Day 10: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein...

When I decided I was going to do these Halloween-themed posts, I knew I was going to post on one certain film. I remember watching this movie with my dad when I was young, and love to watch it every Halloween… Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

If you haven’t seen it, you are truly missing out on a true classic. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s comedy at its finest. The acting is good, the story fits, and when you watch it you can tell that everyone enjoyed making it.

So here goes…

Universal Pictures made a great deal of money from its monster movies in the 1930s. You’ve probably seen most of them…Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and many many more. By the 1940s, Universal’s Monsters were played out. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone when you consider how quickly these movies were being produced.

Universal, and rightly so at that point, seemed to believe neither Frankenstein, Dracula nor The Wolfman couldn’t carry a picture on their own any more. So what do you do? You put the menacing in more films, but only as a group. They came bundled together, three for the price of one, in the films House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, in 1944 and 1945.

It looked like the days of the great Universal Monsters had passed, and the once proud bogeymen would fade away without so much as a whimper.

Then movie producer Robert Arthur had an idea.

In late 1946, Arthur, the producer in charge of Abbott and Costello movies, was kicking ideas around and he came up with something about a mad doctor chasing Abbott and Costello into a confrontation with Frankenstein. Studio bosses suggested he throw Dracula and ehe Wolfman in, use the whole squad, and maybe it would amount to something.

A couple of script treatments were turned out and quickly discarded. One dreadful version had the Monsters defeated after being shrunk down to doll size. Luckily, some changes were made.

The script, in a nutshell:

Chick (Abbott) and Wilbur (Costello) get in over their heads when they deliver two crates to a house of horrors. The crates contain Count Dracula (Lugosi) and Frankenstein's monster (Strange). The vampire is working with a femme fatale to find a brain so simple, so pliable, that when transplanted into the monster he will be completely under Dracula's control. Of course Wilbur has just such a brain, and he and Chick, with help from Talbot (AKA The Wolfman, played by Chaney) have to stop them while keeping Wilbur's head on his shoulders.


The Monsters:

Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, the Wolfman
Lon Chaney Jr. had played Lawrence Talbot/The Wolf Man in four films before this: The Wolf Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was his last time in the role. In this film, he’s a good guy, working with Bud and Lou to prevent Dracula from reviving the dangerous Frankenstein Monster, but he’s also a walking time bomb who can morph into The Wolfman and turn on his friends at any moment.

Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula
This was only Lugosi's second onscreen appearance as Dracula. Ian Keith was considered for the role. Coincidentally, Keith was also considered to play Dracula in the 1931 original. Keith was originally considered for the part, for Lugosi’s drug use (which spawned from a dependence on pain killers) was so notorious that the producers weren't even aware that Lugosi was still alive. This film was was Bela Lugosi's last "A" movie.

Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein Monster
Glenn Strange plays him for most of the film, but broke his foot during production, so Lon Chaney Jr. (who previously played the monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein), took over the role for a portion of the laboratory battle sequence. Strange had played the Monster in two previous outings, but the parts were very minor. Boris Karloff, who played the monster first in Frankenstein, turned down a reprise of the role because he feared the monsters would only be demeaned and denigrated. To the film's credit, this was not the case. Boris Karloff did, however, help promote the movie and can be seen in several publicity photos, including one where he is buying a ticket, even though he refused to actually see the film.

Vincent Price as the Invisible Man
The Invisible man makes a surprise non-appearance at the end of the film. Vincent Price's voice-only cameo as the Invisible Man was his second and last time playing the character, having played the part in the second film of that monster's series, The Invisible Man Returns.


The film was a runaway hit, the 3rd biggest box office attraction of 1948, and it gave Bud and Lou a whole new formula to exploit. In later installments Bud and Lou would run into The Killer(Boris Karloff), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and the Mummy. But their meeting of Frankenstein is the best.