MY BABYSITTER’S A VAMPIRE season 1: 12: THREE GEEKS AND A DEMON

 

MY BABYSITTER’S A VAMPIRE season 1: ep 12: THREE GEEKS AND A DEMON

Is it a far cry from SO WEIRD to THREE GEEKS AND A DEMON? This series is wonderfully inventive mix of juvenile readership content, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (except that here, the main monster slayer IS the vampire girl Sarah and sometime into the show, there’s monster hunter that’s…a villain), CHARMED (Ethan has the power to see the future to help others in trouble), and SO WEIRD itself, not to mention others. This episode is an EXORCIST lite episode but it is modern kid classic.

 

First, the humor, especially in the first 15 minutes is fast and furious, derived out of the premise and the interactions. Ethan’s mom and dad are chaperoning the Senior Prom…only it’s a Senior Prom…for Benny’s grandma and people her age! Ethan’s mom dressed like she’s from the 1980s (“Grandma can lend you something from her closet instead,” Benny tells her, Atticus Mitchell is Benny and just from this episode alone it’s not difficult to see why he won the Gemini Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series). Dad dresses like Don Johnson from MIAMI VICE.

 

Jane, Ethan’s sister, uses the familiar humor of Ethan having a babysitter and showing that off to all, embarrassing him because he’s too old to have a babysitter. Of course, vampire Sarah is there for Jane. And to watch, along with the others a movie that parents would not want any of them to watch Jacuzzi Time Machine. And the humor doesn’t stop there. Sarah wants to vie for a spot to sit next to Ethan on the couch because Benny wants to sit there but he suspects they want to canoodle and Ethan admits to not wanting that. What?

 

If that’s not bad enough, geek vampire Rory flies badly and knocks out the cable dish (remember those!?) and so the gang have to go through a number of games to play before settling on a Ouija board, counting herself out, Sarah and Jane go to play “dress up” upstairs. As they look at the games, Benny discounts a math game (“Too much math,”) and a spelling game (“too much spelling.”).

 

The boys, thanks to Benny, wear dish towels on their heads as if they are a 1970s starlet just come out of the shower. The first spirit they get is “hot but brutally honest” as he tells the boys they are all geeks. There are references to Star Trek (The Borg more than once), Star Wars (“Ask her if she knows what the Force is,”), Ghostbusters, and of course, POLTERGIEST as when Rory decides, after the other two abandon the game and the brutally honest ghost, to break all the rules by mistake and play alone and ask who’s out there…a demon possesses Sarah.

 

The second half is not as funny but funny all the same. When confronting the demon that in Sarah and the room she’s in and has taken over, haunted and trapped Jane in the closet (!), they scream like girls, more than once and the door slams on them once. They use a leaf blower to suck the demon out of Sarah (“Keep sucking!”). Like the Disney Channel show SO WEIRD, MY BABYSITTER’S A VAMPIRE was not afraid to “GO THERE” but the shows are wildly different. While SO was not afraid to get dark and genuinely scary and real life, MY tends to say and do things that might be just at the line of children’s or Kid TV and it’s all the better for it. It’s never mundane, always quick for a joke, and at the same time, builds the arcs (this episode ends with the boys returning one of the cursed objects they trapped evil things in before back to the pit they buried in in another episode but the very end shows a hand coming up out of that very same dirt), and also mixes the relationships between the characters into a grand scheme of positivity and angst all at once. For example, Benny looks at the radically changed “demon” Sarah and asks, “It is wrong that I still think she’s hot?” The show was on Disney but it was a Canadian series, which also originally produced the first and some of the best seasons of YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON TELEVISION, which also pushed the boundaries.

 

All in all this series deserved more seasons and though it was only 26 episodes, I thought there were more. This episode one of the best and funniest.