The Addams Family, hands down.
Hard to believe Grandpa Munster is still alive after all these years… born 1910 according to IMDB (real name: Al Lewis).
I had thought Yvonne Carlo (Lily Munster) was dead too, but she’s still alive. Fred Gwynne (Herman) died in 1993.
Blossom Rock is on the IMDB as Marie Blake, birth name Edith Blossom McDonald.
I have to go with the Addamses, too, but I did like the job that Fred Gwynne did with Herman Munster. He made him a real lovable big guy. Herman was a child at heart, and that added something to the series for me.
Still, ya gotta love Gomez. Anybody who puts his lit cigar into his vest pocket is OK by me.
RR
Just to get in before this thread is moved to Cafe Society, I’ll say that I grew up with Munsters reruns, and gotta vote for them on that result. Grampa Munster was a hoot, and whats-her-name (the girl) was a babe. 
On the other hand, Williams’ Addams Family Pinball (based on the first movie) r0xx0rs.
Which is better, feces or excrement?
[Moderator Hat ON]
Moving to Cafe Society.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
By theme song alone The Addams Family takes the lead. It had better quotes too “Tish, you spoke French!”, “Caramia!” and “Uhhhhhh.” And they had a better house. The Munsters house always felt so cramped and closed in, like I was in my Grandma’s apartment in NYC. Yet I love the high vaulted ceilings the Adams Family had.
Plus sometimes the Munsters felt like … I Dream of Jeannie.
Definitely the Addams Family, for me.
As a little kid I loved all of the “Crazy Dad” type stuff that Gomez was always doing… grabbing his wife and kissing her when she spoke French; getting all buggy-eyed watching the ticker tape coming off of his home stock market thingie; stalking around waving a cigar like Gothic Groucho; paying for everything by pulling wads of crumpled cash from his pockets, causing heinous train wrecks with his model set, etc.
As a “Crazy Mom”, Morticia was right up there, too: cutting the blossoms off of her roses and putting the thorns in a vase; asking “Do you mind if I smoke?” and then literally smoldering like she was on fire; doing a little SM bit with Gomez with the dental equipment (she’d go at him with a drill and he’d groove on it “Ah, Tish! Excellent! You hit a nerve!”).
Grammama rocked… who wouldn’t want a practicing witch for a grandmother?? And she carried herself really well. I mean, she may have had funky wrinkled clothes and messy hair, but I bet she was Deb of the Year in like 1905 or something. Uncle Fester was just giggly and weird enough to be a bit scary, but he was so cheerful all the time it was hard to be scared of him for too long. The fact that he could make lightbulbs light up by putting them in his mouth was just the coolest thing to me, too.
Lurch of course was awesome. How cool to have a guy working for you who could also play the harpsichord. The kids were okay, but I don’t remember too many episodes where they really stood out. In a way, the way the kids’ roles were treated appealed to me as a kid, because I could really relate to being seen and not heard, and using that relative domestic anonymity to do some really fun stuff when nobody was looking. (Of course, I never got to blow stuff up.) Cousin It was just sort of part of the weird background, but at least he looked kind of scary, so that was okay. I also loved the fact that only the family could understand him. The only character who didn’t do a whole lot for me was Thing. Not sure why.
Later on my dad turned me on to the old New Yorker Addams Family cartoons, and they were fabulous. Classic, tasty, macabre, and really funny. Charles Addams and James Thurber, incidentally, were two of the reasons I ended up as a cartoonist at a local newpaper for brief time.
plnnr, you meant to say Fred Gwynne, of course. And if the IMDb is right, he went to Harvard, not Yale.
Personally, my favorite TV show with Fred Gwynne was “Car 54, Where Are You?”, which costarred Joe E. Ross. Al Lewis (Grandpa Munster) was in it, too.
Back to the OP: I much prefer The Addams Family, but I have to admit, I watched them both when they were new.
