It all begins when Ethan (Matthew Knight) and his best friend, Benny (Atticus Dean Mitchell) are caught by Ethan's parents horsing around when they are supposed to be babysitting Ethan's little sister, Jane (Ella Jonas Farlinger). The parents decide Jane needs an actual babysitter, so they hire a hottie from the boys' class. Through a crazy series of events, Sarah (Vanessa Morgan) ends up being Jane's sitter, but Ethan and Benny soon discover she's a fledgling vampire. Before long, Ethan realizes he can see visions of a person's future by touching them and Benny discovers he's got a magical past and has the capability to cast a mean spell. Look out Harry Potter!
When the powers of the trio are combined, you can bet they will find all sorts of trouble to get into, whether it's keeping a 200 year old vampire from raising his undead army or preventing an angry tree from taking out its revenge on the ear buds of every kid in school. My favorite episode involves one of Jane's dolls coming to life. When a life-sized Debbie Dazzle wants to have a disco party, no one had better get in the way!
Ethan and Benny are nerds, so the dialogue is filled with pop culture references about video games and geek culture. In a roundabout way, it kind of reminded me a little bit of Chuck in that regard, just for tweens. While I'm definitely not the target audience for My Babysitter's A Vampire, I enjoyed watching the episodes, despite some overacting on the part of the some of the actors. The main characters, Ethan and Benny, are really funny and I always liked watching them, but some of the other characters were a bit grating. Specifically, Erica (Kate Todd), Sarah's best friend who was a former nerd and is now a hot vampire, was a little bit exaggerated in her behavior, and Ethan and Benny's nerdly buddy Rory (Cameron Kennedy), super dork turned, well, super dork vampire, can get a little annoying. I must admit that the little blonde goofball did grow on me throughout the season, though.
Special features are slim, but include a handful of featurettes with cast interviews and behind the scenes peeks, plus the full length movie that started it all (watch this first to get up to speed). The featurettes are nothing you'd watch more than once, but kids will enjoy seeing their favorite TV stars in their element.
While My Babysitter's A Vampire is the first Disney Channel series to earn a rating higher than a G, the series is fairly mild. There is plenty of talk about vampires, demons, blood sucking and eating people, and the like, so if you don't want your young children exposed to that, you'd do best to avoid the show, altogether. I will also admit that, while not scary, a couple of the episodes were somewhat disturbing, so little kids might be frightened by them. The special effects are terribly cheesy, but the show's concept is fun and the actors are a pretty likeable group. Plus, I have to give huge props to the show for making so much fun of the Twilight craze with their own version called Dusk. My Babysitter's A Vampire doesn't take itself too seriously and you shouldn't either, but it's a fun series for (almost) all ages.
