Nobody expressed relish, zeal, or ardor with more brio than Gomez, and Morticia’s alert form of ennui had a certain proto-postpunk edge to it. The Addamses embraced difference as well, opening their doors even to those lacking a torso, or an epidermis. It can’t be missed that the Addams brood is notably heterogeneous-in other words, composed of a diverse variety of freaks. Gomez was some kind of mad millionaire, and for her part Morticia may have been the most refined creature available for view on network television. Morticia and Gomez (played wonderfully by John Astin) loved their children every bit as much as the Cleavers did, and said children almost certainly ended up with fewer neuroses. The subversiveness of the Addams Family, if it needs spelling out, involves an extreme embrace of tolerance and a perhaps-radical notion that even weirdos could raise a good family. Many gags played on some humorously “opposite” reaction to events (“Oh thank you, this makes me totally miserable!!”), and that very bent for unorthodoxy turned the Addamses into natural and unwitting (?) stand-ins for bohemians, beatniks, freethinkers, and weirdos of all stripes. Since you can’t roast little children on a spit on prime-time TV, the gang took a left turn to perversity.

Morticia and her brood made the potentially awkward leap from the pages of The New Yorker, where they were a tad more convincingly ghoulish-a classic panel involved the family tipping hot oil on a gaggle of trick-or-treaters-to the mass medium of network television in the mid-1960s, a transition the entire gang achieved with remarkable aplomb.Īs it existed on TV, the Addams Family was the approximate correlative of Bizarro in the Superman universe. Dangerous Minds doesn’t have an official mascot, but if the possibility ever manifests, I’d like to suggest Morticia Addams, as embodied by the delectable Carolyn Jones, for the position.

The addams family comic original