The 1997 Live-Action/CGI-Animated One Season Wonder Van-Pires Was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Knock-Off We Never Knew We Never Needed
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been an inextricable thread in the fabric of American life for so long that it can be easy to forget their humble origins.
Before Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s iconic creations became a hit animated cartoon, blockbuster film series, lucrative toy line, and popular video games, they were a black and white comic book conceived initially as a one-off.
In their original incarnation, the heroes of my childhood and many others were a satirical pastiche that combined elements of The New Mutants, Cerebus, and two comic books associated with Frank Miller: Ronin and Daredevil.
The massive, zeitgeist-capturing success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles led to a slew of knockoffs that feel like they were created through Madlibs, like Street Sharks, Biker Mice From Mars, Samurai Pizza Cats, Dinosaucers, and Kung Fu Dino Posse.
These were less parodies or pastiches than shameless knockoffs.
Like the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book, the mind-boggling 1997 live-action/animated single-season wonder Van-Pires combines elements of popular kiddie fodder but in a spirit of thievery rather than mockery.
Van-Pires chronicles the tacky dual lives of teenage mutants, but as its title clumsily conveys, it is primarily a blurry Xerox of Transformers. Instead of focusing on shape-shifting robots from outer space that alternate between robot and vehicle form, Van-Pires shares the adventures of grease-loving teenagers who are transformed by a meteor into robotic-looking anthropomorphic cars that can fly for some reason.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers, and, to a lesser degree, Go-Bots, are not the only kiddie hits Van-Pires steals from. It’s also wildly derivative of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Its protagonists are essentially Mighty Morphin’ Teenage Mutant Transformers From Outer Space-on acid!
Two weeks ago, I inexplicably had no idea that this abomination existed. Then a kind soul chose it for Control, Nathan Rabin 4.0. Over the course of a single magical day, I went from knowing nothing about Van-Pires to experiencing all thirteen episodes in a mad rush.
I am now an expert on Van-Pires. For the last eight hours or so, it has been my life. Incidentally, when my wife catches a glimpse of the garbage I watch for this website and Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, she often rolls her eyes, expressing surprise and irritation that the surreal trash I’m subjecting myself to exists and that I choose to experience it. She’s seldom been more justified in her skepticism and annoyance than when she caught a minute or two of the first episode of Van-Pires.
It should be noted that almost none of the show’s characters are actually vans but Van-Pire, while an exceedingly tortured bit of wordplay, nevertheless sounds better than Car-Pires or Truck-Pires.
Van-Pires consequently owes its unfortunate and peculiar existence to the success of the hits it rips off, and its title almost being a pun.
Thirteen episodes of Van-Pires reportedly cost five million dollars. That’s surprising, since the show looks like it costs about five thousand dollars.
Van-Pires has exactly one set for Sunrise Salvage, a cozy little junkyard owned by Van He’ll Sing, a hippie who earned his name when he worked as a roadie for the Rolling Stones, and when Mick Jagger came down with laryngitis, the band pointed at him and said, "Van, He'll Sing!"
What a crazy coincidence that his name almost sounds like “Van Helsing” and he would someday find himself fighting a Dracula-like figure, in this case, Tracula, an evil gas-guzzling villain and the leader of the Van-Pires.
According to a trivia item in the Van-Pires IMDB entry that is funnier than the show in its entirety, "An unconfirmed urban legend states the Van He'll-Sing (who is credited as himself) was actually portrayed by Gary Oldman."
Oldman is eccentric, but he's not that eccentric. A more plausible explanation for why no actor is credited with playing one of the lead roles is that the thespian who portrayed Van He'll Sing understandably does not want to be publicly associated with the role or the show.
Van He’ll Sing’s sartorial sensibility can be described as “psychedelic Gallagher.” He speaks in a cartoonish English accent, seemingly modeled on John Lennon. He states explicitly at one point that he doesn’t use drugs, but his defining characteristic is that he seems high all the time.
At the Sunrise Salvage, Van He'll Sing employees a quartet of gearheads whose lives revolve around the cars they are apparently too young to drive legally.
Van He'll Sing didn’t really teach them to be robot car teens. Axle (Jason Hayes) rules, Nuke (Marc Schwarz) is a machine/Rev (Melissa Marsala) is cool but rude, and Snap (Garikayi Mutambirwa) is a party dude.
Axle and Nuke are white bros who love cars, Snap is an African-American who uses Ebonics to express his fondness for all things automotive, while Rev is the girl, a tomboy who gets in trouble more than once by trying to go it alone, to teach impressionable audiences that teamwork is essential and that chicks shouldn’t get too cocky. In “Bride of Tracula,” Tracula develops a romantic obsession with Rev, which would be weird and creepy even if she were not mostly human and underage.
Axle, Nuke, Rev, and Snap are ordinary teenagers with names like energy drinks that get recalled for having dangerous ingredients when a meteor descends upon their home away from home, which has some rather curious effects.
It turns kids who dream about cars into cars, or at least car-robo-humanoid beings realized through some of the shittiest CGI and character design of the 1990s. We’re talking Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa-level embarrassing.
This was apparently the best they could do in 1997, and it was quite poor. The meteor creates a team that calls itself Motor-Vaters. That sounds like a Christian youth group that travels the country doing trick driving and spreading the gospel of Christ.
Motor-Vaters are the arch-nemeses of the titular Van-Pires, a collection of cut-rate Decepticons/Renegades led by Tracula (Jonathan Davis), who seek gas the way vampires seek blood, transforming innocent automobiles into gas-craving Van-Pires by sucking their oil. Also like vampires, Van-Pires must hide from the sun and live in darkness. They must feed to stay alive. They are insatiable and relentless. And real dumb.
