How much do you really know about Wednesday’s origins? Test your creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky knowledge below!
She’s baaaaack! Everyone’s favorite goth teen queen is returning to Netflix this week for Season 2 of Wednesday. (Finally!) With her distinctive pout, deadpan dialogue and signature dance moves, Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams became an instant Gen Z icon when the show premiered in 2022 … but believe it or not, the original character is actually pushing 90.
Before Wednesday made her a breakout star, the macabre character was just one part of the Addams Family—the creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky clan at the center of an iconic 1960s sitcom. You may have seen the original black-and-white show, featuring a 5-year-old, pigtailed Wednesday, in the wee hours of the night on TV, as well as the ’90s movies starring Christina Ricci. So you probably think you know a lot about the original show … but do you really?
Well, you’re about to! Read on for some fascinating facts about the original Addams Family and the lineage of Nevermore Academy’s most famous student.
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1. The Addams Family was originally a cartoon in the New Yorker
The man behind The Addams Family was an illustrator named Charles Addams. (Nope, that last name wasn’t a coincidence!) A native of Westfield, New Jersey, Addams always had a love for the offbeat and macabre—he liked to explore graveyards and even trespassed in an abandoned Victorian mansion in his neighborhood—and he sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker in 1932 for just $7.50. Six years later, in 1938, he debuted an illustration about an unnamed family that dressed all in black.
Addams published several dozen Addams Family cartoons before his death in 1988 at age 74. One of his most famous drawings? For Christmastime in 1946, the family members were all on the roof of a creepy mansion, poised to douse carolers on the street with the contents of a steaming cauldron. “He started out as a morbid person, but it was more a fascination with death,” Kevin Miserocchi, director of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation, told NPR in 2022.
2. The Addams Family members didn’t have names until the TV show premiered
Those distinctive names didn’t enter the public lexicon until The Addams Family was adapted for TV in 1964—and even then, Addams wasn’t the one making the final call on them. That said, he did offer some input at the time: For the patriarch, he preferred the name Repelli (as a form of the word repellent) over Gomez, but actor John Astin ultimately chose the latter for his character. Addams also suggested Pubert for the name of the son (playing up the idea of puberty), though ABC censors rejected it for sounding too racy and went with Pugsley instead.
As for our girl Wednesday? According to a letter from actress and poet Joan Blake published in a 2018 issue of the New Yorker, she was the one who told her friend Charles that the daughter looked like she embodied the line from the nursery rhyme “Monday’s Child.” She recounted, “He had no name for the little girl. I said, ‘Wednesday—Wednesday’s child is full of woe.’ And Wednesday became her name.”
3. The man who composed the show’s catchy theme song also created its title sequence
Even if you never watched The Addams Family, you still surely recognize its distinctive theme: A da-da-da-dum beat followed by two finger snaps. The music credit goes to Vic Mizzy, who previously composed theme songs for Shirley Temple programs in the 1930s and ’40s (and later created the theme song for the sitcom Green Gables). The producers of the series were so impressed by the (ahem) snappy song that they urged him to direct The Addams Family‘s main title sequence, which included everything from positioning the cast to instructing them how to sync up their finger snaps.
That song created long-lasting dividends. “That’s why I’m living in Bel Air,” he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2008, a year before his death. “Two finger snaps and you live in Bel Air.”
4. The original Gomez Addams has a big Gen X connection
Does John Astin’s name sound familiar? The man who played the hilarious Gomez Addams is also the father of Sean Astin—a Gen X hero, thanks to his roles in 1985’s The Goonies (he played adorable Mikey Walsh), 1993’s Rudy (Rudy! Rudy!) and later The Lord of the Rings trilogy. His other son is Mackenzie Astin, best known for his stint as precocious kid Andy on the 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life. (Most recently, Mackenzie popped up as an anguished son on a few episodes of The Pitt.)
As for the elder Astin, the 1952 Johns Hopkins graduate and former acting professor is now 95 years old. In a 2012 ABC News profile, he referred to The Addams Family as “a celebration of the unusual.”
