October 9, 2016/Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

===Transcript===
Intro
Hi, welcome to TCM, I’m Ben Mankiewicz. Thanks for joining us. We are moving steadily along through the Universal Frankenstein series tonight, and up next, we have the first picture to feature two of Universal’s monster franchises, a monster mash-up, if you will. From 1943, it’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. It’s a double sequel, really, to The Ghost of Frankenstein from 1942 and to The Wolf Man from 1941. And since each of those movies ends with the death of its respective monster, our movie had to put extra work into figuring out how to bring them back, so don’t really expect the plot to make a great deal of sense. The movie is an excuse to get two signature big-screen creatures on screen together to wreak havoc. On that level, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man works well. The casting, though, was an even trickier problem to solve. Lon Chaney Jr. had just played Frankenstein’s monster in the previous film in the series the year before, but he had also played the original Wolf Man two years before. The initial plan was to have Chaney Jr. reprise both roles for one film, but when that fell through, producers settled on keeping Chaney as the Wolf Man and giving Frankenstein’s monster to Bela Lugosi. Amusingly enough, Lugosi had been offered the original role of the monster for the 1931 version of Frankenstein, but he turned it down, leaving Boris Karloff to make screen history as the creature. Despite the monster mix-and-match, perhaps because of it, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man made a solid profit for Universal and more crossovers soon started making their way down the production pipeline. From 1943, also featuring Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles and Lionel Atwill, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
Outro
Curt Siodmak, brother of the great noir director, Robert Siodmak, was the unlucky screenwriter charged with crafting a story for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man that made, you know, some degree of sense. To do that, he had to completely alter aspects of the Wolf Man legend introduced in the original Wolf Man film, a task especially painful to Siodmak, because he had also written that screenplay. Siodmak, for his part, thought the idea of a monster crossover was completely unnecessary. The way he put it was this, “Whipped cream is good and herring is good. So they think they should be better together.” Great point, except for the part about herring being good. Audiences clearly thought Frankenstein and the Wolf Man worked well together and an even bigger crossover was in the works for release the following year. You, though, will not have to wait that long, we have it, coming up next.
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