Creepy and Kooky Things You Probably Didn’t Know About The Addams Family
They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky, but they’re also endlessly fascinating! It might be hard to believe, but the Addams Family has actually been spreading their special brand of strangeness for over 50 years. There was the original TV show that aired in the ’60s, the movie series in the ’90s, and an animated adaptation in 2019. Now, the beloved family is returning to our screens in Netflix's highly-anticipated reboot, Wednesday. And although Wednesday and her "strange, deranged" family have been in our lives for decades, we bet there are probably still a few dark secrets you still didn’t know about the kookiest family in history.
1. Meet the Addams Family
The Addams Family movies were based on the TV show, but the TV show itself was actually based on a series of macabre little cartoons that Charles Addams drew for The New Yorker. The characters didn’t even have names at that point. In fact, they weren’t given names until the TV show!
2. Charles Addams was the original kook
Charles Addams, the brains behind The Addams Family, was every bit as odd as the characters were. For instance, he collected crossbows, and he wasn’t afraid to use them. In fact, he was once reported as saying, “I have this fantasy. A robber breaks into my apartment and just as he comes through the door, I get him – right through the neck.”
3. A big "rip off"
The straight-to-video Addams Family Reunion was directed by Dave Payne, and he wasn’t happy about the whole messy affair. In 2016 he told Yahoo! Movies, “Everything we wanted to do was killed at the creative level by the executives, who kept on saying, ‘No, just rip off the movies, just rip off the TV show!’ Any of our original, fun ideas to do something with this were just thrown out in favor of ‘let’s not fix something that isn’t broken.’” Now, of course, the movie is largely forgotten about.
4. Charles Addams is buried in "The Swamp"
The creator of the Addams family wasn’t about to let a little thing like death stop him from being weird. After a heart attack killed him aged 76, he was cremated – and his ashes were buried in the pet cemetery of his property, a place he called “The Swamp.” A cartoon published after his passing showed the Addams Family standing over the artist’s grave while he, of course, clambered out of it.