Strange, macabre, but nevertheless somehow amusing cartoon characters, something weird always happens when the bizarre and creepy ‘Addams Family’ is involved. The Addams Family have been on air on Cartoon Network for pretty long now.
Plot & Premise
An incredibly eerie woman, Morticia, is the vague, somber lady of the house. Her grinning lunatic of a husband Gomez has rather destructive instincts (i.e. destroying himself) as does his brother, the utterly despicable Fester, (I cannot get over his divided toenails). Gomez hates making a profit in his business. Morticia gets worried sick whenever he does. Morticia detests sunny days, and Gomez loves his wife’s hands to be cold and clammy.
Their maladjusted children Wednesday and Pugsley also have a ghoulish quality about them. Especially Wednesday who is too spaced out for words. The children are encouraged to scare and be nasty to others and are rewarded when they get into trouble. Their Granny, although the most normal looking of them all is in actuality a witch and a psychic.
Lurch, their butler, is a seven-foot-tall warmed-over Frankenstein monster whose dialogue usually consisted solely of the two words, ’’You rang?’’ His responsibilities include groaning, causing wreckage to the home, bodily harming Fester, and playing the piano while the family dances.
These oddballs live in a musty, haunted castle full of strange objects-such as a disembodied hand, called ’’Thing’’ which keeps popping out of a box and does some errands for Morticia whenever she wants. They also have an outrageously odd relation called Cousin It.
Like any other family they also have a few pets, but like everything Addams their pets are also ghastly: the Family Lion: Kitty Kat, Pugsley’s Octopus: Aristotle, Wednesday’s spider: Homer, Morticia’s pet vultures: Hubert and Henry, the family pet alligator: Snappy. Morticia also maintains a plant, the African strangler named Cleopatra. Cleopatra eats meatballs made of Yak meat. Her other plants include roses (which she grows for their thorns), and poison ivy.
Their neighbors, the Normans for a livelihood manufacture mens’ underwear. The Normans represent everything normal (as opposed to the way out weird Addams) are perpetually horrified at the Addams family antics.
So what is interesting about it anyway?
What’s particularly arresting about the series is the sheer imaginativeness that might have gone into creating these characters and their idiosyncracies. Episodes dedicated to a character delve into their personal weirdness, each distinctly apart from the other.
Why is it that Addams family is liked by kids and adults alike?
All through our lives as children we have been told that evil is bad. Whereas here in Addams family, evil is made fun of, in fact it is a mockery.
While we laugh at the Addams family even they laugh at the normal world. For them the normal is abnormal.
We may find the Addams vile and disgusting, ironically, the Addams find the normal world even more so.
We laugh at the ghoulish guys scoring over the good people (the Normans) in the series who in turn are petrified by the Addams family.
The series has a macabre sense of humor, juxtaposing the fantastic and gruesome with the mundane and ordinary, in the process generating big laughs from weird and whacked out happenings. Makes the chilling, horrifying and disturbing seem implausibly funny.
It’s an absolutely topsy-turvy world. Contradictorily paradoxical, hence the wild humour.
Happy viewing!!
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“The Addams Family theme song”
They’re creepy and they’re kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They’re all together ooky,
The Addams Family.
Their house is a museum
Where people come to see ’em
They really are a scream
The Addams Family.
So get a witches shawl on
A broomstick you can crawl on
We’re gonna pay a call on
The Addams Family.
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[These characters were created by Charles Addams as a series of panels in The New Yorker magazine in 1937, made their live-action debut in 1964. The sitcom, which originally aired from 1964-66. Two movies have also been made on this theme, Addams Family (1991) & Addams Family Values (1993).]