It's a novelty sitcom, but as novelty sitcoms go, "The Addams Family" did a pretty good job...
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"They're creepy and they're kooky,
mysterious and spooky,
they're altogether ooky,
The Addams Family.
"The Addams Family" debuted a week before "The Munsters" in the fall of 1964, and both shows finished in the Nielsen Top-25 at the end of their first year. Just as quickly, the fad and fascination with monster families ended. "The Addams Family's" final broadcast came only a day before Fred Gwynne donned his Frankenstein make-up for the last time in the fall of 1966, when both shows were abruptly cancelled.
In Hollywood, it's been said that there are only two kinds of plots: something comes into the hero's world, or the hero leaves to find new adventures. The Munsters-especially Herman-got out a lot and mingled with people more. He was a blue-collar type of monster who carried a lunch box and kept having unintentional disasters befall him because of his great strength and the people he came in contact with. The Addams Family were stay-at-homes who waited, like trap-door spiders, for unsuspecting visitors to be shocked by their idea of "normal." They were more white collar and even came with a pedigree: they were inspired by the macabre characters drawn by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. If you read The New Yorker, you were more inclined to pledge allegiance to this amusing gang than the goofier Munsters.
Gomez Addams (John Astin) was a rich lawyer who did most of his work by phone at home and had big eyes rimmed with black that made him look slightly insane. His wife, Morticia (Carolyn Jones), dressed in floor-length tight black gowns with strips of cloth that hung from her forearms like Spanish moss and cloth tendrils that spread from the bottom of her dress like roots or octopus limbs. Morticia loved gardening, though being an Addams, her aesthetic was such that she loved deadly plants and thought roses looked their best with the flowers clipped off. Everything dank and dark and misty and shrouded was a joy to behold for the Addams, whose house was as bizarre as any museum of oddities. Amid the Victorian clutter in this old mansion rimmed by a spiked wrought iron fence were all sorts of oversized knick-knacks, like a suit of armor, a stuffed billfish with a leg sticking out of its mouth, a great stuffed Kodiak bear, a cage full of live crows, a live buzzard on a perch, a harpsichord (played by their butler), and a gigantic stuffed two-headed turtle.
And the basement? Forget the rec room. This was a wreck room, with all sorts of torture devices and weaponry. What a place to grow up in! No wonder Wednesday (Lisa Loring), their always sullen little girl, was prone to moroseness and the older boy, Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax), a chubby and equally dour little boy, was into blowing things up-especially model trains, with dad. Oh, and this kid loved building miniature fuctional Guillotines, too. Grandmama Addams (Blossom Rock), meanwhile, looked like one of Shakespeare's witches and had a propensity for cooking up kettles of strange composition, while Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan) wore all black with a tight fur collar. That, combined with his bald head, made him look like Darth Vader after the mask came off. Uncle Fester could was the kind of person who could light up a room-literally.
Occasionally Cousin Itt (Felix Silla) came to visit, though Itt had no features, only long hair that covered both front and back. And every time the family needed something-like mail-a disembodied hand named Thing (Ted Cassidy) came out of various boxes and tree holes to hand it to them. But without a doubt, the family member that brought "The Addams Family" to the same monster-level as the competition was a scary-looking butler named Lurch (Cassidy again). Lurch moved at a snail's pace, talked sparingly in a deep, deep growl, and said, whenever the master called, "You rang?" That became a catch-phrase during the Sixties, and Lurch became one of the most popular elements of the show.
Fans will be pleased that the show is finally on DVD, but probably wish that the episodes were on single-sided discs instead of double, and that the entire first season was included. This is Volume One. The good news is that it's not a random compilation. The three discs contain the first 22 episodes, in order, out of 34 that were telecast. Since the series featured 64 episodes in total, I'm guessing that fans might be looking at the first of three volumes.
Most of the episodes had to do with the family's warped ideas of normalcy, and visitors' reaction to them. Whether it was a truant officer checking into why the Addams family children weren't going to school or a doctor trying to figure out what's wrong (make that, watts wrong) with Uncle Fester, who's suddenly become unable to generate electricity, most people were eager to leave the Addams' mansion with the crumbled hat that Lurch handed them.
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[release]19836[/release]