Morticia seems vampiric. Fester appears to be a hunchback. Lurch was a Frankenstein’s-monster knockoff. Grandmama is sort of witchy.
Was Gomez supposed to be like an Igor or something?
He strikes me as almost a Rasputin type.
I thought he was Castillian.
I thought he was vaguely reminiscent of Peter Lorre… except Spanish. Lorre played plenty of creepy characters.
he was a “Capitalist”. Eeek!
None of the Addams Family members really mapped one-to-one with the archetypal movie monsters the way the Munsters did. They were just a really weird family with some…interesting…genetic aberrations among them. I personally think this is what makes the Addams Family better than the Munsters, actually.
I agree.
Other than better writing, better acting, and better casting, you mean? 
I think he’s an Evil Goofy.
(But what was Goofy? 
)
Well, the sets were better, too.
I knew I was going to leave something out and that some smart-ass was going to point that out to me.
He was the most evil of all occupations.
He was a lawyer. A seedy one at that.
He was a Valentino.
Well, one of the things…
Gomez represented the other horror archetype of the 1960’s, the “Hispanic guy.” The character was plainly intended to play on the omnipresent fear of Desi Arnaz common to Americans of that era, who constructed insulated subterranean bunkers in the event they should ever need to seek shelter from a Latin rhythm combo.
Seriously, I always felt like Gomez Addams was an idealized mixture of Walt Disney and Rod Serling, what with his demented enthusiasm and sadistic model train layout and the two-headed sea turtle and all. He also strongly reminded me of my dad, although I think that was more on account of the mustache than anything else. Well, that and the stories Dad used to tell me and my brother to keep us in line, about monstrous shambling horrors lurking under the basement stairs. Mere physical discipline was a rarely employed last resort in our household; Dad maintained order via a battery of sophisticated psyops techniques.
John Astin is one of my favorite actors. I hope he’s doing okay these days.
Actually, I don’t think the (unnamed, AFAIK) dad in the original Charles Addams cartoons was meant to be Hispanic – merely creepy.
Actually, if I remember correctly, there was no cohesive “Addams Family” before the series began. All of the characters appeared at different times and in different combinations in Chas. Addams’s cartoons, but none of them were actually named anything and they didn’t form a family unit.
They let Addams name all his characters for the show, but for some reason the network rejected “Pubert” for the son, who was instead named “Pugsley.” The newborn in the second Addams Family movie was named Pubert as a little homage to this incident.
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Addams did indeed show the family as a unit. His famous “Boiling oil for carolers” shows Gomez, Morticia, and Lurch, for instance, and the two-headed pig for Thanksgiving shows all but Fester. I have another cartoon in the Monster Rally collection showing everyone but Granma, and there are many in that collection that have two or three of the characters together. The clear implication was that they were a family unit.
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Though PR for the show said that Addams chose the character names, Nat Perrin, the producer, has claimed the names were his idea.
According to imdb