By 
At the end of the 1948 monster mash classic Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the hapless heroes played by Lou Costello and Bud Abbott take a moment to breathe a sigh of relief. Not only have they survived an encounter with the titular monster, portrayed by Glenn Strange (who had inherited the role from Boris Karloff years earlier), but also Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man, and a mad scientist played by Lenore Aubert.
No sooner does Abbott’s character assure Costello’s that all the monsters have been defeated than they hear the disembodied voice of Vincent Price. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the Invisible Man,” he says, setting up a later film, 1951’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man.
A final teaser for an upcoming film is just one of many elements of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein that still feels modern today. And that’s why it makes perfect sense for a contemporary comedy duo to take up the mantle. Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell have announced that they’re putting their own spin on horror comedy with Kenan & Kel Meet Frankenstein.
Although we currently know little about the project, it makes perfect sense as Kenan & Kel are perhaps the most beloved comedy duo of the past thirty years. The two appeared together as teens on the ’90s Nickelodeon sketch show All That, spinning off to the sitcom Kenan & Kel and the 1997 film Good Burger. Certainly, Kenan has been the more high-profile of the two in recent years, as he’s been a Saturday Night Live cast member since 2003, but he recently reunited with Kel for 2023’s Good Burger 2.
Moreover, the Abbott and Costello monster movies are a perfect model to revive. Starting with Meet Frankenstein in 1948 and continuing through Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), Meet the Invisible Man (1951), and Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), the films followed a foolproof formula, teaming the comedians with Universal Monsters.
The first act would introduce the duo and establish the running bits—for example, in Meet Frankenstein, Costello has a beautiful girlfriend which befuddles the straight man Abbott—and introduce the characters’ jobs. Those jobs bring the characters into the orbit of the monsters, as when the delivery drivers played by Abbott and Costello receive crates containing Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monsters, and entangle them all together. From there, however, the movie plays as both a straightforward horror movie and a straightforward comedy.
As that description suggests, Meet Frankenstein and its successors understand a point too often lost by modern horror comedies. Where too many horror comedies use the comedy to undercut the horror or go so hard into the horror that the jokes get lost, the Meet movies work keep the two genres more or less separate, without forcing one to be subordinate to the other. When Dracula hypnotizes Costello’s character in Meet Frankenstein, he’s just as frozen as anyone who meets Lugosi’s gaze. But when Abbott wakes him up, the two immediately go into one of their well-tuned argument routines.
Of course, it helps that Abbott and Costello come to their films with an established comedy persona. Which is also true of Kenan & Kel. If Kenan & Kel Meet Frankenstein can let Kel play a maniac and Kenan play his befuddled friend alongside a standard movie about a reanimated corpse, then they can match the magic of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, bringing the classic into modern times.
The post Kenan & Kel Meet Frankenstein Revives the Abbott & Costello Tradition appeared first on Den of Geek.
