Sony corporation didn’t just brand Hotel Transylvania a Groovie Goolies reboot. I didn’t think Underdog had enough name recognition to justify a 3d animated point-missing remake, and the Goolies have even LESS.
Anyway I thought there was no idea to start with, but by 2018 they have run out of no ideas since the third installmeh has a “everybody takes a trip to the beach” theme, which puts it into Brady Bunch territory. That is even the premise of the third The Chipmunks bad computer animated movie. Apart from the mummy, these characters aren’t really recognizable as monsters now. They just look like slobs.

I might have thought the right side one was Shaggy from Scooby Doo if I did not see the Hotel Transylvania logo and there being a woman attracted to him. in fact there is a Scooby Doo “movie” called The Reluctant Werewolf in which Shaggy gets transformed into a werewolf and gets taunted by recycled Groovie Goolies animation.* he even has an inexplicable female companion named “Googie” whom to my knowledge was not seen prior to then nor afterward (and isn’t seen here either). I remember watching it at the age of 6-9 on the USA network at my grandmother’s house since she had cable. It took about two hours. The running time was insane for something that dull and crummy. And I watched it anyway because kids have no taste. The left character here, I guess is just some lady. These people are PERSECUTED just because they’re MONSTERS even though they keep up with contemporary American fashion and gender norms.

Or maybe these two are the “normal” normal people that are supposed to be like the viewer’s avatar, who start off AFRAID but realize eventually that some business man/ trophy hunter / scientist nerd is the REAL monster, even though they are the people actually making the movies. the trophy hunters are doing it in a sexual sense but otherwise there is no difference.
(then I drew this) I don’t know. and i can’t tell. And once i can’t tell, what even is the point? “it’s what’s inside that counts!” that’s true! as long as you are completely ordinary and submissive to commercialism inside, be as garish as you want. Eat up –it’s on food, even– the fake politically correct morality of the moment.
I don’t even know if Hotel Transylvania 3: Die Darkman Die came out yet, maybe it even came out last year; these things are preservatived enough to be legally edible for several years.

here is The Roughly Adequate Dinosaur branded consumable material in shop rite in 2017 despite a visible copyright notice identifying 2015. Of course to be fair it IS at Shop Rite. You can tell it is Shop Rite because there are bright yellow labels that say “SAVINGS” on items which are not actually on sale. And you can tell I took this picture two years later than the date on it because I just typed text saying so.

_{(emphasis mine)}
what on earth is “spooky” here? The five smoke stacks on the ship in the distance? The unsupervised child playing on a stack of abandoned cargo? That Quaker uses the iconography of a health food company while selling candy and corporate propaganda? I buy granola bars because I want to eat chocolate chip cookies and consider these marginally less detrimental to my well-being.
this is from the quaker website because the box with these characters on it was sold out when I finally decided to take pictures of them, not considering that I would postpone finishing what I was writing for another three weeks and would have ample time for the store to restock them even though I never finish one of these in under a month anymore.

*I mis-remembered this; recycled Groovie Goolies animation appears in a 1984 episode of The Let’s Go Ghost-Busters which I also have seen, but the production on Reluctant Werewolf is so shoddy and 1970s looking that this is plausible enough to leave in with a disclaimer. I was surprised just now to read it came out in 1988!

I have also been told by my own nagging need to sabotage my efforts by looking things up, that the completely ordinary looking woman here is Dracula’s daughter and the conflict is more of an obnoxious sitcom sort of deal with Dracula being overprotective of his daughter from this human who isn’t even a vampire and hanging out with his oafy friends who can’t stand their nagging wives. The nagging wives bit is extrapolation by me based on them being portrayed by Fran Drescher and Molly Shannon, them being absent from the plot description and my memory of commercials for Father of the Pride (that page is from 2004, when my parenthetical asides spanned whole paragraphs watch out). I was thinking: more Shrek, with all the annoying Saturday Night Live crummydians in the place of actors but really it’s more Shrek 2, with annoying pop singers added in to raise the marketing value among kids who aren’t yet old enough to think they are smart because they watch Saturday Night Live. In any event everybody’s just a slob at the beach by now and that means this completely ordinary-looking woman standing in direct sunlight is supposed to be a full-blooded vampire, so plainly it doesn’t matter that she IS a vampire. They probably try to play it like “look at this allegory about social harmony ho ho ho we’re so positive and messagey even though we just likened Jews to vampires.” Mel Brooks was even hired to voice Dracula’s father in the sequel (but not to write the screenplay). What’s even the point of calling him “Dracula” at this point? Dracula is only interesting because he does evil things while seeming pleasant and welcoming. A Dracula that is just an average nice guy –Adam Sandler isn’t a credited producer or writer but his wife and his daughter portray his wife and his daughter so one assumes he dictated how his character came across– and doesn’t kill people to keep himself alive or even kidnap them just to amuse himself isn’t Dracula!

It isn’t even Duckula because Duckula’s attendants legitimately want Duckula to start killing people, are disappointed when he doesn’t, and he is usually suffering most of the time. It’s more like Count Chocula: The Movie, especially considering the sugar-loaded rubbish component. Everything I see about Hotel Transylvania makes it seem like it is only as interesting as a two hour episode of Scooby Doo. Which regrettably is enough.