The Addams Family is a fictional family created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. They originally appeared in a series of 150 unrelated single-panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker over a 50-year period since their inception in 1938. They have since been adapted to other media, such as television, film, video games, comic books, a musical and merchandising.
The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening. Beginning with the 1964 television series, the Addams Family consists of Gomez and Morticia Addams, their children Wednesday and Pugsley, close family members Uncle Fester[a] and Grandmama,[b] their butler Lurch, and Wednesday's pet octopus, Aristotle. The dimly seen Thing (later a disembodied hand) was introduced in 1954, and Gomez's Cousin Itt and Morticia's pet lion Kitty Kat in 1964. Pubert Addams, Wednesday and Pugsley's infant brother, was introduced in the 1993 film Addams Family Values.[c]
In 1964, a live-action television series premiered on ABC and ran for two seasons. It subsequently inspired a telefilm titled Halloween with the New Addams Family and cameos from the cast in other shows. An unrelated animated series aired in 1973. The franchise was revived in the 1990s with a feature film series consisting of The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993). The films inspired a second animated series (1992–1993) which is set in the same fictional universe. The series was rebooted with a 1998 direct-to-video film and a spin-off live-action television series (1998–1999). In 2010, a live musical adaptation featuring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth opened on Broadway and was nominated for two Tony Awards and eight Drama Desk Awards. The series was again rebooted in 2019 with the animated film The Addams Family, which led to a sequel in 2021.
The franchise has become a staple of popular culture. It has spawned a video game series, academic books, and soundtracks which are based around its Grammy-nominated theme song. They have had a profound influence on American comics, cinema and television, and are seen as an inspiration for the goth subculture and its fashion.
Charles Addams began as a cartoonist in The New Yorker with a sketch of a window washer that ran on February 6, 1932.[2] The first Addams Family cartoon was published in 1938, in a one-panel gag format. Charles Addams became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and drew approximately 1,300 cartoons between then and his death in 1988. 58 of these would feature the Addams Family, almost all of which were published in the 1940s and 1950s.[3]
In 1946, Addams met science fiction writer Ray Bradbury after drawing an illustration for Bradbury's short story "Homecoming" in Mademoiselle magazine, the first in a series of tales chronicling a family of Illinois monsters, the Elliotts. Bradbury and Addams became friends and planned to collaborate on a book of the Elliott Family's complete history, with Bradbury writing and Addams providing the illustrations, but it never materialized. Bradbury's Elliott Family stories were anthologized in From the Dust Returned (2001), with a connecting narrative, an explanation of his work with Addams, and Addams's 1946 Mademoiselle illustration used for the book's cover jacket. Although Addams's own characters were well established by the time of their initial encounter, in a 2001 interview, Bradbury states that Addams "went his way and created the Addams Family and I went my own way and created my family in this book."[4]