"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.