The Addams Family — Road to Film0

Written by Nishanthini Ganesan

Created by late car­toon­ist Charles Addams, The Addams Family fran­chise took its baby steps in the late 1930s as a series of one-panel car­toons that were pub­lished in the American news­pa­per, The New Yorker. They were noth­ing more than a dark par­ody of the clas­sic American fam­ily, but this was just the beg­gin­ing and the char­ac­ters, other than their dis­tinctly macabre sense of humor, were still undeveloped.

None of the char­ac­ters in The Addams Family car­toons even had names until the 1964 sit­com based on the comics was put into pro­duc­tion. Charles Addams, father of The Addams Family was asked to do the hon­ours and Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, and the rest of the Addams Family’s quirky names came to be.

The 1964 The Addams Family sit­com had 64 episodes split into 2 sea­sons with John Astin star­ring as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones as Morticia. Critics of the film often stated that Carolyn Jones was “too pretty” for the role but she soon earned her praise as Morticia Addams. The Addams Family theme song that soon became syn­on­mous with the fran­chise was also introduced.

The series broke ground with the por­trayal of Morticia’s and Gomez’s rela­tion­ship. Never before, or pos­si­bly ever since, had a cou­ple been so phys­i­cally inti­mate or intensely in love with each other on tele­vi­sion. It was even joked about that Morticia and Gomez Addams seemed to be the only 1960s TV par­ents even remotely capa­ble of hav­ing chil­dren. The Addams Family was also one of the last net­work series to be filmed in black and white. Though not suc­ces­ful in its two years on tele­vi­sion, the sit­com soon became a cult favorite after it was discontinued.

The sec­ond Addams Family sit­com, The New Addams Family was shown on Fox Family from October 1998 to August 1999. It did not con­tain the orig­i­nal theme song but rather a faster-paced tune that still had the clas­sic finger-snapping. The series ran for 65 episodes split into 2 sea­sons, and con­sisted of remakes of the orig­i­nal 1960s Addams Family episodes, as well as newly-written ones. Apart from the lack of orig­i­nal­ity in the plot-lines, The New Addams Family earned praise for putting a mod­ern twist to the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters, but still keep­ing to the essence of The Addams Family.

The first ani­mated The Addams Family car­toon series ran from 1973 to 1975 on NBC with only 16 episodes. The first ani­mated appear­ance of the fam­ily how­ever was on Episode SDC-3 of Hanna-Barbera’s The New Scooby Doo Movies. It aired on the American tele­vi­sion sta­tion CBS on the 23^rd of September, 1972.

The first Addams Family fea­ture film, The Addams Family, opened on November 16, 1991. It grossed $191,502,246 world­wide at the box office and became the sev­enth highest-grossing film of 1991.

It was after the suc­cess­ful release of this film that the sec­ond Addams Family car­toon series began pro­duc­tion. This ani­mated series became part of the pop­u­lar Saturday Morning Cartoons and was aired from September 1992 to November 1993. New char­ac­ters such as the Addams Family’s next-door neigh­bours, the Normanmeyers were intro­duced into the fran­chise. California toy man­u­fac­turer Playmates Toys also bought the rights to The Addams Family and pro­duced a series of nine Action Figures based on the char­ac­ters of the sec­ond ani­mated series.

In 1993, the sec­ond Addams Family fea­ture film, The Addams Family Values, opened at #1 in the box office with a reported total earn­ings of $14,117,545. Many of the orig­i­nal cast mem­bers in the movie came back for the sec­ond film, includ­ing Angelica Huston and Raul Julia who reprised their roles as Mortica and Gomez Addams. The film’s earn­ings were a sharp decline from the first film, with The Addams Family Values only gross­ing a total of $48,919,043 at the box office. However, it was bet­ter received by crit­ics, and got a 75% out of 35 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Almost 2 decades later, The Addams Family Broadway Musical offi­cially opened on the 8^th of April, 2010. It cel­e­brated it’s 500^th per­for­mance on June 16 2011 and by that time, accord­ing to Playbill, had grossed over $62 Million. This September, the pro­duc­tion is set to embark on its National Tour of the US with its first show at the Mahalia Jackson Theater in New Orleans.

With an illus­tri­ous past and a bright future ahead, The Addams Family is one fran­chise that has shown suc­cess in not only film, but ani­ma­tion and tele­vi­sion. It has been tried and tested by time and has secured itself among the lists of all-time cult favorites.

So here’s to the wierd, the gloomy, the eecen­tric, the dif­fer­ent, and the down­right macabre. Because if there is any­thing that Hollywood has proved endear­ing to an audi­ence, it’s us.