"Their house is a museum…"
If you’ve ever seen the mid-sixties TV comedy The Addams Family, you might have been intrigued by their appropriately strange-looking home. The show was filmed in black and white, which perfectly captured the vintage monster-movie strangeness of characters inspired by the cartoons of Charles Addams.
The house was full of odd items like a stuffed polar bear (and swordfish and moose and turtle and god knows what else), Victorian lamps, a hookah smoking pipe, suits of armor, a noose hanging from the ceiling and more.
It was a playhouse for a fictional family who lived Halloween every day and night of the year.
And although we may not have thought about it, of course they lived in a world that in reality was very much in color. (The TV networks had begun a switch from black and white programming to color, even though a majority of Americans didn’t yet own a color television set.)
That’s when a photographer named Richard Fish took some behind-the-scene shots for TV Guide magazine.
Pinks and yellows and pastel greens?
Ooky.
A happy non-traditional family
Click to enlarge this shot of
The Addams Family set in color
Time to relax on a bed of nails
(Click to enlarge)
Click for a closeup of "Thing"
And if you’ve ever seen the show, you cannot get the theme song out of your head, so here are the lyrics:
They’re creepy and they’re kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They’re all together ooky,
The Addams Family.
Their house is a museum
Where people come to see ’em
They really are a scream
The Addams Family.
(Neat)
(Sweet)
(Petite)
So get a witch’s shawl on
A broomstick you can crawl on
We’re gonna pay a call on
The Addams Family.