Motor-Vaters must also avoid sunlight and need oil to stay alive, but as good Americans and consumers, not Commies, they pay for their gas. You might assume they’d be bummed about the whole being a car-vampire, or a van-pire, as it were, but they just seem geeked about becoming Cronenbergian monsters, furious fusions of metal and steel and bone and muscle.
As one of the idiots cheerfully enthuses, he didn’t just get behind the driving wheel; he is the driving wheel.
Even before a meteor turns them into flying robo-cars, the Motor-Vaters have a deeply annoying habit of speaking exclusively in automotive metaphors. That only increases once they actually evolve into what Snap refers to as “Mutant Teenage Auto Cyborg Power Morphing Thingamajigs” or MTACPMT for short.
Motor-Vaters use their weird auto-vampirism for good. Their arch-nemeses, the Van-Pires, use it for evil. Tracula leads a ghoulish gang that includes Cardaver, a hunchback hearse in the Igor vein, and Bride of Frankenstein ambulance Ambula (AKA the girl).
The Wikipedia entry for Van-Pires says of Ambula, “She has an Electra complex (with Tracula playing the role of Agamemnon and Rev playing the role of Clytemnestra)." But I think someone might be goofing around.
Finally, and most obnoxiously, is Automaniac, an ice cream truck that speaks in a shrill, Jerry Lewis-like nasal whine and behaves in a buffoonish fashion. He uses balloon animals and ice cream as weapons.
Van-Pires is full of Batman & Robin-style wordplay, mainly involving cars, of course, but in one episode, Automaniac guzzles some super gas that allows him to rocket into outer space and create a new ice age single-handedly. This leads to him uttering some Mr. Freeze-worthy one-liners about no longer being Mr. Ice Guy.
Yes, these bland teens are all about kicking ass—as-phalt, that is! The Van-Pires and Motorvators are also keen on rhyming, as when Tracula enthuses, “Those who have the fuel shall rule!” Later, it’s observed, “He who has the fuel is cool!”
Van-Pires and Motor-Vaters fall instantly and easily into an adversarial relationship. The Motor-Vaters receive assistance from a riddle-dispensing Gypsy Cab whose every appearance is punctuated by Romani-style violins, and Greasespot, a tricycle that behaves like a puppy.
The Van-Pires’ sidekicks include a sentient toilet that talks like Rodney Dangerfield and a toaster that speaks in a thick French accent. It is, consequently, a French Toaster! The wordplay is exquisite!
In the third episode, Tracula seeks recruits in the form of a fleet of military vehicles that gain sentience when he turns them. Unfortunately for the evil autos, the leader of the government fleet, General Motor, rebels and wages war against Tracula and his goons.
This establishes a sturdy template where Motor-Vaters encounter a new villain of the week, often brought to life by Tracula as part of his quest to defeat the Motor-Vaters and/or take over the world by stealing all of its beautiful, beautiful gas. These temporary menaces are defeated by Motor-Vaters, setting the groundwork for the gang to take on another motor menace the following week.
Motor-Vaters change by shouting, “It’s morphing time!” No, wait. That’s a different show. Actually, it’s “It’s morbin time!” Sorry, that’s a different vampire-themed misfire. Motor-Vaters actually trans-morph by shouting “Mission ignition!”
As with much of Van-Pires’ dialogue, it’s not much, but at least it rhymes.
When they transform, the Motor-Vaters occupy a completely digital world realized by primitive CGI that was state-of-the-art at the time but now looks mesmerizing in its garish ineptitude.
There’s something about the cheap tackiness of early CGI that I find fascinating. I consequently was addicted to Van-Pires because of the hideousness of its animation, not despite it.
Van-Pires is as hilariously inept from both a technical and storytelling standpoint.
The ninth episode, “A Car Is Born,” inexplicably wraps up its action with three minutes left to go. To run out the clock and pad the episode, we’re treated to a three-minute-long slow-motion montage sequence celebrating friendship.
It’s not unusual for Saturday Night Live to end a few minutes early, leaving a panicked host to ad-lib poorly, because it’s impossible to time a live television show down to the second.
Van-Pires is not a live show, yet they somehow couldn’t figure out a way to end the episode in a manner more organic than a lazy trip back through its back pages.
In “Unleaded Zeppelin”, the Motor-Vaters are excited to meet their favorite band, Starr, a Kiss clone whose tour bus becomes sentient and evil thanks to Tracula’s interference.
Van-Pires has an unlikely connection to another legendary rock and roll band. Bassist John Entwistle contributes a theme song and an original track to every episode. By “original track,” I of course mean “song that that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend rightly rejected.”
One of the old tracks even features Keith Moon, who had been dead nearly twenty years when Van-Pires debuted, yet still somehow contributed, from beyond the grave, to the soundtrack of a kiddie show about vampire cars.
I like to think that true Who super-fans make a point of watching every episode of Van-Pires for the sake of completism.
According to someone who may or may not have a firm grasp on reality, Van-Pires was reportedly renewed for a second season and eyed as a potential motion picture. Cooler heads prevailed, and this was rightfully relegated to the dustbin of history.
That’s far from a tragedy, but I very much enjoyed my weird day in the world of Van-Pires. So if you enjoy taking drugs and then watching the surreally incompetent, Van-Pires is your jam, particularly since all 13 episodes are available for free on YouTube.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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