5. The actress who originally played Wednesday later inspired Jenna Ortega
Before Jenna Ortega entranced viewers on Wednesday, there was Lisa Loring. The actress was just 5 years old when she landed the role of the pigtailed Wednesday Addams. “I got it because of my pout,” Loring said in a 1980 interview. Wednesday kept a black widow spider and a lizard named Lucifer as pets. In one classic moment, she puts on a record and teaches the family’s butler, Lurch, how to dance.
Decades later, Ortega told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that Loring served as a key inspiration for her hands-in-the-air gone-viral choreography. “I paid homage to Lisa Loring, the first Wednesday Addams,” Ortega said. “I did a little bit of her shuffle that she does.”
Loring, sadly, died in 2023 at age 64.
6. The actor who played Lurch also played Thing
Ted Cassidy, who played the mostly mute and hulking Lurch on The Addams Family, actually pulled double duty on screen. Yup, the disembodied helping hand known as Thing belonged to him too. For scenes in which the two characters appeared simultaneously, Thing was often played by associate producer Jack Voglin or other crew members. And though Cassidy most often used his right hand as Thing, he reportedly sometimes used his left hand just to see if anyone in the crew or the show’s audience would notice.
7. The Addams Family debuted the same week as another monster series
The 1960s was the peak era for high-concept silly sitcoms—think along the lines of I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, My Mother the Car and My Favorite Martian. (All plots should be self-explanatory.) So perhaps it’s no surprise that The Addams Family premiered on ABC in September 1964 just six days ahead of The Munsters on CBS. Both shows depicted creepy but close-knit families attracted to the dark side.
Still, the tones differed: The Munsters came from the producers of Leave It to Beaver, as evidenced by the more traditional family-centered plot lines that emphasized slapstick comedy. The Addams Family, however, was run by Nat Perrin, a frequent collaborator with the Marx Brothers. Instead of a fish-out-of-water sitcom setup, the show focused on an eccentric clan living in a house of horrors where normal folks are seen as outsiders.
“We have made [the family] full-bodied people, not monsters,” series creator David Levy once said. “They are not grotesque and hideous manifestations. At the same time we are protecting the images of [Charles] Addams’ ‘children,’ as he refers to them. We are living up to the spirit of his cartoons.”
8. The show made history by predicting the future
They’re creepy, kooky … and forward thinkers! The Addams Family clan holds the distinction of being the first television family to have a home computer. The UNIVAC I, Universal Automatic Computer, was the first electronic digital computer. Designed for use in businesses, it was actually used to predict the outcome of the 1952 presidential election. (And yes, it was correct!)
In the Season 1 episode “The Addams Family Splurges,” the machine—dubbed “Whizzo”—is introduced by Gomez and his son, Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax). They use it to calculate the cost of a family trip to the moon, and Gomez later consults it to predict the winners of horse races for the vacation budget. In a Season 2 episode, Gomez enters the race for their town’s mayoral seat, and Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan) moves Whizzo to the family’s living room to act as Gomez’s “political machine.”
9. The Addams Family got the ax after just two years … but never really died
How fitting that The Munsters and The Addams Family met their dark fates at the same time—that is to say, both shows were canceled in 1966 at the end of their respective second seasons. But The Addams Family was ultimately brought back from the dead. It found new life in syndication and was replayed ad nauseum for decades (and was still shown in 30 markets as late as 1991.)
As its cult following grew, several revivals followed. In 1972, the third episode of the Saturday-morning animated series The New Scooby-Doo Movies, “Wednesday Is Missing,” featured the voices of Astin, Jones, Coogan and Cassidy. (The voice of Pugsley was provided by 11-year-old future two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster.) There was also the less-than-stellar 1977 Halloween made-for-TV movie, and—wait, can this be?!—a pilot for a musical variety show. Unfortunately, it was DOA.
