In 1980, everything changed for animation in America. President Jimmy Carter signed the FTC Improvements Act of 1980, limiting the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to regulate children’s programming, among many other things. Ronald Reagan was elected the same year: As president, he championed an immense wave of pro-corporation deregulation that loosened the 1970s rules that limited ads during kids’ shows. Suddenly, toy-company-backed cartoons like Mattel’s Hot Wheels show were no longer classified as advertising. The immediate result was a wave of animated shows backed by Hasbro, Mattel, and other toy companies — well-funded shows supported with copious advertising and merchandise. And weird little one-off, non-toy-based shows like 1980’s Drak Pack all but disappeared from Saturday-morning TV.
Nostalgia for the heavy hitters of ’80s cartoons — He-Man, Transformers, My Little Pony, Thundercats, G.I. Joe, and so forth — remains a cottage industry, with endless retro merch and endless reboots and reimaginings. But I was apparently put on Earth to champion the one-season animated oddities of the ’80s, and Polygon’s Fangsgiving celebration is the perfect time to argue for a modern reboot of 1980’s little-remembered one-season series Drak Pack.
The Saturday-morning show has deep roots in the off-brand Universal Monsters tradition. It centers on three teenage sorta-superheros — a vampire, werewolf, and Frankenstein’s-monster trio — “dedicated to reversing the evil image of their forefathers” by prominently positioning themselves as do-gooders. That pretty exclusively means battling a group known as OGRE (“Organization of Generally Rotten Enterprises”), a team of similar serial-numbers-filed-off monster-movie types led by smarmy villain Dr. Dred. Those battles are mostly high-concept goofery rather than serious battles over the fate of the world: Dr. Dred just seems to want to show off his superior planning and inventing skills, mess with the heroes, put them in silly deathtraps, and occasionally steal valuable things. The tone is more Scooby-Doo than Castlevania.
But while Drak Pack was never going to inspire the loyalty of a Thundercats or Transformers — shows that invited their viewers into vast, ancient fictional worlds, with plenty of room for viewers’ imaginations to stretch out — it still stands out as a charming oddity with ideas worth mining and characters worth revisiting. Chief among them: the teenage vampire Drak Jr., the superteam’s leader and the show’s namesake.
The great-great-grandnephew of Count Dracula, who nominally oversees the team (though that mostly involves kvetching about their latest adventures and their insistence on calling him “Big D”), Drak Jr. is an outlier among ’80s cartoon characters. His visual design was ahead of its time: Purple eye shadow, vampy raked eyebrows, and a perpetual smirk on a male character in a Saturday-morning cartoon basically made him the ’80s equivalent of The Legend of Vox Machina’s Shaun Gilmore. His personality is an unusual, appealing blend of vampiric arrogance and laid-back affability. His far-ranging supernatural skills (flight, telekinesis, shape-shifting) would get much more of an elaborate workout in a modern animated series.
And so would his vampiric nature. In Drak Pack, being a vampire just means having cool powers, with none of the downsides. Count Dracula seems to have weaned himself off of blood and substituted tomato juice. There are no shades of darkness or drama in this series, no modern interrogation of what it means to be a monster, or even why Drak Jr. and his companions care about the legacy of monster-kind. It’s easy to imagine, say, monster-superhero fan Guillermo del Toro having a lot of fun with Drak Pack’s most basic setup, but using it to explore the idea of idealistic teenagers resisting their own monstrous natures and trying to change the world, or Tim Burton imagining the titular superhero team as tormented outsiders, trying to make a place for themselves in a world that has good reason to fear monsters.
What neither Burton nor del Toro would be likely to capture, though, is Drak Pack’s unique group dynamic. As team leader, Drak Jr. routinely makes the decisions, while Frankie and Howler (both voiced by William Callaway) stand back and form a snarky peanut gallery, critiquing his choices without pushing back against them. But there’s never any real tension or drama between them. Instead, there’s a relaxed sense of mutual trust that feels more stoner-ish than superhero-ish. Drak, Frankie, and Howler come across as casual, comfortable, supportive friends in a way pretty much no ’80s cartoon characters ever did. They don’t have the heightened, intense bond of the era’s usual hero teams, or the competitive, sometimes contemptuous relationship of most other cartoon teen teams.
There’s a real affection to their friendship that feels much more modern than the show’s dated animation, music, and humor. It isn’t romantic or sexual, but some recent viewers have identified it as queer — a close but not coded bond that’s well outside the normative, often toxic ’80s stereotypes for how men are supposed to interact. There’s a small but significant fandom for the show on Tumblr in particular, with fans thinking carefully about the show (quite possibly more carefully than the creators did) and putting their own updated visual spins on the show’s minimalist art. And the central trio’s relationship seems to be the focus of those posts far more than anything else about the show.
The other thing that’s still appealing about Drak Pack today is the sense of a bunch of creators at play, grab-bagging whatever elements of monster-movie culture amused them, and mashing it all up into one weird story. Dr. Dred is voiced by the incomparable Hans Conried, whose plummy, drippingly sarcastic voice work made Captain Hook in Disney’s animated Peter Pan into an icon. (Conried was more or less the Alan Rickman of his time.) Many of the other voice actors are doing impressions: Jerry Dexter as Drak is channeling Don Adams from Get Smart, Julie McWhirter as OGRE’s vampire minion Vampira is doing an Eva Gabor impression, and ’80s cartoon stalwart Alan Oppenheimer (perhaps best known as He-Man villain Skeletor) takes his Count Dracula performance directly from Bela Lugosi’s iconic version of the character. Most notably, cartoon superstar Don Messick voices Dr. Dred’s toady sidekick Toad as a spin on Peter Lorre in full “Yesssh, mahster” Igor mode.
In spite of the cultural-magpie approach, Drak Pack doesn’t hold up well today for anyone who isn’t wearing nostalgia-colored glasses. Hanna-Barbara’s animation is simple and basic, with big blocks of flat color and characters that frequently look a little off-model. The sound design is garish and the plots are broad and shallow, though sometimes surprisingly inventive. (Dr. Dred building a shrink ray or weather-controlling machine is standard ’80s hijinks fare; Dr. Dred designing his own evil theme park, or engineering a species of super-termite monsters, is something else entirely.) And it’s impossible to find a crisp, high-fidelity version of the show: A complete-series DVD set released in 2011 is now out of print, and even the direct rips from those DVDs posted online have the fuzzy pixelation of a VHS-era series that was badly preserved.
But the basic idea is solid: the descendants of famous monsters trying to be better people than their parents, whether to end prejudice against their kind, or just to make the world a better place. And there’s still something appealing to this day about a smug but confident vampire and his werewolf and Frankenstein’s-monster sidekicks modeling an easygoing friendship, and an equally easygoing form of heroism that barely rises above the level of community service.
Drak Pack doesn’t take anything particularly seriously, from its frequently squabbling, ridiculous villains to the dark legacy the Drak Pack’s forebears left behind. But that dynamic hasn’t stopped the similarly comedic Scooby-Doo from getting endless reboots and revamps. Drak Pack’s own central vamp and his buddies deserve a second life and a modern reimagining just as much as Scooby and company ever did.
