The Addams Family - Premise and Background

Premise and Background

Addams's original cartoons were one-panel gags. The characters were undeveloped and unnamed until the television series production.

Gomez and Pugsley are enthusiastic. Morticia is even in disposition, muted, witty, sometimes deadly. Grandma Frump is foolishly good-natured. Wednesday is her mother's daughter. A closely knit family, the real head being Morticia—although each of the others is a definite character—except for Grandma, who is easily led. Many of the troubles they have as a family are due to Grandma’s fumbling, weak character. The house is a wreck, of course, but this is a house-proud family just the same and every trap door is in good repair. Money is no problem.

The family appears to be a single surviving branch of the Addams clan. Many other "Addams families" exist all over the world. According to the film version, the family credo is, Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc (pseudo-Latin: "We gladly feast on those who would subdue us"). Charles Addams was first inspired by his home town of Westfield, New Jersey, an area full of ornate Victorian mansions and archaic graveyards.

According to the television series, they live in a gloomy mansion adjacent to a cemetery and a swamp at 0001 Cemetery Lane. In the The Addams Family musical, first shown in Chicago in 2009, the house is located in Central Park.

Most of the humor spread from the fact that although they share macabre interests, the Addamses are not typically evil. They are a close-knit extended family. Morticia is an exemplary mother, and she and Gomez remain passionate towards each other. Created by the television series writers, she calls him "Bubele", to which he responds by kissing her arms, behavior Morticia can also provoke by speaking a few words in French dialogue (the meaning is not important—any French will do). The parents are supportive of their children. The family is friendly and hospitable to visitors, in some cases willing to donate large sums of money to causes (television series and films), despite the visitors' horror at the Addams's peculiar lifestyle.

Charles Addams began as a cartoonist in the The New Yorker with a sketch of a window washer that ran on February 6, 1932. His cartoons ran regularly in the magazine from 1938, when he drew the first instance of what came to be called the Addams Family, until his death in 1988.

In 1946, Addams met science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury after having drawn 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. The pair 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' 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."