10. The idea for an Addams Family movie came in a snap (literally)
Flash-forward to the late 1980s. As the story goes, Scott Rudin, then the head of production at 20th Century Fox, was riding in a van with other company executives one day after a movie screening. “Everyone was there—[studio chiefs Barry Diller and Leonard Goldberg and [marketing chief] Tom Sherak—when Tom’s kid started singing The Addams Family theme,” Rudin told the LA Times in 1991. “And suddenly everyone in the van was singing the theme, letter perfect, note for note.”
The very next day, Rudin proposed to Diller and Goldberg that they make an Addams Family movie. “There really wasn’t a lot of debate,” he recalls. “They said, ‘Let’s do it.'” The movie was soon green-lit for production.
11. The movie’s production seemed cursed
Life wasn’t exactly letter-perfect on the set of The Addams Family. In this third week of filming, first-time director Barry Sonnenfeld suddenly felt the room spinning and fainted. A few weeks later, its first director of photography left to do another movie. Then the film shut down for several days when his replacement was rushed to the hospital with a serious sinus infection. To make matters worse, Orion Pictures, which bankrolled the film, was so cash-strapped that it sold the picture to Paramount mid-shoot.
Yet The Addams Family turned out to be a bona fide hit. Released during Thanksgiving weekend in 1991, the movie eventually grossed $114 million and ended up as the seventh-biggest U.S. hit of the year. (It hit nearly $200 million when counting worldwide receipts.) Critics were more enamored with the 1993 sequel, Addams Family Values, though it brought in only $49 million.
12. Christina Ricci appeared in character on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s
The Addams Family cast included Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester. But the breakout was then-10-year-old Christina Ricci, who portrayed the sadistic preteen with a dry, deadpan wit. (As the New York Times put it in 2019, “With her pale skin, wide forehead and sullen demeanor, Ricci looks like an Addams drawing come to life.”) In fact, Ricci’s take proved to be such a fan favorite that she appeared in character—along with Jimmy Workman as Pugsley—on a November 1991 episode of Saturday Night Live to introduce host and musical guest MC Hammer (who sang its theme song, “Addams Groove.”)
Ricci would go on to host SNL solo in 1999 and appear in Season 1 of Wednesday as Nevermore Academy botanical science teacher Marilyn Thornhill. Fun fact: Lloyd appears in Season 2 as Nevermore’s Professor Orloff.
13. Though the Broadway show was a miss, it lives on
In case you haven’t learned by now, it’s impossible to kill The Addams Family. One recent example: When a musical version of The Addams Family starring Nathan Lane as Gomez and Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia premiered on Broadway in 2010, reviews were gruesome. It closed after 20 months. But the show got retooled and started touring. Now it’s a beloved staple in elementary schools and community theater productions, and continues to play in dozens of countries.
“The singular joy of The Addams Family is that in the years since we’ve made it, the world has echoed back that they like what we’ve done,” composer and lyricist Andrew Lippa told the New York Times in 2020. Viva The Addams Family!
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Sources:
- NPR: “How the cartoonist behind The Addams Family defused fear, with dead-on humor”
- New Yorker: “Addams Family Values”
- Smithsonian Magazine: “The Cultural History of ‘The Addams Family'”
- New York Times: “Charles Addams Dead at 76; Found Humor in the Macabre”
- New York Times: “Vic Mizzy, Songwriter of ‘Addams Family’ Fame, Dies at 93”
- John Hopkins: “John Astin reflects on his role in ‘The Addams Family'”
- National Endowment of the Arts: “Ten Things You Might Not Know About the 1964 TV Series: The Addams Family“
- CBR: “The Addams Family Had TV’s First Home Computer”
- Smithsonian Magazine: “Lisa Loring, the Original Wednesday Addams, Dies at 64”
- Remind: “5 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘The Addams Family’s Lurch, Ted Cassidy”
- Los Angeles Times: “Meet the New Addams Family: The weird brood from Charles Addams cartoons and ’60s TV is back in a big-name, $30-million movie”
- New York Times: “‘The Addams Family’ Musical Was Panned. Then It Became a Hit”
