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I've just referenced the "Fregosi Emerald" in a bounty on this question. Unfortunately I mipselled it as "Fergosi" and bounty comments can not be edited.

In The Munsters S02E21, Grandpa visits the last living Fregosi descendant who works for Amalgamated Motors in Detroit, putting evil curses on cars manufactured by the competing auto manufacturers also in Detroit (thought the view of the hills from Mr. Fregosi's window looks more like LA than Dearborn).

I was surprised to hear Grandpa refer to himself as "Dracula" more than once, including when he called back to Transylvania for directory assistance.

While of course the show is full of references to Grandpa being a vampire, I'd never heard of him as being The Count Dracula before. Is this a one-time reference, or was this a more standard part of in-universe Munster history?

The episode is partially viewable at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x53mae6 where Grandpa makes his call to Transylvania after 15:10 and says "My name is Count Dracula", to which the operator replies "You once bit my grandmother!" Also, after 18:30 Mr. Fregosi says "Dracula is an unusual name." to which Grandpa replies "It's Transylvanian!"

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    Maybe I should point out that in the original novel the title of "Count Dracula" was hereditary and Van Helsing happened to mention that the enemy vampire Count Dracula had many descendants. So if someone worries about kindly Grandpa Munster being the sinister Dracula in the novel, one could always suppose that Grandpa was a descendant of the novel's Dracula and became a vampire generations after his ancestor but was not as evil. Of course Grandpa's stated age in some episodes might make him as old as or older than the medieval Turk-fighting Dracula in the novel.
    – M. A. Golding
    Mar 26, 2018 at 19:53

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From the Wikipedia article:

Grandpa's identity as Count Dracula is also alluded to in both the original series and The Munsters Today. In the 1965 episode "The Musician", Mr. Gateman refers to him as "Count Dracula" when he comes to dinner. In "The Fregosi Emerald", Grandpa refers to himself as Count Dracula to an operator in Transylvania.

(The second example is of course the one you mention in the question.)

The article goes on to mention a number of instances in The Munsters Today.

I can't find a quote directly from the original writers, but I managed to find an independent source, Dracula in Visual Media, which also explicitly identifies Grandpa as the Dracula.

To sum up, we can't be sure that Grandpa was intended to be Vladimir Dracula when the show was originally pitched (though my guess is that he was as it would have been a sensible choice given the context of a monster show parody) but it wasn't just a one-time reference. It seems safe to consider it as canon; the original series may not have made a big deal of it, but the writers of The Munsters Today certainly picked it up and ran with it.

PS:

M. A. Golding suggests above that some people might be worried about kindly Grandpa Munster actually being the sinister Dracula from the Bram Stoker novel. But if you think about it, Herman isn't exactly much like the traditional Frankenstein's Monster, either. In-universe, I think we can take it for granted that both Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley were either ignorant of the truth or extremely prejudiced against poor innocent monsters. :-)

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  • Great answer, and impassioned call for the defense of monsters. Thank you!
    – uhoh
    Apr 3, 2018 at 1:10
  • @user14111 however, in this case it seems that I did indeed forget! Accepting now.
    – uhoh
    May 7, 2018 at 9:16

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