It's #DraculaDay day. An excuse to explain how I JUST CAN'T GET OVER the #SesameStreet Count's counting compulsion and actual vampire folklore (bear with me here). A thread

It's a great pun because vampires are Counts and counting = educational.

So why are vampires Counts? 1/6

Now I mean obviously it's Dracula. The Count is a Dracula parody. Dracula is a Count

But the folkloric figures vampires are based off weren't pale sexy castle-dwelling nobles. Not at all. They were regular folks who'd died cursed & diseased But in the 19thc this changes.

2/6

Gothic stories had already started to feature old castles and In 1819 Polidori writes The Vampyre with “Lord” Ruthven.. and a few years later you get Countess Karnstein /Carmilla.

And so eventually we wind up with "Count" Dracula.. Who definitely doesn't count.

3/6

Dracula becomes the archetypal vampire.. Counts are associated with vampires. It now makes sense to have a pun with a counting character as a vampire.

(by the way the title Count and to count seem to have seperate etymological routes)

And it works well exactly like that!

4/6

Except that.... The creatures in those old vampire myths (and some witches) have the same very specific tendency as Count von Count to count compulsively (arithmomania).

So much so that dropping seeds in front of them stops them because they're so distracted counting them.

5/6

I don't know if the count's creator, Norman Stiles knowingly made a modern vampire using largely forgotten qualities of earlier vampire lore, which was educational AND a pun.

If he did it's a great achievement. And if not it's just a hell of a coincidence. And I love it!

6/6