The Addams Family - Volume One
If The Munsters was a traditional family sitcom as reimagined by Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, The Addams Family is a macabre twist on Father Knows Best. The Munster and Addams clans made their TV debuts in 1964 and lasted two seasons before the networks buried them. The Addamses are now gloriously resurrected in this three-disc set that digs up the series' first 22 episodes (oddly, 12 shy of the complete first season). Inspired by Charles Addams's New Yorker cartoons, The Addams Family is fiendishly funny, with a dead-on cast that indelibly embodies Addams's characters. John Astin brings a demented glee to eccentric, frighteningly wealthy Gomez Addams. Carolyn Jones is bewitching as his pre-goth wife, Morticia, whom the Beatles might have had in mind when they sang, "Baby's in Black." Jackie Coogan is the electrifying Uncle Fester, with Ted Cassidy (who famously took a kick in the groin from Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) is the monstrous butler Lurch, whose "You rang?" entered the pop culture lexicon.
The Munsters was family friendly. The Addams Family is more sophisticated and wickedly funny. As Gomez notes at one point, "There's a touch of madness" in the Addams household, where "every day is Halloween." Bear rugs growl, a disembodied hand, Thing, delivers the mail, and a torture rack is good for what ails you. The children, Wednesday (Lisa Loring) and older brother Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax), enjoy such hobbies as playing autopsy or exploding model trains. Gomez and Morticia were one of television's most passionate couples, with Gomez being driven to arm-kissing ecstasy whenever Morticia spoke French. The last episode included in this collection, "Amnesia in the Addams Family," is a classic in which Gomez is rendered "normal" following a conk on the head. The look of disgust on Morticia and Lurch's face when he asks for a glass of milk is priceless. The "altogether ooky" extras include three episode commentaries, a featurette on Charles Addams, reminiscences from cast members Astin, Loring, and Weatherwax, a segment on the creation of the classic snap-snap theme song ("They're creepy and they're kooky...."), and the inevitable theme song sing-along. The Addams Family at last on DVD? As Gomez might exclaim: "Capital!" --Donald Liebenson
The Addams Family - Volume Two
Based on the original Goth cartoons by Charles "Chas" Addams that ran for decades in the New Yorker magazine, The Addams Family television sitcom portrayed a monster family whose moribund physical appearances were counteracted by each family member's exuberance for passion and adventure. This Volume Two DVD contains twenty-one episodes, including the last of season one and the whole of season two, plus commentaries, and a featurette about the cinematic impact The Addams Family had on American television culture. Premiering the same year as The Munsters, this short-lived series was one of the first two shows to take issue with the Leave It To Beaver aesthetic that dominated television throughout the 50s, in which perfect families narrowly defined normality in the American home. Instead, it starred a family feared by neighbors, who within the boundaries of their haunted Victorian mansion invented their own thriving, not to mention fun, culture. The Addams Family proved that outsiders could be extremely gracious, educated, and interesting, even if eccentricities rendered their looks a threat.
These episodes include the original cast: Gomez (John Astin) and Morticia (Carolyn Jones), Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan), the two children Wednesday and Pugley, butler Lurch, hairy Cousin Itt, and the enigmatic hand, Thing, who plays castanets for the married couples' cha cha parties, and looks up things in phone books. Macabre humor in each episode reverses average, expected logic. Flower arranging, for Morticia, involves de-budding and stripping roses of all but the thorns. In "Morticia, The Sculptress," Gomez bribes a local art dealer to buy Morticia's hideous art at the Addams Family's own expense, revealing Gomez to be a strange but loving husband. In most episodes, such as "Lurch, The Teenage Idol" and "Cousin Itt and the Vocational Counselor," The Addams' aim to help their loved ones succeed, in these cases Lurch, as a harpsichord-playing pop star, and Itt, on a career search for an unintelligible, hair-covered little person. The Addams Family house interior still looks exquisite forty years later, full of taxidermied animals, antique furniture, carnivorous plants, and medieval charm. One watches this show not only for its sets and costumes, but also for its refreshingly wide take on what successful families can look like. --Trinie Dalton
The Addams Family - Volume Three
Product description: The Addams Family is not your typical family: they take delight in most of the things that "normal" people would be terrified of. Relive the misadventures of America's favorite frightfully funny family.
