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[R/LOSTMEDIA – 22ND DEC 2023- 21:45 – User: Cas992]
Does anyone remember “Blood Brothers”?
I (32M) just came home to stay with my parents for Christmas. I’ll spare you the details but it’s cold and wet and after a sadly very typical fight with my father where he again imploded about ‘tradition’ and ‘family values’ I elected to stay home while my parents and SIL/brother dragged my poor, half sick, nieces to a Christmas tree farm in the middle of nowhere in absolutely ass weather. I made a New Years resolution last year that I wasn’t going to set myself on fire to keep the family warm anymore. That I was going to be my own person. So if they want to go freeze in the sleet with a couple of stuffed nosed toddlers that’s their prerogative but I have zero obligation to do so unless I have a sincere desire to. There’s no point spending time with family if you don’t enjoy the time, I’m learning.
My parents live pretty far inland, high elevation, hence the snow. It’s a small town, not much to do and very few people left inside it I would consider ‘friends’ from high school. Certainly none I actively stay in touch with. The house is cluttered but well loved and clean. My mom loves those spoons you get in tourist gift shops and has at least three from every country he’s ever been too plus a dozen more from each state and often each town he’s visited on a lifetime of camper van road trips. It was dark with the cloud cover, the sleet falling heavy against my bedroom window, the wind cold enough to cut and the sun so far gone midday looked like early evening.
I had this whole little kingdom to myself, so I thought, what to do? Christmas presents are wrapped under the tree already. Though some are already worried with holes either by the toddlers or my mother’s small yappy terriers, its hard to tell. I considered doing a puzzle but the only puzzles left that my mom hasn’t donated are photographs of landscapes and I didn’t much fancy doing 300 pieces of blue sky unbroken by so much as a gradient. I thought, for a moment, am I really such a sad person that I’m going to check my work emails while on vacation? That seemed way too bleak to consider so I curled up in my childhood bedroom.
My room is a time capsule of my teens. Emo band posters, badly drawn fanart with anime eyes, a beaded curtain of blue plastic suns and crescent moons. I’m pretty sure there’s a binder of printed off fanfiction in my closet somewhere, under a pile of worn through converse and shitty cut up magazines I used for my artistic collages. The bed’s a king single, comfortable, and on my dresser is an old TV. It’s a dinosaur by today’s plasma standards but it works just fine and it’s still hooked up to the cable. Something I begged for kicking and screaming. It was real complicated back in the day to have multiple TVs playing different things in the house. My dad really dragged his feet on setting that up, let me tell you.
I stuffed down under my blankets and thought; how is cable doing these days? I only have streaming services and most of the time I just watch YouTube on my TV. I don’t even have the free to air antenna working or however you finagle that. I know cable still exists but it seems so retro now a days. In some ways I’m starting to retroactively understand the appeal.
I flicked through my dad’s fifty sports channels. All of them ‘balls in various colours and types of distress’ before finding the music channels and the cartoon channels I used to love as a kid. They were all uncomfortably foreign to me now. I found the Scifi channel playing reruns of ancient shows I used to adore—Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed—and then the Whateveritscalled channel that seems to only play Gilmore Girls and Gossip Girl on loop. Between these two channels I found a third channel. 319, I think? And I was delighted to discover it was playing an episode of Blood Brothers. At least I think it was Blood Brothers and I think Blood Brothers exists? But it wasn’t how I remember it.
I used to watch Blood Brothers a lot in the late 90s when I was small. It could get gory for a show of that period so I’m honestly surprised my parents let me watch it. I loved the characters, the slowly congealing layers of lore, the kitschy costume design, the soundtrack, the lovingly manicured studio sets, the way the lighting made everything looked hazed so the outside scenes were lit exactly the same as the indoor scenes and the world of the show seemed locked in its own fairytale dimension.
Blood Brothers, as far as I remember it, was a show about two Brothers: Dean and Sam Winchester. The premise was simple. The Brothers were part of an ancient bloodline descended from some half mythic warrior princess who vowed all her descendants would fight to protect the people of the world from monsters. This came with superpowers for all her descendants but also a big fat bullseye on their backs which meant monsters could sense them and were drawn to them.
The show started with Dean and Sam moving to yet another new town, attending yet another new high school, and trying desperately to make this placement work for their widower father. I don’t remember his name- the dad- but he had a framed photo of their mother, the previous monster hunter queen, and he would talk frequently about what he would’ve wanted them to do. He had some experience as, like, ex-military or something and he had trained them to fight while their Uncle, another re-occurring character, was their supernatural lore guy. They had a small cast of friends at their high school but the crux of the show was Dean and Sam.
