What recurring characters and gags from the TV show were not in the original Charles Addams cartoons? Were Thing and Cousin Itt in the original cartoons?
The wikipedia entry is not very clear, as it mixes the cartoons, TV show and movies all together.
The cartoon characters had no names. Addams had to invent them for the show. Pubert was rejected in favor of Pugsley. (Going on memory: didn’t read Wiki.)
I just read an excellent bio of Addams (quite the ladies man, btw!)
I believe the first cartoon depiction of what ultimately became a member of the Addams Family was Morticia in a cartoon that dated from the late 30s (early 40s? - going from memory here).
The Uncle Fester character showed up in several drawings that had no relation to the “Family” dynamic - my favorite one is him as the only laughing face in a sea full of sad ones - watching a movie.
VCNJ~
IMHO, Gomez & Morticia had the best marriage on TV…ever.
Addams also came up with two names for the father and let John Astin decide. He chose Gomez over Repelli.
I don’t remember the train set from the cartoons. (I have the complete New Yorker cartoon CDs, and so have looked at all of them.) It’s not surprising that the series had to invent lots of stuff.
The first movie actually staged more scenes from the cartoons than I remember the series doing.
The TV show occasionally would take gags from the cartoons – there was one, for instance, where Pugsley had a bunch of warning signs on the wall of his room and I think they used that in the TV show. I also seem to remember one panel showing the equivalent of Cleopatra (the African Strangler plant).
The characters in the cartoons were not always depicted as a family. Pugsley and Fester were involved in many with no reference to the others. Morticia, Gomez, Lurch and Grandmama were shown together, in some cases with Wednesday and Pugsley. The “family” cartoons also had an addition character – a man who seemed only able to crawl around – that was not included in the TV show.
Essentially, the producer took the characters from the cartoons and made them into a family. He gave them names (with Addams’s approval) and turned the one-off panel cartoons into a story.
When the show first came on, I was a big fan of Addams, but had never realized there was a family (I had a couple of Addams collections, but none that featured the group). I learned that the “family” existed, but I had never noticed it, and it was only a small portion of Addams’s prodigious output.