the Munsters could start acting and dressing normal and people wouldn't notice they're draculas or franklinsteins or whatever. whereas with the Addams family, one of them is a hand
I think that’s actually part of the point of it. The Munsters are upwardly mobile, trying to be a normal middle class family. The Addams like themselves the way they are. They’re aristocratic.
it's been ages since I watched it, but wasn't part of the show's conceit that the Munsters themselves thought they were just average, unremarkable middle class people?
Oh yeah that's right, there was the one character who looked like she's wandered over from Leave It To Beaver whom everyone else in the family felt pity for.
I agree. Munsters was a show about the anxiety of conforming to the norms of a "typical" American Family, oblivious most of the time how they failed to achieve that goal. Addams Family was the obverse; with enough $ you can afford to be eccentric and indifferent to norms.
I remember the one where Mr. Munster joins the local watch or something and is hunting a suspect based on everyone thinking the "weird guy" they saw was suspicious. The joke is that he doesn't realize that he's the weird guy.
When I think of that in this context it does seem symbolic.
What you’re telling me the poor can’t afford to put up a sex swing in their living room to tickle the feet of their servants?
I am shocked I tell you! Shocked!
It gets even weirder when you include the way monsters can be class-coded. Vampires are famously tied to wealth and inherited status, when meanwhile a lot of Lovecraft monsters are "degenerate" folks from rural areas.
See also murder-hillbillies, although they are at least biologically human.
This recapitulates the tradeoffs faced by Jewish families as I will demonstrate with my New York and Tennessee family groups in my forthcoming million word Medium essay
Not cool! The poor guy has a disability and he's just doing his best in the world after the unfortunate fencing accident where the rest of him got cut off...
I'm not sure, but weren't the Munsters, or maybe even both shows, a comment on marginalized people blending in with society, or am I off the mark here?
I like the common observationn going around how Gomez and Morticia were unusual for a sitcom couple in that they were depicted as being openly, passionately in love with each other at all times
For the Addams Family, some might go back to the Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons. In those it might be satirizing aspects of contemporary society by displaying an alternate. Each new person picking the characters up (TV, movie, cartoons) probably have their own lens
Makes sense. Herman was a working class bloke trying to make ends meet for his family.
Gomez was so rich and eccentric, he had a careless disregard for just handing people fat stacks of cash. Plus, the longevity of the family’s lineage suggests he is very old money.
I think that encapsulates something that didn't sit right about the Wednesday series. She's miserable in it. But Wednesday should be too above it all to be miserable!
I BEG your pardon, have you SEEN Herman's HEAD? There would have to be some serious effort made at concealment, and then I'd buy your premise. No to mention that everyone except Marilyn is a kind of soothing light teal. Like my grandma's bathroom.
He like, goes to a costume party dressed as King Arthur in shining armor, then he and Lilly get insulted when he takes his helmet off and everyone declares him the winner of the costume contest cause they all think his head is a mask
The 90s were a wild time where you'd make 72 episodes of something over three sequential calendar years dumping all this time, effort, and money into it and 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 you'd realize it wasn't popular and cancel it.
Also not an ideal model, but at least they didn't end seasons on paradigm-altering cliffhangers before renewal. xPPP
(Also, saw this in my notifications and assumed it was in response to my rant about Earth: Final Conflict. Also relevant there.)
yeah exactly, and he was still generally understood and treated by others as a human being. so Herman only needs to reach that level of inconspicuousness
