Okay, let me start off by admitting that I am indeed very much a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan.  I mean, really, it almost makes me disappointed to live here in Richmond, where the closest thing we have to vampires are those creepy goth kids.  To my knowledge, there’s not even a hellmouth under the city, and I’ve just about given up hope that our mayor is ever going to turn into a giant demon snake and try to eat my old high school (I mean c’mon, he hangs out with Bill Cosby, and that’s about as non-I-want-to-be-a-giant-high-school-devouring-demon-snake as you can get).  So yeah, Richmond: Zero Living Dead Activity; for which I should probably be thankful, but it does leave me with all these extra crossbows that I only get to use against hay bales at the archery range (granted, they’re evil hay bales, but even so, they just kind of sit there and don’t turn into dust or anything when you bust a bolt in its shiesty dome).

            The thing is though, getting back to Buffy Summers, did you ever wonder about some of the rest of her family?  By which of course I mean, he never-mentioned-on-the-show uncle, Mark Summers, host of the ever-popular show Double Dare and really the modern father of vampire fighting at Nickelodeon.  What’s that, you don’t believe me?  Well then, I ask only that you think back to The World of David the Gnome.  Remember how bad that show sucked?  Everyone said that it was because it was made in Norway, but c’mon, that’s where Vikings are from, not gnomes.  The real reason why it was so bad was because everyone on that show was a vampire.  Seriously, David, his wife, Buckwheat Bertha, the fox, the kindly old woodcutter, every one of them was a vampire.  By night they’d stalk around the studio, eating people and generally wreaking havoc.  Clearly, the world of children’s television programming needed a new kind of hero not answerable to the FCC, and that’s when fate, which is not without a sense of humor, tapped Mark Summers to be that hero.

            You see, it was about halfway through the first season of Double Dare, and while the show’s unexpected success had brought him unimaginable fame, wealth, and the attention of any number of beautiful women, Mark Summers still felt as if something important was missing.  ‘Twas on that fateful night that he was wandering through one of the many cemeteries of MarkSummersville that he was accosted by a ravening band of vampires.  Thinking quickly and remembering the large Styrofoam nose full of green slime that he had brought home from work with him, Mark Summers beat the fiends into submission before finishing them off with some quick work from his wooden leg (oh yes, Mark Summers has a wooden leg, he lost his real one in a transporter accident in the Mutara Nebula).  He returned home that night, sobered, yet filled with a new purpose: to kill a bunch of vampires.

            And so it went, by day running the biggest game show on TV since that one where you threw a pie at Hitler and he fell into a tank of electric eels that they took of the air after the eel lobby complained (The Eel Lobby, by the way, would be a most excellent name for a band).  But by night, Mark Summers took the ultimate physical challenge, as he crept through the shadows, ceaselessly ridding the world of the undead.  He might have continued indefinitely in this, had not the fateful day came when, to his unmitigated horror, one of the families on Double Dare turned out to all be vampires.

            Using their unholy strength, speed, and knowledge of elementary school environmental science, this band of bloodthirsty killers quickly sent the Donaldson family home with nothing but their shame, a home edition of the game, and a year’s supply of British Knights tennis shoes, and though Mark Summers had only minutes to concoct a plan to destroy them, when it came time to run the obstacle course, he had seized upon a plan as bold as it was silly.  Over the last commercial break he quickly changed around the challenges awaiting the vampiric team, so that when it came time to see what awaited them, they were shocked to see that a cunningly laid trap awaited them.

            Indeed, only a master vampire slayer could have conceived of such a plan.  They would have to climb up a ladder made of crosses, slide down a slide past His Holiness John Paul II, into a swimming pool full of ping pong balls and holy water, run through a tunnel of pointy wooden stakes, jump through a big flamey hoop of fiery fire, and finally grab the flag from a hook in front of a moderately well lit window.  I know what you’re thinking, ‘why didn’t they just quit then?’, but you forget, among all the legions of the damned, vampires are the least able to turn down a chance to win everlasting glory on daytime television, so on they went, all meeting their undeaths along the way, and bring Mark Summers his greatest victory yet against the forces of darkness.  Unfortunately, the producers were less than impressed, and told him that his days as a children’s game show host were over unless he gave up his never-ending battle against vampires.

            Mark Summers, of course, chose to accept the ignominy of getting fired from the show that he himself had created, in order to pursue his epic war against evil.  Going underground, he kept to the shadows, avoiding publicity while carrying out his mission.  It was by his hand that the Count from Sesame Street was punched off of a flaming blimp (really, the guy they have on now is just a zombie Fatty Arbuckle in a cape with some purple makeup on), and it was he who slew Count Choculas 3 through 17 (the first two were killed by a jealous Frankenberry, and Number 18 has to travel under heavy guard, sleeping in a different coffin every night).

            So there you have it, the tale of one of our generation’s greatest of heroes, Mark Summers.  Even now he dwells among us, now beneath the very streets in the labyrinthine sewer systems of our cities, now in a big fiberglass tree full of those elves who bake cookies shaped like more elves (he once saved them all from Count Shockula, that vampire over at Sears who sells pneumatic struts, and they’ve been grateful ever since), always ready to hurl a metaphorical bucket of tapioca pudding at the forces of evil, in order to win the BMX dirtbike of justice and peace.