The Addams Family
1 9 6 4 - 1 9 6 6 (USA)
64 x 30 minute episodes
 The
adventures of the seriously spooky and altogether ooky Addams
family who live at number 1 Cemetery Lane in suburban New York -
right next door to an overgrown cemetery.
The extended family
include Gomez Addams, an eccentric cigar-smoking millionaire
lawyer; his slender wife, Morticia; their obese son Pugsley; their
sombre little girl Wednesday Thursday Addams; Grandmamma Addams;
bald Uncle Fester Frump; hairy Cousin Itt; and Lurch, the family's
towering zombie butler.
Other "residents"
include Thing (a disembodied hand), Kit Kat (a cowardly lion) and
Cleopatra (an African strangling plant).
As the theme song
announces, they are ''creepy and kooky''. Yet on the other hand,
the mother and father are utterly smitten with one another, they
dote on their children and the kids are respectful of their elders
and both the grandmother and uncle are loved and respected.
 Extended
family members are admired and Lurch shows great devotion to his
employers, Thing is appreciated for his helpfulness, and visitors
are always welcome and treated with generosity and courtesy. If that's
creepy and kooky, let's have more of it . . .
The
Addams Family was basically a one joke show - The running gag of
outsiders trying to cope with the Addams' ghoulish world; Fester's headache cures in the torture chamber;
Pugsley's
spectacular train set wrecks; Morticia's taste for the macabre
and bizarre. Morticia calls Gomez "Bubala", "Cara
Mia" and "Cadido" while he lovingly refers to her
as "Cadida", "Tish" and "Cara
Bella".
In 1973-74 Hanna Barbera/NBC broadcast a
cartoon version of the show with Ted Cassidy and Jackie Coogan
voicing their roles as per the series.
In this cartoon series
Pugsley was voiced by the then 8 year old Jodie Foster. There was
also a made for TV movie, Halloween with the New Addams Family
which was broadcast in 1977. The movie reunited most of the
original cast.
The characters were revived in 1991 and 1993
with the movies The Addams Family and Addams Family
Values. Both
films starred Raul Julia and Angelica Huston. In 1992 Hanna-Barbera
produced another cartoon version to tie-in with the pair of big
budget films made by Paramount.
 65 episodes of a new half
hour series, called The New Addams Family, were made for the
Family Channel in 1998. Glenn Taranto starred as Gomez, with
EllieHarvie as Morticia, John De Santis as Lurch, Michael Robards
as Uncle Fester, Nicole Marie Fugere as Wednesday and Betty
Phillips as Granny Addams.
Charles Addams,
the creator of The Addams Family characters was fascinated with
medieval paraphernalia and his Manhattan apartment was filled with
instruments of torture, a collection of crossbows and armour, as
well as human skulls, a collection of brass lizards, fragments of
tombstones, and 18th century embalming table which he converted
into a coffee table. So where did he get his macabre sense of
humour?.
|
