Description
The Addams Family is a fictional household created by American cartoonist Charles Addams in 1938. The Addams Family originally included Gomez and Morticia Addams, their children Wednesday and Pugsley, close family members Uncle Fester and Grandmama, their butler Lurch, and Wednesday’s pet octopus, Aristotle. The dimly seen Thing was introduced in 1954, and Gomez’s Cousin Itt and Morticia’s pet lion Kitty Kat in 1964.
The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening. They originally appeared as an unrelated group of 150 single-panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker between their debut in 1938 and Charles Addams’s death in 1988. They have since been adapted to other media. In 1964, a live-action television series, starring John Astin and Carolyn Jones
The family has had a profound influence on American comics, cinema and television, and it has also been seen as an inspiration for the goth subculture and its fashion. According to The Telegraph, the Addamses “are one of the most iconic families in American history, up there with the Kennedys”. Similarly, Time has compared “the relevance and the cultural reach” of the family with those of the Kennedys and the Roosevelts, “so much a part of the American landscape that it’s difficult to discuss the country’s history without mentioning them”.