If The Munsters was a traditional family sitcom as reimagined by Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, The Addams Family is a macabre twist on Father Knows Best. The Munster and Addams clans made their TV debuts in 1964 and lasted two seasons before the networks buried them. The Addamses are now gloriously resurrected in this three-disc set that digs up the series' first 22 episodes (oddly, 12 shy of the complete first season). Inspired by Charles Addams's New Yorker cartoons, The Addams Family is fiendishly funny, with a dead-on cast that indelibly embodies Addams's characters. John Astin brings a demented glee to eccentric, frighteningly wealthy Gomez Addams. Carolyn Jones is bewitching as his pre-goth wife, Morticia, whom the Beatles might have had in mind when they sang, "Baby's in Black." Jackie Coogan is the electrifying Uncle Fester, with Ted Cassidy (who famously took a kick in the groin from Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) is the monstrous butler Lurch, whose "You rang?" entered the pop culture lexicon.
The Munsters was family friendly. The Addams Family is more sophisticated and wickedly funny. As Gomez notes at one point, "There's a touch of madness" in the Addams household, where "every day is Halloween." Bear rugs growl, a disembodied hand, Thing, delivers the mail, and a torture rack is good for what ails you. The children, Wednesday (Lisa Loring) and older brother Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax), enjoy such hobbies as playing autopsy or exploding model trains. Gomez and Morticia were one of television's most passionate couples, with Gomez being driven to arm-kissing ecstasy whenever Morticia spoke French. The last episode included in this collection, "Amnesia in the Addams Family," is a classic in which Gomez is rendered "normal" following a conk on the head. The look of disgust on Morticia and Lurch's face when he asks for a glass of milk is priceless. The "altogether ooky" extras include three episode commentaries, a featurette on Charles Addams, reminiscences from cast members Astin, Loring, and Weatherwax, a segment on the creation of the classic snap-snap theme song ("They're creepy and they're kooky...."), and the inevitable theme song sing-along. The Addams Family at last on DVD? As Gomez might exclaim: "Capital!" --Donald Liebenson
The Addams Family - Volume Two
Based on the original Goth cartoons by Charles "Chas" Addams that ran for decades in the New Yorker magazine, The Addams Family television sitcom portrayed a monster family whose moribund physical appearances were counteracted by each family member's exuberance for passion and adventure. This Volume Two DVD contains twenty-one episodes, including the last of season one and the whole of season two, plus commentaries, and a featurette about the cinematic impact The Addams Family had on American television culture. Premiering the same year as The Munsters, this short-lived series was one of the first two shows to take issue with the Leave It To Beaver aesthetic that dominated television throughout the 50s, in which perfect families narrowly defined normality in the American home. Instead, it starred a family feared by neighbors, who within the boundaries of their haunted Victorian mansion invented their own thriving, not to mention fun, culture. The Addams Family proved that outsiders could be extremely gracious, educated, and interesting, even if eccentricities rendered their looks a threat.
These episodes include the original cast: Gomez (John Astin) and Morticia (Carolyn Jones), Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan), the two children Wednesday and Pugley, butler Lurch, hairy Cousin Itt, and the enigmatic hand, Thing, who plays castanets for the married couples' cha cha parties, and looks up things in phone books. Macabre humor in each episode reverses average, expected logic. Flower arranging, for Morticia, involves de-budding and stripping roses of all but the thorns. In "Morticia, The Sculptress," Gomez bribes a local art dealer to buy Morticia's hideous art at the Addams Family's own expense, revealing Gomez to be a strange but loving husband. In most episodes, such as "Lurch, The Teenage Idol" and "Cousin Itt and the Vocational Counselor," The Addams' aim to help their loved ones succeed, in these cases Lurch, as a harpsichord-playing pop star, and Itt, on a career search for an unintelligible, hair-covered little person. The Addams Family house interior still looks exquisite forty years later, full of taxidermied animals, antique furniture, carnivorous plants, and medieval charm. One watches this show not only for its sets and costumes, but also for its refreshingly wide take on what successful families can look like. --Trinie Dalton
The Addams Family - Volume Three
Product description: The Addams Family is not your typical family: they take delight in most of the things that "normal" people would be terrified of. Relive the misadventures of America's favorite frightfully funny family.
Main characters
- 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 (the music is actually played by The Addams Family composer Vic Mizzy). Lurch is very high-minded about visitors; when a plainclothes policeman (played by George Neise) 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.