I was flipping through my Watch Instantly cue on Netflix last night and I ended up landing on something that I had no recollection of reserving.  This has happened before; the little gremlins that live inside the website are apparently capable of adding things to your list that they figure you’ll find interesting based on your previous selections.

I’d watched several horror films the week before, one of which I’ll be reviewing on this site in the coming days, which made the Netflix gremlins think I’d appreciate ”100 Years of Horror”.  This mystery pick turned out out be a TV series from the mid 90’s hosted by 70’s-horror-staple and cinematic Gandalf nemesis Chistopher Lee.  Each show is dedicated to a different subject ranging from monsters, mutants and space aliens to psychos, slashers, sadists and everything in between; naturally I went straight for the werewolf episode.

Anyone who’s even vaguely versed in the golden age of monster movies knows that Lon Chaney Jr. is pretty much the godfather of silver-screen actors with body-hair issues.  There were arguments made during the show that earlier efforts like Werewolf of London more justly deserved the title, but most will concede that The Wolf Man is still where it all really began.

In the midst of my stroll down lycanthropy lane, an image suddenly came into my mind and then began to fade as abruptly as it had appeared.  I grabbed my laptop from the couch before the picture had completely vanished and quickly googled “Werewolf, Frankenstein, Dracula record”.  The results came back and I clicked on one of the entries labeled “A Story of Dracula, The Wolfman and Frankenstein” and was greeted with this image:



I knew I was on the right track and after several minutes of additional searching I hit upon this blog entry, which had what I sought. 

Contained on the page linked above is the complete audio and imagery from one of my prized childhood possessions.  These follow-along stories were big in the 70’s and early 80’s before cable television became ubiquitous across America.  The idea was to get kids into reading and what better way than to fill the stories with adventurers, pirates and scary creatures.  The iconic monster trilogy above was the best of the bunch; listening to it now I still feel myself being drawn in.

Experiences like this are interesting because they not only make you remember what happened years ago, but also make you recall who you were and how you felt.  Nostalgia is really the closest thing to time travel we’ve got and it doesn’t even require a flux capacitor, just a little spark of memory and some persistent internet searching.

So now it’s your turn.  Tell me the last time you had a moment that hurled you back in time. 

What triggered the event and where did it take you?

I await your rose-tinted answers with bated breath.

-Quoth the Raven

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