The Wikipedia entry on The Addams Family (TV series) notes:
I’d… forgotten about the episode featuring Lurch in a Beatle wig.
I choose the Adams Family, but I like them both.
I worked with a petite dark haired woman who’s name was Trish. She could have played Morticia Adams in the series. She was nice and hot.
I think this is required viewing at this point.
ETA: The effect would have been better if post #42 hadn’t sneaked in while I was proofreading.
addams family. they had lurch and thing. the show has convinced me life is much better with a lurch and thing.
i love lurch.
“It’s so nice to have a Thing around the house!”
I did the original a few miles back and in another post. (and if I knew how to link to it, I would. For the love of og, somebody please help me here).
I have since flipped, based on the facts presented here.
Addams Family by a country mile. (hey, I DO live in New England).
Did you know about his day job?
I’m surprised anyone even felt the need to ask. Addams, all the way. Not even close.
I was a mere kiddo when these shows originally aired; back then I definitely liked the Munsters better – they were actual flat-out monsters and made no bones about it, and I was a partisan of monsters, a preadolescent groupie of mosters, as awed and admiring of monsters as one of those far-gone anime loons is toward the Japanese. Those Addams people…they were plenty weird all right, and sometimes funny and somewhat unnerving, but they weren’t real monsters. So I thought the Munsters were gy far the better tribe.
Nowadays, I shift allegiances between the Munster and Addams clans. The idea of a family of bona-fide, no foolin’ monsterswho live in a small America townville still strikes me funny, and besides that the Munsters are a blue collar sort of family that I can relate to as fellow proles, while the Addams’ are filthy rich and have an air of “old bloodline, good family” patrician-ness. On the other hand, they’re freaky uninhibited free spirits who can do whatever the hell they want to, and choose to do weird charming fun stuff with their wealth instead of buying power over my kind. And it’s plain that both families love each other dearly and take care of each other.
Guess I’ll go with the Addams crew in the end though, just because they have a pet lion, and because Gomez is such a shameless, joyful perv.
For those who like completion:
The original Addams cast was among the first to have a reunion movie. It was in 1977, was set at Halloween, featured two new Addams children named Wednesday Jr. and Pugsley Jr., and features the entire cast except Grandmama (who was in ill health). On video but only for real purists.
There was a syndicated version of The Addams Family that ran for a couple of seasons in the late 1990s that was not up to the original series or the movies but wasn’t terrible either. I only watched a couple of episodes, but they made me chuckle. There was also a syndicated update of the Munsters that gets good reviews on imdb but I remember at the time it got A-W-F-U-L reviews, some critics (including from my favorite TV review, Harry & Wally’s Favorite TV Shows, who not only trashed it but stated that it had their vote for worst show of all time, comparing it to a small town little theater working without scripts).
There was also a straight-to-video movie starring Tim Curry & Darryl Hannah as Gomez and Morticia that has a 3.6 rating on imdb.
Trivia: Jodie Foster was the voice of Pugsley Addams on the 1970s cartoon version.
More Trivia: John Astin recent pic is now a creative writing professor at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins, and has consistently won “favorite prof” awards even from students born a generation after Gomez. He also occasionally tours in a one man show of Edgar Allen Poe.
And yet more trivia: The only Addams Family cartoon that the New Yorker wouldn’t print (this was before the series) was of Gomez looking through a hospital nursery window at a nurse changing a diaper as he tells her “no need to wrap him, I’m going to eat him here”. Pubert was his original choice for Pugsley’s name on the series but censors wouldn’t allow it, so it was eventually used in the second movie for their younger brother.
Addams. It’s not really close. The Munsters were a pretty run-of-the-mill sitcom. Not bad, but the Addams Family was far more original. Birthed out of the great strips via a Marx Bros. writer…that’s got to be the winner.
And I liked both Addams movies.
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Quite late, I know, but I fixed the thread title for ya.
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And Addams. No contest.
Another vote for the Addams Family. There were some things I enjoyed as a kid about the Munsters, and going to boot camp with a Munster was a trip. But Addams Family was so much more fun.
The Addams Family. John Astin is a trump card. The only trump card. (See The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.)
I have a tastefully small shrine to Charles Addams.
Decades ago, a Boston Globe columnist wrote a column concerning an indefinable “something” that produces a huge difference between 2 choices.
The entire column was written in this fashion:
John Kennedy had it - Richard Nixon didn’t.
Elvis Presley had it - Bill Haley didn’t.
The Beatles had it - the Dave Clark 5 didn’t.
He did not mention 1960’s sitcoms featuring macabre characters but I imagine he would have said:
“The Addams Family had it - The Munsters didn’t.”
It’s amazing how overwhelming the Addams Family is favored over the Munsters here at the SDMB.
… and justifiably so !!!
Was he ever covered in sores?
Nope. A perfectly normal pre-Nuke in boot camp, ahead of the curve on brains, and a nice guy from N’awlens, just with a perfectly normal name that had certain sit-com memories attached to it for everyone who met him.
ETA: Which he dealt with, by using humor and poise. I really thought he was a class act. Just had a funny name.
They both had relatives living with them too. The major difference was that, despite all those children, Ma & Pa Walton never seemed to have sex. Gomez & Morticia were going at each other like bunnies, but they only had two children. Go figure.
Addams… I still believe I am a long lost relative
Wow thanks, Annie-Xmas. As linked, I raised the initial objection in the other thread. It is nice to see how overwhelming the support is for the Addams Family.
Jim