New Book! The Addams Family- America's Favorite Gothic Family

Addams Family fans! There is a wonderful new book out about America's Favorite Gothic family from Pomegranate Communications entitled The Addams Family: An Evilution.

 If you are anything like me, you watched the T.V. Show The Addams Family faithfully. But did you ever wonder where the Addams Family started?  I did, and  I really enjoyed learning more about this creepy, kooky family, how each character came to be, and the man behind the pencil! There are 10 chapters, one for each main character- including the house, which is a character unto itself! 

“Why can’t you just spank us like the other mommies?”

 If you are expecting to already know all about Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Thing, Lurch and the extended family because you watched the T.V. show, you will be in for a few surprises. They are even more delightfully morbid than you imagined! And if you were fortunate enough to be familiar with the cartoon series then this book will be an extra treat for you since there are 50 images in this book that are in print for the first time!

A few of the Addams Family cartoon characters had their debut in a 1938 issue of the New Yorker magazine,  but they were not know as the Addams Family at the time.  Their creepy, spooky humor caught on, later moving to television and even the silver screen.

This is a nice book, beautifully printed, interesting and full of pictures (over 200 of Charles Addams illustrations) I have included a few of my favorites here- used with permission. This book would make a great gift as well, so pick one up for yourself and for the darkling in your life. I highly enjoyed it and will covet it for years to come. 

“Just the kind of day that makes you feel good to be alive!”

Here is a little wikihistory on Charles Addams:

Charles Samuel Addams ( January 7, 1912 – September 29, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his particularly black humor and macabre characters. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as The Addams Family, became the basis for two live-action television series, two cartoon series, three motion pictures, and a play.

His cartoons regularly appeared in The New Yorker, and he also created a syndicated comic strip, Out of This World, which ran in 1956. There are many collections of his work, including Drawn and Quartered(1942) and Monster Rally (1950), the latter with a foreword by John O'Hara. Typical of Addams's work, one cartoon shows two men standing in a room labeled "Patent Attorney." One is pointing a bizarre gun out the window toward the street and saying, "Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn't even slow them up!"

“The little dears! They still believe in Santa Claus.”

Dear Dead Days (1959), one of the rarest Addams books, is not a collection of his cartoons (although it reprints a few from previous collections); it is a bizarre scrapbook-like compendium of vintage images (and occasional pieces of text) that appealed to Addams's sense of the grotesque, including Victorian woodcuts, vintage medicine-show advertisements, and a boyhood photograph of Francesco Lentini, who had three legs.

Addams kept a collection of crossbows on the wall of his study and used a little girl's tombstone for a coffee table, but Janet Maslin, in a review of an Addams biography for The New York Times, wrote, "Addams's persona sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers ... was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye," noting that one outré publicity photo showed the humorist wearing a suit of armor at home, "but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by John Updike."

Addams's popularity is reflected in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest; Cary Grant references Charles Addams in the auction scene. Discovering Eve with Mr. Vandamm and Leonard, he says, "The three of you together. Now that's a picture only Charles Addams could draw." He is also mentioned as "Chas Addams" (how he usually signed his cartoons) in Edward Eager's fantasy novel Knight's Castle.

After his death a cartoon ran depicting his Addams Family standing vigil before his grave while Addams crawled out the other side. A Charles Addams Art Scholarship was founded in 1991.

Addams died September 29, 1988, at St. Clare's Hospital and Health Center in New York City, having suffered a heart attack while parked in his car. An ambulance brought him from his apartment to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room. As he had requested, a wake was held; he had wished to be remembered as a "good cartoonist."

All images © Tee and Charles Addams Foundation / Courtesy Pomegranate Communications.

The Addams Family

This classic still rates as one of my favorites, perhaps because I have been referred to as Morticia numerous times over the years, as well as I have had some odd looks when non friends have come calling to the house. And then there is the way my Grandpa used to refer to me as Wednesday. Mostly though its the wonderful cast of characters, lovable and zany.

The Addams Family is an American television series based on the characters in Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. The 30-minute series was shot in black-and-white and aired for two seasons in 64 installments on ABC from September 18, 1964 to April 8, 1966.

The Addamses are a close-knit extended family with decidedly macabre interests. They all have supernatural abilities, although no rationale for their powers is ever explicitly given.
The very wealthy, endlessly enthusiastic Gomez Addams is madly in love with his refined wife Morticia. Along with their two children, Wednesday and Pugsley, Uncle Fester and Grandmama, they reside in an ornate, gloomy, Second Empire style mansion, attended by their servants, Lurch, the towering butler, and Thing, a hand that usually appears out of a small wooden box. Occasionally, episodes would feature relatives or other members of their weird subculture, such as Cousin Itt or Morticia's older sister, Ophelia.
Much of the humor derives from their "culture clash" with the rest of the world. They invariably treat normal visitors with great warmth and courtesy, even though their guests often have evil intentions. They are puzzled by the horrified reactions to their good-natured, if extremely bizarre behavior, since they are under the impression that their tastes are shared by most of society. Contrarily, they view "conventional" tastes with generally tolerant suspicion. For example, Fester once cites a neighboring family's meticulously maintained petunia patches as evidence that they are "nothing but riff-raff."





