The Addams Family
The Addams Family are the creation of American cartoonist Charles Addams. They are a bizarre brood who delight in the macabre in all things and are never really aware of why people seem to be so frightened of them.
Addams' cartoons in The New Yorker magazine gained popularity in the 1930s. Many of the cartoons featured a rather morbid sense of humor, and over the years various bizarre people and creatures who lived in a huge decaying Victorian Gothic house became recurring characters.
In the 1960s a network television series was spawned with actors playing characters from Addams cartoons, entitled "The Addams Family". The television show originally ran from 1964 to 1966, and appeared frequently in syndication thereafter. The Munsters, which shared a similar gothic look but featured broader humor, ran for approximately the same period.
In the 1990s this concept was revived and developed into a film, The Addams Family (1991),which proved popular and financially successful and spawned a sequel, Addams Family Values (1993).
Many of the characters did not have names in the cartoons, but Addams thought up names for them for the television series.
The main characters included:
- Gomez Addams (played by John Astin in the 1960s show, Raúl Juliá in the 1990s movies)
- Morticia Addams (played by Anjelica Huston in the 1990s movies)
- Pugsley Addams
- Wednesday Addams (played by Christina Ricci in the 1990s movies)
- Uncle Fester (played by Christopher Lloyd in the 1990s movies)
- Grandmama
- Thing
- Cousin Itt
- Lurch, the butler
