Originally developed as part of Cartoon Network's What a Cartoon! series for Hanna-Barbera, Mina & The Count made its debut in 1995 with the short, "Interlude With a Vampire":
Apparently, this didn't pass muster with CN suits, so creator Rob Renzetti took it with him to Nickelodeon three years later, and produced another handful of shorts over the next year. Unfortunately, Mina & The Count never got past the shorts stage and into a full fledged series.
It had been proven that vampires could be used for laughs, but CN would later come up with something similar, swapping out the vampire for the personification of death in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. Unfortunately, that series mostly celebrated stupidity on the part of Billy and his dad. The fact that Mina was able to later pass off Count Vlad (Mark Hamill) as a music teacher and a giant sized doll on her unsuspecting dad (Michael Bell) was similar to the subtle humor of similar scenarios enacted on Beetlejuice a few years earlier. Ashley Johnson (ex-Growing Pains) voiced Mina here, but Tara Strong took over the part when the project moved to Nick.
Rating: B-.
4 comments:
And 8 years later in 2003, Rob Renzetti would go on to create My Life As A Teenage Robot.
I never liked these shorts. For some reason, "Mina & The Count just never clicked with me. Too sweet and sentimental and not funny enough, I suppose. I was never a fan of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy" either. I did enjoy Beetlejuice, though.
Sounds like Beetlejuice hit the Goldilocks sweet spot for you by spook show standards; Mina was too soft, Billy & Mandy was too hard, but BJ was just right.
In a way, it did, Silverstar, although Billy & Mandy had its moments. Like, who'd hate a Reaper with a Jamaican accent, anyway? Billy was just too stupid to tolerate.
@Steven: I've previously done a critique of "Teenage Robot", and we may visit with Jenny again down the road.
@Goldstar: I haven't seen any of the Nick shorts of Mina, but that, too, may be down the road.
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