Now Watching: Young Dracula

I'll start this post by saying that Young Dracula, despite being a kids tv show about vampires, is nothing like Twilight. You can breathe easy now. There's no sparkling or stalker-like love stories, and almost all of the vampires like drinking blood.

Instead, Young Dracula is a wonderfully campy show about a young boy, Vlad, who moves to a small town in England after his family is run out of Transylvania by torch-wielding villagers.

Vlad (right) lives with his father, the Count Dracula (centre), his older sister Ingrid (left), their servant Renfield (far right) and their talking stuffed wolf Zoltan in an abandoned castle.

Vlad takes the move as a chance to be a normal kid, despite the fact that his father is grooming him for the vampire throne. He befriends a local 'breather' (humans, if you hadn't guessed), Robin, a normal boy who wishes he were a vampire, who wears a cape to school. Meanwhile, Ingrid spends her time toying with the breathers, using her vampire powers to get what she wants. She's actually rather evil at times, something which the Count ignores, as she reminds him of her mother, who ran off with a werewolf. She makes a few appearances throughout the series, returning only to mess things up and leave once she's finished.

Just to stop things being too easy for the Draculas, the school's woodwork teacher Eric van Helsing is also a vampire slayer. Well... he tries to be. He's not very good at it and nearly gets himself killed several times, but he keeps on trying. Everyone else thinks he's crazy but he's right most of the time (quite like Mr. Crocker from The Fairly Odd Parents), just rather inept (also like Mr. Crocker.)

I've embedded a video of the first part of the first episode for your enjoyment, and parts 2 and 3 can be found here and here.

They've only played the first season in Australia so far (boo), but season two looks quite promising.
And I'll stop talking about kiddie shows soon, I promise. Well, I sort of promise. There's actually quite a lot of weird and wonderful children's shows out there.