Samurai at this point were samurai true, but mostly just office workers at this point. Not exactly the armored warriors most people would think of as a samurai.
Where would the pirates be from? Golden age of piracy had long past in Europe afaik. Or are we just being amorphous with the fact there are always pirates?
I think that’s your B story right there, the fact that they’re all misfits, too out of step with their times, driven by a wild yearning and a sense of romanticism. The movie itself is 0% anachronistic, but the protagonist are anachronistic in spirit.
Dracula meanwhile as a villain represents postmodernism, apathy, and the banality of evil. He’s ironic, sleek, with it - a Londoner par excellence, rich and idle, but his life is a living death, figuratively as well as the whole undead thing.
The third act sees the protagonists combine their fighting styles excellently, but without avail. However, their foolhardy spirit and absurd heroism inspires Dracula to an inner awakening, and they come to an understanding in the end.
Post credits stinger: Van Helsing and Captain Ahab combine forces to take down a were-whale.
Abraham Lincoln could have sent a fax to a samurai
Dracula’s always been the ultimate baddy
… and we thought present day action films were over the top.
This is not how time works
Um…what?
You mean Dracula didn’t exist 😰?!
Not remotely what I meant, no.
Woosh…
Not a woosh. You just said a dumb thing that was irrelevant to what I said.
It should be “playing with Nintendo” instead of “playing Nintendo” toe be fair. To be honest, “playing with Nintendo cards” would be the most accurate, but “with Nintendo” is still accurate enough and still gives the sentence the desired effect. But no, “playing Nintendo” isn’t correct. Unless they made some specific game variant and included the rules with their cards or something.
Well, did they have their own proprietary game for their cards? Or were they just making poker cards?
That’s the question I’m asking!
Guy who invited his friends over to play Nintendo, and when they arrive pulls out a deck of hanafuda cards.
He would be playing hanafuda, which is the Japanese card game that Nintendo was producing at that time. Not as funny as imagining Dracula trying to beat Ninja Gaiden or whatever.
Was that a general game or something they designed? If it’s something they made “playing Nintendo” works.
I’m really overanalyzing this joke, it’s funny either way, obviously.
They probably said either the name of a specific game or “playing karuta”, which is a word derived from the Portuguese word for card (carta).
Pirates are still a thing, they just don’t look cool anymore.
TBF, I think movies made old pirates look a lot cooler than they really were.
If you look at old drawings and depictions, they do look like we know them, but they may have been embellished even then. But Hollywood didn’t invent the image.
Shocker: movies are inaccurate.
Amen. Ain’t nothin’ cool about scurvy.
i’d watch it
They might’ve all existed, but did they all exist in the same place at once?
Colonization made strange things happen. Once, for example, Spain recruited indigenous warriors from Tlaxcala (Central Mexico, allies of theirs since their battles against the Mexicas/“Aztecs”) and went to the Philippines, and there they fought Japanese pirates and samurais, basically.
Accurate info here.
Japan was opened up by American gunboats in 1853 at which point Japanese-American trade was present. That puts Nintendo in reach of American sailors. Levi’s was founded in the west coast port city of San Francisco as workwear. This makes it plausible for a laborer to wear them while working as a deckhand or other skilled labor job where they may pick up a taste for Japanese card games while gambling in Japan. If they find themselves on the Atlantic route any time in the southeast and they’re likely to run into coca cola which was a refreshing and energizing beverage owing to the sugar, caffeine, and cocaine. If they keep some bottles on board for a special occasion they may very well have some left by the time they arrive in England where Brahm Stoker is writing Dracula.
Now, why is a Gothic writer gambling in a Japanese game with an American sailor and noticing his curious pant choice? I couldn’t tell you enough about Stoker to say if that’s normal, but add some emotional abuse and a bisexual baccanal and it sounds exactly like some Lord Byron bullshit and Percy Shelley may join in.
I’m here for the Lord Byron bullshit.
Samurai, gunslingers, and pirates are even more reasonable. There was an age of piracy located in the Caribbean and gulf of Mexico a few decades before the wild west. They’re unlikely to be fighting at the time, but as New Orleans settles down it’s plausible that a pirate may want to open a saloon or brothel outside the reach of the government and polite society. During the wild west the Japanese government underwent the Meiji Restoration which ended the feudal system and put a lot of samurai out of work (they had a rebellion about it). A samurai deciding to hop a ship to America to seek ronin work is something I feel like i would’ve heard if it had happened, but it is within the realm of “yeah I wouldn’t question if a mostly reputable source said it happened”. And well I suppose one or two western style gunslingers may have been in the West at the time.
He’s not a samurai (and in fact is probably one of the few members of the cast who is not arguably some flavor of samurai) but this is basically Lee’s ending in Last Blade 2:
On earth? Yes. Within traveling distance by sail? Also yes.
How is this not already a movie?
Would make a good rpg party
And nothing much has changed since, just more, more jeans, more coke, more blood suckers
A gun-slinger, a samurai and a pirate fighting Dracula? What is this, the new JoJo?
A reminder that there is an actual wild west gun slinger (sort of) in Dracula. He’s the perfect stereotype of a Texan cowboy.
Also an invitation to our Dracula bookclub in !vampires@lemmy.zip.
A Texas what? Oh, cowboy.
Like a vacero not like a youthful minotaur though
While the Old West goes back a few centuries, I’d say the “gunslingers era” isn’t until the first Colt revolver becomes available in the mid 1830s. It took a bit of digging to find pirates that would have definitely been around late enough into the 1800s that they’d be contemporary with gunslingers and samurai (class abolished in 1870), but old school river piracy lasted, even in just the US, into at least the late 1870s, so I guess that all checks out, as long as you weren’t expecting Blackbeard or anything.
Piracy pretty much always exists. As long as valuables are being transported by ship there will be people who want to capture those ships.
Yeah, but modern pirates with small motorboats and automatic guns don’t have the flair that hollywood pirates are known for.
Actual 17th-18th century pirates didn’t really have that flair either.