Dean was the rambunctious older brother. His messy hair always in disarray, his smile blinding, his eyes twinkling with mischief. He was a machine which produced sassy come backs. He had a dishevelled and frenetic energy which coalesced into something especially special when he would slay a monster with an axe, toss his hair, smile wickedly and look, to my six year old self, like the biggest bad ass in the universe. Dean never took anything seriously, not even when he ought to, but the writers built a lot of depth into that. He was always a protective big brother and they made it clear that his trauma of never being able to scrape together a normal life for himself or his family made him keen to appear aloof when really Dean sometimes cared more than anyone else on the cast.
Sam was the serious younger brother. Like Dean he wanted to be normal but his desire for this expressed itself in a very methodical approach to monster hunting and high school. He had dark, curly, hair and dressed very proper with his sharp, boxy, glasses. A real 90s nerd. Stick in the mud. Killjoy. Sam threatened to be an unlikeable character but his seriousness coupled with how naïve and sincere he was made him charming. He wanted to make friends, impress people. Just like he could always find the answer to how to kill a monster, or come up with a great trap in a pinch, he would use that same energy every episode to come up with elaborate schemes to make the popular boys like him. They’d blow up in his face but you really appreciated how badly he wanted to belong.
I watched Blood Brothers for years. I have no idea how many seasons there were. The actors were young when the show started, literal child actors, teething awkwardly through later seasons of the show. I watched them through all of high school and, in the last season I remember watching before I stopped, Dean had graduated and Sam was starting his senior year. Dean was trying to find and hold down a real adult job while fighting off his father, and Sam’s insistence he ought to go to college (really he did want to go but he didn’t want to move away from his brother). Sam was working through a major romance with a girl he was considering telling his secret. He had a plan to scheme them into prom king and queen as one final gotcha at the popular boy rival he’d spent the last however many seasons being bullied by.
I figured the show had probably fizzled out at some point so imagine my surprise when sitting down in my old bed I found an episode of it airing. A new one! Or at least one I’d never seen before. I thought maybe it was a different show at first. The sets were recognizable as the town where Blood Brothers was always set—Collins Diner, The Saint Cecilia botanical garden, Jerry’s Drive Thru which backed onto the morgue and funeral home they so often broke into, the Trinket Shop which actually sold monster hunting supplies behind a hidden door that looked like a display of essential oils—but the show was totally different from how I remembered it.
The show started with a child actor (maybe fourteen?) for a new character named Ben. Ben was going to the same high school Dean and Sam used to and for the first ten minutes of the episode he mulled over how he was going to tell his dad he failed a chemistry test. I was almost convinced it was a different show, just some bizarre recycling of sets, when Sam came to pick Ben up from school. It was Sam, Ben called him “Uncle Sam”, and I recognized the actor immediately. He was an adult man now, clearly, older than I remembered him. He was disheveled in a tired, wrung out, kind of way. His car was a beat-up mess filled with old take out fry cartons and gum packets. His glasses were the same though and he pushed them up his nose as he asked— “What’s wrong kiddo?”
Ben showed him the failed test and Sam whistled. “Dean ain’t going to like that.” He said. He scrunched it up then and threw it out the window of the moving car. Ben shrieked and Sam said— “it’s better if you just don’t tell him, right?” Obviously setting up a plot about Ben trying and failing to keep a secret he knows he shouldn’t keep.
Sam, now apparently some deadbeat, dropped Ben off at that same Trinket Store where we met Dean behind the counter. Dean might as well have been an alien to me. He was the same actor, now an adult, but every part of him was scrubbed and polished. He wore a button up shirt, had a clean shaven face. All wrong. He welcomed Ben to the store, which he clearly now ran, and gave him some chores while asking about his day at school. Ben dithered nervously. Dean said— “is something wrong?” spiking the tension and Ben chose to lie and say, “no, nothing.”
The episode played out like you’d expect. It was clearly geared towards adults because the show intercut between Ben and Dean. Showing Ben’s little boy struggles and Dean’s single dad struggles. When Ben eventually came clean and confessed Uncle Sam had encouraged him to lie Dean rubbed his face with his hands and said— “Listen, I’ll be talking to Sam but, kiddo, you should never lie. Not to me.”
The single weirdest part of the show was the fact that every single supernatural element of the series seemed to have been scrubbed out of the lore. The picture of Dean and Sam’s monster hunting mother hung in Dean’s house, sword included, but no one so much as mentioned a ghost or ghoulie for the entire twenty-six-minute run time. That seems crazy to me. Does this happen? Do shows change genre while keeping the whole cast and crew? How many seasons of Blood Brothers are there? When did the show change? Why? I’m so baffled. If anyone has an answer, please share it with me. It was like talking to an old friend and realizing they’ve joined a cult.