- Karloff would return to the wearing of the makeup and to the role of the monster one last time in a 1962 episode of the television show Route 66.
- The popular 1960s television sitcom, The Munsters, depicts the family's father Herman as Frankenstein's monster, who married Count Dracula's daughter. The makeup for Herman is based on the makeup of Boris Karloff.
- Frankenstein appears in Mad Monster Party? (1967), a Rankin/Bass Productions Halloween special, where Dr. Boris von Frankenstein (voiced by Karloff) invites various classic monsters to a reunion at his castle with intentions to announce his retirement and to name his successor.
- Mel Brooks's comedy Young Frankenstein (1974) parodied elements of the first three Universal Frankenstein films, while also using the original props built for the 1935 film, provided by their designer Kenneth Strickfaden. Brooks also recreated the movie into a 2007 Broadway musical of the same name.
- A live-action parody short film, Frankenweenie (1984), depicting Victor Frankenstein as a modern American boy and his deceased pet dog as the monster, was made by Tim Burton in 1984. Burton remade it as a full-length animated film in 2012.
Frankenstein's assistant
Although Frankenstein's hunchbacked assistant is often referred to as "Igor" in descriptions of the films, he is not so called in the earliest films. In both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein has an assistant, who is played both times by Dwight Frye, who is disabled. In the original 1931 film the character is named "Fritz"; he is hunchbacked and walks with the aid of a small cane. Fritz did not originate from the Frankenstein novel, and instead originated from the earliest recorded play adaptation, Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, where he was played by Robert Keeley.[71][72]
Boris Karloff as the monster, Basil Rathbone as Dr. Frankenstein's son, and Bela Lugosi as Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939).In Bride of Frankenstein, Frye plays "Karl", a murderer who stands upright but has a lumbering metal brace on both legs that can be heard clicking loudly with every step. Both characters would be killed by Karloff's monster in their respective films. Frye also appears in later films in the series, such as in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).
The genesis of the scene in which Frankenstein's assistant Fritz drops a jar labeled "normal brain" and replaces it with a brain in a jar labeled "abnormal brain" is believed to be based on the fate of Walt Whitman's brain at the American Anthropometric Society. Whitman had donated his brain after his death to the society for analysis to correlate intelligence with brain size.[73] A 1907 paper by Edward Anthony Spitzka on the society's brain collection caused a minor sensation when it revealed that Whitman's brain had been accidentally destroyed when a "careless assistant" dropped the jar it was stored in.[74] This story element was not present in the original 1818 Mary Shelley novel.[73]
It was not until Son of Frankenstein (1939) that a character called "Ygor" first appears, here played by Bela Lugosi and revived by Lugosi in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) after his apparent murder in the earlier film. This character – a deranged blacksmith whose neck was broken and twisted due to a botched hanging – befriends the monster and later helps Dr. Wolf Frankenstein, leading to the "hunchbacked assistant" called "Igor" commonly associated with Frankenstein in popular culture. Regarding Son of Frankenstein, the film's director Rowland V. Lee said his crew let Lugosi "work on the characterization; the interpretation he gave us was imaginative and totally unexpected ... when we finished shooting, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that he stole the show. Karloff's monster was weak by comparison".[75]