Yeah, I saw part of one episode once. That was all I could stand. What a waste of John Schuck’s talent!
addams family hands down. for so many reasons…
they have a butler. lurch is the ultimate. i want lurch at my house.
they have an awesome house. i could live there.
morticia is the perfect woman. i always thought she was too good for gomez.
they have a pet lion.
they have a foghorn door bell.
who couldn’t use an extra hand…er… thing around the house.
i do the “mail’s in” noise when delivering things at work. some people get it.
Even as a small child I felt that The Munsters was a very ordinary sitcom about very ordinary characters who simply looked weird. The Addams Family was about characters who really were weird.
Just has to be the Adams Family,
Moricia is my ideal woman.
The original Addams Family, no question about it. Even the '90s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series was better than the original Munsters. (They managed to get John Astin to play Gomez!) H-B also made an Addams series in the '70s. Here’s a trivia tidbit for you: The voice of Pugsley in that series was Jodie Foster.
But, heavens to Cecil, that recent series that was on the Fox Family channel was lame garbage. I’m glad it’s gone. John Astin appeared as Grandpapa Addams and I didn’t see it and I bet it would have been painful to see him in a pale shadow of a great series.
As for Munster actors, there was a Munster made-for-tv movie made in 1995 that starred Edward Herrmann as Herman and Hill Street Blues’ Veronica Hamel as Lily. That has to be one of the worst made-for-TV flicks in history.
Morticia has that smoldering, dark sensuality which percolates my hormones. Gomez has a nonchalance about the ridiculous and the sublime which is stunning. I want to be Gomez. I want to be maried to Morticia. I want to lose all self control when she speaks french and maul her in front of whoever is around.
Mostly, I want Lurch to be my butler. Fester? Thing? Cousin it? Okay, whatever. But Wow, Morticia.
Of course Fred Gwyne was a riot- comparing the two is sort of like comparing hamburgers and steak. I sometimes like a hamburger.
b.
Addams Family, no question.
I use the Addams “Mail’s In” .wav on my PC.
Addams.
I even think the way Lurch in real life got buired in a back yard and forgotten kind of fits in to the show he played in.
Even though both shows have good theme songs, the Addams Family is vastly superior to the Munsters. Even when I was younger, I couldn’t stay interested in a Munsters episode much longer than the theme song. I loved the Addams characters, and their house looked like the greatest place in the world to live.
I even loved the two Addams movies, though the second one was much better than the first. Where else could you find a situation like Morticia saying to Fester’s new wife “You have enslaved Fester. You have taken him from us. You have put him under some strange sexual spell. All that I can forgive. But, Debbie…pastels?”
Morticia: Gomez, do you know what the penalty for bigamy is in this state?
Gomez:(reading the stock quotes, not missing a beat): I should imagine it would be having two wives.
BWAAAAHHHAAAAAAHHAAAAAA!!!
So? The Addams theme had low reeds too! It had bass clarinets.
There was a feature film of the Munsters produced and released back in the sixties. I don’t recall the title, but I clearly remember watching it in the theater. It wasn’t a made-for-tv thing, though it was low budget. I seem to remember that the plot revolved around Herman Munster having to win some kind of race with the family’s hot rod hearse to save the family’s estate back in Europe.
I watched both The Addams Family and The Munsters and enjoyed them, but I much preferred the Addams Family. The only point on which the Munsters were clearly superior to the Addams family was that Herman drove that really cool hot rod hearse mentioned previously. It was available as a model kit, and of course I had it (and wish I still had it). It was designed by some famous custom car builder out on the West Coast. (Wasn’t the designer’s first name Boris?) It was a real, functional car, too, not just a prop.
My favorite bit from The Addams Family: Towards the end of a show, Morticia and Gomez have just done something that will save the local school system from going under. Gomez says brightly, “Just think, Tish, we may have saved the world!” Morticia smiles, and then a look of deep concern comes over her face. “Oh, dear,” she says, “do you think we did the right thing?”
Our family had a cat named Morticia.