Review: 'Original Music from The Addams Family'

Along with its sister-series The Munsters, The Addams Family brought a celebration of weirdness to weirdly status-quo sixties TV. It also brought along some very memorable music, not just with its cool, finger-snapping theme tune, but also its zesty incidental themes. A couple of years before it became de rigueur in the pop tunes of everyone from The Beatles to the Stones to The Left Banke, harpsichord was an essential element of Vic Mizzy’s Addams Family score. Could Lurch’s love of the baroque keyboard inspired the arrangements of “Fixing a Hole”, “Lady Jane”, and “Walk Away Renee”?

Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes: Day 3

Does the mere idea of stepping into another mall, watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the zillionth time, or talking to your loved ones make you throw up? Then settle your bowlful of jelly into the La-Z-Boy® and deck your hall with today’s installment of Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes instead! Merry vegetating!

Series: The Addams Family

Episode: “Christmas with the Addams Family”, in which the Addamses prepare weird gifts of severed heads and poison perfume; decorate a dead tree; jam out on “Deck the Halls” (Lurch on harpsichord! Morticia on lute thingy! Thing on sleigh bells!); scheme to convince Wednesday and Pugsley that Santa exists by dressing Gomez, Uncle Fester, and Lurch in red suits; and otherwise refuse to engage with the concept of plot.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 2

Series: The Addams Family

Episode: “Halloween—Addams Style”, in which we learn that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Uh… I mean we learn that yes, Wednesday, there is a Satan with claws. The littlest Addams’s faith in evil is shaken after a crabby neighbor tells her there are no such things as witches, monsters, and ghoulies. Such a revelation could really ruin her Halloween, so Morticia and Gomez set out to find a true-blue witch to save the holiest of holidays. Funny, I always thought Grandmama was a witch, but if she was, then the Addams’s wouldn’t need to throw a spooky séance to contact their dear departed Aunt Singe, who’d been burned at the stake centuries earlier. The premise opens plenty of opportunities for the clan’s standard sweetly sick humor…and with its seasonal theme, “Halloween—Addams Style” is the perfect episode to consume during this most festive time of the year!

Review: 'Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003'

Oh, how many of us misspent our youth by rushing home from school and forgetting all about our homework to vegetate in front of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” or ancient reruns of “The Flintstones”? Well, the idea of reading a hernia-inducing, two-volume encyclopedia of such animated trifles may actually seem like homework. At least it might until you delve into Hal Erickson’s delightful though dryly titled Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003. The great surprise of these books is not that their 950-plus pages bulge with history (I was unaware of how troubled the first season of “The Simpsons” was…or that “Ren & Stimpy” creator John Kricfalusi, who’d address his Nickelodeon bosses as “scum-sucking pigs,” was as irreverently outrageous as his dog and cat team), production info, trivia (Wait… “Scooby Doo” was patterned after “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”? Jodie Foster voiced Pugsley on the “Addams Family” cartoon? Belgium produced nine Smurfs feature films in the sixties?), and criticism; it’s that Erickson captures the fun of his topic with writing that is polished and informative but also cracks wise quite regularly. What a relief.

I defy anyone to pick up these books and not immediately leap to her or his favorite shows, and Erickson generally does not disappoint by giving due room and attention to cult items such as “Duck Man” and “Liquid Television” as well as perennial favorites like “Space Ghost” and “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”. If there’s a significant flaw to this collection it's that it does not live up to its “Illustrated” designation a bit more, but I guess more pictures would have necessitated a third volume, and I’m not sure my puny, sunshine and exercise-deprived, “Groovie Goolies”-weakened muscles would be capable of lifting it.

Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003 was originally published in 2005, and it is now going be reissued in its third revised edition. I received the second edition for review, so I'm not sure about what those new revisions entail.

Review: 'Monster Mash: The Creepy Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972'

Writers such as David Skal have dealt with the zany monster revival of the fifties and sixties before, but as far as I know, Monster Mash: The Creepy Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972 is the first book devoted to that topic alone. Mark Voger makes up for lost time by cramming as many monsters, Munsters, Addamses, Dark Shadows, issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Creepy, Borises Karloff and Pickett, horrific toys, models, and hot rods into a slim 190 pages as he can stuff. Unlike scholarly Skal, Voger captures the gee-whiz enthusiasm of a true Monster Kid with goofy prose and a scattered structure that screams, “Oh wait…here’s another boss thing that happened during the monster craze!”

The focus of Monster Mash is its copious interviews and photos. During his career as a journalist and pro-horror geek, Voger has interviewed such genre major players as writer/editor Forrest J. Ackerman, publisher James Warren, singer Bobby “Boris” Pickett, artists Basil Gogos and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and actors John Astin, Lisa Loring, Al Lewis, Butch Patrick, Pat Priest, and Kathryn Leigh Scott. Those fun (it’s heartwarming to discover how much the “Addams Family” cast adored each other), sometimes frothy interviews constitute a good portion of this book’s text. However, they cannot compete with all the ghoulishly, gleefully, garish full-color photos of monster memorabilia. Don Post masks and Famous Monsters covers and comics panels and Aurora models and “Munsters” lunchboxes and Wolf Man dolls and Gill Man Soakies. Looking at Monster Mash is like having a giant nostalgia bug lay lovely eggs in your eye sockets. 

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Charles Addams and “The Addams Family”

Charles “Chas” Addams didn’t crawl out of the womb on writhing tentacles or sporting an extra head when he was born 100 years ago tomorrow. Such irregularities would have been fitting considering the bizarre body of work he left behind. Addams is best known for the eponymous family he created for a series of peculiar New Yorker cartoons, but the lesser-known facts of his life are equally worthy of attention. Here are twenty curiosities about Charles Addams and the family he created that may be new to you…

September 18, 2009: Psychobabble Presents: A Horrible History of Horror TV!

Today is the 45th anniversary of the debut episode of The Addams Family and this September 24th finds The Munsters celebrating that same milestone. These two ooky, kooky birthdays have got me thinking about one of TV’s fringiest genres: the horror program. Horror has never gotten a claw-hold on the small screen the way it has in cinema houses, while dumb sitcoms, cop shows, and doctor shows continue to proliferate. Perhaps this is because it’s hard to sustain terror week after week on an episodic series. The anthology seems to be the horror program’s favored format, but it’s difficult to get viewers to tune in every week without familiar characters to follow. While a respectable number of horror shows have aired since TV’s cultural breakthrough in the 1950s, many of them were short-lived. Even indelible shows like The Addams Family and The Munsters only lasted two seasons. But the appeal of even some of the most fleeting horror TV shows has endured long beyond their original airings.