Chillin' With Charles Addams

I've been an Addams Family fan ever since I was a kid. It's a franchise which, over 50 years, has rarely put a foot wrong; wonderful original cartoons by the mighty (and mighty spooky) Charles Addams, a brilliant TV show with a Top 5 All Time theme song, an ok-ish Hannah-Barbera adaptation, a couple of genuinely great family movies, some well-loved video games, and The Best Selling Pinball Machine Of All Time. They used to show the live action TV series 'round 6-ish during the week when I was in my teens, in that time slot which was home during the nineties to so many great cult US imports on BBC2 (Def2) & Channel 4; Mission:Impossible, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, Eerie Indiana, the Waynes World sketches from SNL, Daria, Blossom, Boy Meets World, Ren & Stimpy, cartoon showcase Liquid Television etc etc. During the Summer Holidays in my late teens they'd sometimes show it mid-morning-ish on BBC2, 'round the same time they'd show re-runs of The Fugitive. I'm quite sure much of this stuff was regarded solely as cheap filler by the British networks running them, but the chance to watch classic US television shows or weird new cartoons (from that nineties Golden Age first-wave of postmodern cartoonery - you remember how good The Animaniacs was? Or The Tick?) was one I treasured greatly as a kid.

And I always thought The Addams Family were particularly cool. I've been reading alot about Charles Addams recently. Mostly his work appeared in the New Yorker (the first in 1932), occasionally in TV Guide and a couple of other publications. The creator of the the all-together ooky family was quite a character himself, living a life fogged with bizarre myth and legend. Certainly the 'wyrd', macabre Addams persona was partly an affection, but even so there enough freaky facts to satisfy a dirt-digger like myself. Addams had a tombstone for a coffee table and collected crossbows. He was known to dress for dinner in a knight's suit of armour. His last house was nicknamed The Swamp, and he used to shoot at rats from his bedroom window. He dated Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jackie Kennedy. (How crazy is that?) He got married to his third wife in a pet cemetery and wore sunglasses throughout the service. Brilliantly, he was known to his friends as 'Chill'.

The image at the top of the post is of an album packaged in Addam's artwork, a supernaturally-themed folk LP from 1957, by Dean Gitter. I have no idea whether the album is any great shakes, but a Charles Addams sleeve makes it a must-have piece of Americana. The haunted house depicted is a typical Addams image. It seems that as a kid growing up in New Jersey, Charles had a bit of a thing for sneaking into old abandoned houses, and was infact once arrested, aged 9, for doing so. The creepy, broke-down, boarded-up suburban spook-house remains a resonant image in US pop culture, from Psycho to (one of my faves) The 'Burbs...the idea that some awful darkness might be lurking behind the white picket fences and sunny Sunday bake sales of Elm Street resonates within our society still. Addams tapped into this troubled fascination, and 80 years after his first New Yorker illustration, the durability of his work suggests we remain suckers for the creepy and kooky side of the American dream.