Dracula: The Series (1990)

When the Philadelphia bank Eileen Townsend works for transfers her to Europe, she takes her sons (teen-age Chris and 10-year-old Max) to stay with her uncle Gustav Helsing. Gustav's passions in life are schnitzel, polka music and, we will come to find out, hunting Dracula, who is living nearby as businessman Alexander Lucard. Also living with Gustav is teen-age Sophie Metternich, who impresses Chris. Max is also obsessed with vampires, and not knowing about Gustav's quest, he misreads several signs and becomes convinced that Gustav is a vampire. With his mother away on an assignment, Max goes to the only other adult he knows, the businessman his mother had introduced him to at a reception the previous day, Alexander Lucard. At Lucard's urging, Max lures Chris and Sophie to Lucard's castle. Upon their arrival, Lucard reveals his true nature. Max and Chris get away, but Sophie is left in Dracula's clutches. Unable to reach Gustav, Chris and Max return to the castle to rescue Sophie.

Walter and Anna Dyson, Gustav's old friend and former girlfriend, come to stay at the house. Unknown to Gustav, Max has removed the Cross of the Magyars from the house to have it blessed. It is this cross which keeps vampires from entering the Helsing home, and Lucard finds out that it's been removed. Unfortunately, the cross is returned at the last minute, and it drives Dracula from the house in a blaze of light.

Gustav and one of his former students, Arthur Bauer, find a rare herb and develop a formula called the quinidrine solution, which they hope will reverse the effects of a vampire's bite. When Arthur is kidnapped, Gustav allows himself to be captured by Lucard so that he can test the solution on himself and Arthur. But the formula doesn't work, because Max has confused it with his high protein energy drink and has consumed all the quinidrine. When the kids arrive to free Gustav, Max is able to fend off Lucard and his lieutenant, Klaus, by firing energy bolts at them through his fingers. They escape back to the house, where the kids quickly use their last remaining quinidrine leaf to mix up another batch of the solution for Gustav and Arthur. Gustav is saved, but Bauer chooses to reamin a vampire. He attacks Gustav, but doesn't know about the Cross of the Magyars, the house's protective talisman...which then destroys him.

Max brings home a bungling vampire-hunting scientist, Magnus St. John-Smythe, who insists that a new laser gun he's developed can destroy vampires using concentrated sunlight. Magnus' benefactor in the project, however, is Lucard himself, eager to learn if such a gun is possible. Lucard determines that Magnus' invention is a waste of time and money when it has no effect on a vampire colleague. Incensed, he's about to vampirize Magnus, when Gustav and Max barge in and stop him. Later, at Lucard's castle, the vampire colleague suddenly disintegrates and Lucard becomes the proud owner of the world's only delayed-action vampire gun...which he then destroys.

An archeologist, Dr. Cross, uncovers the resting place of Lucard's ancient and bitter rival, Nosferatu, who tries to bring down Lucard's economic empire. Nosferatu is powerful, with the ability to disguise himself by transforming into guises as innocuous as Gustav and Max. With the assitance of Dr. Cross, he nearly destroys Lucard. But Lucard has help from an unusual source...Max.

Gustav becomes curious when Lucard buys an old worthless movie theatre. While searching the theatre, he suddenly finds himself at the mercy of one of his childhood heros, the silent film era's most famous vampire-film actor, Jonas Carey. Now a real vampire, Carey has been imprisoned in the theatre for the past sixty years under the power of Lucard. Lucard has purchased the theatre to ensure that Carey's freedom doesn't last long, but Gustav helps his old hero to escape death at Lucard's hands. Later, however, Carey destroys himself as Gustav looks on.

Eileen is doing business with Lucard; in fact, she's going to have dinner with him at the castle. Gustav and the kids learn of the dinner, but Gustav himself is vampirized by one of Lucard's assistants, and the kids are left on their own to rescue Eileen. They release Gustav, but find that Lucard has already turned their mother into a vampire. Lucard orders her to bite Max, but her love for her son overpowers his control over her.

Gustav appears on a TV talk show to debunk a zany psychic, Lana Zorro. She and her husband Lane at first seem comical, then ominous, as she proceeds to disturb Gustav by sensing personal information about his past. Meanwhile, Max is sure he's discovered the resting place of Dracula and can therefore destroy him. However, the coffin is only a decoy placed there by Lucard and in fact contains not Lucard, but Lane Zorro, nebbish vampire, who is borrowing it. When Lucard confronts the kids and the Zorros, Lana proves she is a real psychic by sending an automatic-handwriting cry for help to Gustav.

Gustav appears on a TV talk show to debunk a zany psychic, Lana Zorro. She and her husband Lane at first seem comical, then ominous, as she proceeds to disturb Gustav by sensing personal information about his past. Meanwhile, Max is sure he's discovered the resting place of Dracula and can therefore destroy him. However, the coffin is only a decoy placed there by Lucard and in fact contains not Lucard, but Lane Zorro, nebbish vampire, who is borrowing it. When Lucard confronts the kids and the Zorros, Lana proves she is a real psychic by sending an automatic-handwriting cry for help to Gustav.