Gomez Addams (John Astin). Gomez is passionately in love with his wife, often referring to her as "Cara Mia". His ardor is greatly intensified when she speaks French (a quirk that first appears in the eleventh episode, "The Addams Family Meet the V.I.P.s") - before then it was "Bubele". A (German-Bavarian, & Yiddish ) expression referring to someone as something like "my little boy", "little girl", "grandmother", "darling", "honey", "sweetie". He is very wealthy, due to owning numerous companies, as well as stocks in yet others (although mostly not knowing that it is so) and mostly charming, but doesn't seem to have money itself as "a priority" in life; indeed, he tends to squander his huge fortune quite cavalierly, yet somehow still manages to remain wealthy after all. He does, however, spend a great deal of time with his family. His own family background is referenced as "Castilian," and he occasionally uses Spanish words and phrases. He can perform rapid and complicated calculations in his head; on one occasion, when Fester swung his blunderbuss too close to Gomez's head, the gun barrel knocked against Gomez's head with the sound of metal upon metal. He is remarkably acrobatic and can easily dismount from a hanging position upon a chandelier.

Morticia Addams (Carolyn Jones). A cultivated and beautiful -- but strange -- woman, Morticia dabbles in art, raises flesh-eating plants (often recalled as hamburgers), and trims her roses by clipping off the buds (or just turning them upside-down on occasion) and saving the stems in a vase ("Oh, the thorns are lovely this year"). With her aristocratic detachment, she remains the cool, calm center in the middle of the chaotic events that continually swirl around the family. She can light candles with her fingertips and emit smoke directly from her person.




Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan), Morticia's kind and kind of "electric" uncle. His standard gag is to place a lightbulb in his mouth, where it lights up. When angered or disgusted by outsiders, he may grab for a blunderbuss and announce that he will shoot the offender in the back.

Lurch (Ted Cassidy) is the household butler. Morticia and Gomez summon him by means of a bell pull in the form of a hangman's noose, which rings the massive bell located in the mansion's bell tower; the resulting gong shakes the entire house when the noose is pulled. When Lurch appears (usually immediately or within seconds thereafter), he responds with an extremely deep-voiced and drawn-out "You rang?" According to IMDb, Lurch was intended to be a non-speaking part, as the Charles Addams cartoon character was silent; however, Cassidy improvised the line during his audition, and it was so well-received that it became a feature of the character. When questions are posed to him, Lurch's primary response is a deep throaty rumbling and, at times, tremendously annoyed sound, which the family nonetheless interpret as spoken words. Superhumanly strong (he cleans the family car by simply lifting it and shaking it out like a rug), Lurch often plays the harpsichord. Lurch is very high-minded about visitors; when a plainclothes policeman visited the family, Lurch patted him down and regarded him suspiciously when he found his gun. Neise showed Lurch his badge, whereupon Lurch returned the gun. Lurch occasionally regards his employers' activities with some dubiousness, but only as any servant might regard the idle rich, not because he does not share their macabre tastes.





Grandmama Addams (Blossom Rock), Mother of Gomez, (who occasionally calls her "Mamacita"). She is a witch who conjures up potions, spells and hexes. She also dabbles in fortune-telling, though it is obvious that, in this respect, at least, she is a charlatan. Her given name is never revealed in the series.

Wednesday Friday Addams (Lisa Loring), Gomez and Morticia's daughter - who has the middle name of Friday. She is the youngest member (six years old) of the family, she is a strange yet sweet-natured little girl who pursues such hobbies as raising spiders, beheading dolls (called "Marie Antoinette", "Mary Queen of Scots", and "Little Red Riding Hood"), and practicing ballet in a black tutu. Her favorite pet is a black widow spider named Homer, although she also has a lizard named Lucifer. She is strong enough to bring her father to his knees in a judo hold.

Pugsley Addams (Ken Weatherwax), Gomez and Morticia' son and Wednesday's older brother. Kind-hearted and smart, occasionally conforming to "conventional" standards contrary to his family, he still shares nevertheless a close bond with his parents and sister, the latter whom he often plays with. He also enjoys engineering various machines (sometimes with Gomez), playing with blasting caps, and his pet octopus, "Aristotle". And he switches his electric trains onto the same track; when they collide he says things like, "Swell wreck!" Despite his pudginess, Pugsley is, like his father, exceptionally agile, able to out-climb a gorilla and hang from branches by his teeth.

Thing T. Thing (Ted Cassidy, except in scenes where both Thing and Lurch appear, when assistant director Jack Voglin would perform this service), a disembodied hand (or, more accurately, a disembodied arm, since at times he is visible down to his elbow) that appears out of boxes and other conveniently placed containers. While never explicitly explained throughout the series, Thing apparently has the ability to teleport from container to container, almost instantly, as seen when Thing appears in different containers within seconds of each other, sometimes within the same scene.



Cousin Itt (Felix Silla; and played by Roger Arroyo for two episodes). Gomez's cousin, a short entity completely hidden by his almost head-to-floor-long hair. He speaks in rapid unintelligible gibberish which the family has no difficulty understanding. Gomez once asks him what is under it all; Itt answers, "Roots." In one episode, Itt is said to have "the eye of an eagle...plus a few of his own". Nevertheless, he wears conventional sunglasses, supposedly so people will not pester him for autographs.

Ophelia, Morticia's sister. Gomez was originally engaged to her in an arranged marriage, but when he saw 22-year old Morticia (dressed in a grown-up version of Wednesday's clothing), he was smitten and fell in love with her; when she spoke French, he claimed that for the first time in his life, his sinuses were cleared and his Bronchitis was gone. Ophelia was played by Carolyn Jones in a blonde wig (a staple of 1960's sitcom twins). One quirk of Ophelia's is that the flower growing in her hair had roots that travelled down into her foot; another is her love of judo, with which she can hurl men (usually Gomez) several feet.