Vlad Tidings

(Props to Don)

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Stop Hammer Time

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The Man Who Could Cheat Death (for Awhile, Anyway)

Christopher Lee, best remembered as the Russian commandant in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow, has died at the age of 93. On screen, he took on James Bond (as Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun), Professor Van Helsing (in the Brides of Dracula), Yoda (as Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus in the prequel trilogy best left forgotten), Dennis Nayland Smith (as Fu Manchu in 5 films, including the MST3K’ed The Castle of Fu Manchu) and Gandalf (as Saruman in about 157 hours of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien sesquicentennialogy), not to mention countless riled up villagers as Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creature in various Hammer Films creations. All of which paled in comparison to his real life badassery as a member of Britain's Special Operations Executive, a crack commando unit tasked by Winston Churchill himself to "set Europe ablaze," whose actions remain classified to this day. Holding the Guinness World Record for Tallest Leading Actor at 6 foot-5, Lee appeared in more than 260 films, in which he used some of the seven languages in which he was fluent, and scored a knighthood. He parodied his persona as a mad scientist in Gremlins 2: The Next Batch, and paid homage to Hugh Hefner in his role as the free loving, public nudity and human sacrifice endorsing hedonistic pagan leader Lord Summerisle, he played an expert scuba diver who drowned within minutes of entering the water in Airport ’77 and played a Nazi U-boat commander in 1941. At the age of 87, he then recorded a metal album, in which he played his great-great-ancestor Charlemagne.