Lucard invites Mycroft Tickler, a lounge performer with delusions of grandeur, to give a recital at his castle. Gustav tries to warn Tickler, but he's utterly oblivious to anything other than the chance to further his career. However, Lucard actually has no interest whatever in Tickler's ""talents""--he knows that Tickler is none other than Magnus St. John- Smythe's bother. Lucard has realized that he could use St. John-Smythe's anti-vampire gun in his own defense, so he kidnaps Tickler and sends a ransom note to St. John-Smythe in order to lure him to the castle. As an extra incentive for St. John-Smythe to build another copy of the gun, Lucard captures Gustav and locks him in a shrinking room.

Lucard bites a young thief with a rare antigen in his blood which can kill the vampire who ingests it. The famous vampire doctor, Gabor Varney, tells him that there is only one cure--water from the Paquette Spring in the Bettange Valley. Sick and delirious, Lucard doesn't trust anyone, and insists on going to the spring himself. Once there, he discovers that the water has been polluted by one of his own factories. As Lucard lies dying, Gustav and Max arrive to finish him off. Fortunately, Varney stops them and gives Lucard a vial of the water, purified, which returns him to normal. Meanwhile, Sophie is dating a creepy young existentialist poet named Vincent, and Chris is jealous. In fact, Vincent is the thief whom Lucard bit; now a vampire himself, he attacks Chris, who spurns him with a cross but discovers that it's already too late to save Sophie.

Following her romance with Vincent, Sophie herself has been turned into a vampire, and is serving an apprenticeship with Lucard. Mrs. Pfenning, Lucard's vampire accountant, is plotting to overthrow her master and wants Sophie to help. Meanwhile, Gustav finds the key to restoring Sophie to her human self in Vincent's unusual blood type, and Chris is able to introduce the solution into her system with a kiss. Pfenning's plan to kill Lucard fails when Lucard uses sleight-of-hand to switch glasses with her, giving her the wine tainted with holy water that she had intended for him to drink. Pfenning disintegrates, but nearly destroys the finish on Lucard's table!

Having been rescued by Chris, Sophie is about to fall for him, but his old girlfriend Alexa turns up from Philadelphia. Her obnoxious American businessman father, Ted Singleton, is doing business with Lucard and makes the mistake of not taking him seriously enough. They plan a trade of Singleton's new computer chip for a briefcase of money, but Lucard takes both, and almost takes Alexa as well. Utterly ruined, Singleton has no choice but to offer himself to Lucard, who has been wanting to extend his empire into the US.

Gustav's best friend, a fellow vampire hunter named Frederick Rilling, claims that people at his old age home are being killed by a vampire. He asks Gustav to help him destroy the one responsible. Meanwhile, Lucard tries to play Pygmalion to an airheaded Galatea named Amber Santana. Things are not as they seem, however: Amber is in fact a dedicated vampire hunter who hopes to kill Lucard, and Frederick is an ancient vampire who hates what he is but is unable to control himself.

Max inadvertently frees Klaus from the Helsing family crypt where Gustav had imprisoned him, and Gustav and Lucard both must try to escape his trap. The powerful Cross of Silesia and a plastic explosive will destroy Klaus's two fathers at the same instant unless they work together to outwit him.

An old love from Lucard's past, Margo Burton, comes back into his life, only now she is married to a writer whose latest work is intended to expose Lucard as a vampire and bring down his empire.

Max meets Lawrence Lei, a rather Norman Bates-ish neurotic bookseller who has a peculiar interest in vampires. Gustav doesn't trust him, and Lucard finds him much too bizarre for his taste when he shows up at the castle asking to be made a vampire. Lawrence mentions that his friend Alfred won't make him a vampire either, and Lucard decides to hunt down this Alfred, whom he suspects is responsible for the recent upsurge in the area's population of inferior zombies. When Gustav's hot and steamy schnitzel arrives neither hot nor steamy, delivered by a glassy-eyed delivery boy who is destroyed by the Cross of the Magyars, Gustav tracks his origin back to Alfred as well. However, it turns out that Lawrence's friend Alfred is nothing more than an inflatable vampire doll and that Lawrence is the real vampire. Intrigued by Lawrence/Alfred's split personality, Lucard seals the bookseller in a coffin for safe keeping.

Gustav and the kids go to dinner at Lucard's castle...?? Full of flashbacks, including a great one that must have been cut from Bad Blood. And, a hilarious Klaus-climax.

The finale cliff-hanger. Gustav discovers a way to reclaim Klaus from the world between the living and the dead that vampires inhabit. His theory is that vampires exist outside of time--and he has found a break in time...at Lucard's castle.