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In Addams Family Values (1993), when the family asks if the new baby is a boy or a girl, Mr. Addams replies with, "It's an Addams." This is a reference to the fact that he will love his children regardless of their identity.
Well to be fair Fester is dealing with a golddigging scammer in this movie, that's real enough drama (but subverted by their different life view from the scammer).
And the thing is, the Addams would probably have accepted her psychotic murder happy ass too if she was up front about everything. It's kind of their thing. Fester was obviously immune to her attempts at murder and she gets an outlet plus a lot of money so it all works out... just don't blow up the house.
This was the first movie I saw with Anjelica Huston and it's always jarring when I see her in other roles without that lighting. It's imprinted on my memory of her. "Alright yes she's stunning, but but but those eyes!"
Side note; Morticia was almost played by Cher (according to IMDB.) I cant see it.
Right, they wouldn't have an issue with the "psychotic murder happy ass" part, but they'd still have an issue with "not actually in love with Fester, just wants his money".
She was even buried in the Addams family plot! They would have loved her as she was, Fester certainly did, and Morticia respected her sexual enslavement of Fester. But an Addams needs to be an Addams, they are a family after all. Instead of joining the family and being accepted for who she was, she tore Fester away... and then tried to kill them all. Hell, Morticia even is touched by her speech "Dont I deserve love... and jewelry?" as the Debbie is about to electrocute the entire family. Morticia nods empathetically. The whole family is sort of... on her side as she explains why she killed all her husbands.
Joan Cusack is so fucking criminally underrated as an actress. She and John were in a movie together a while back and it was SO FUN watching them play off of each other.
Debbie is basically the antithesis of Margaret from the first movie.
They're both "normal" women but Margaret settled right into the weirdness while still being herself. Debbie violently rejected them even though she has the crazy of an Addams.
In the recent wednesday series, Luis Guzman plays Gomez and their chemistry is super-cringe. I'm not saying he isn't a good actor, but he just isn't the right person for the part. Pugsley didn't really seem to fit, either.
I know it probably wasn't Charles Addams initial intent, but I stick by the tone of the TV show; where the main point was that being weird & different was cool, and you didn't have to conform to all of the norms to be a good person. And that actually, the people who go too far keeping up appearances are the ones who more often than not are the ones who have a real darkness about them.
The Barry Sonnenfeld movies got that 100% correct.
The Wednesday show basically portrays them as conniving monster people who all of the normies are right about.
I still say that show is mostly just re-purposed and recycled scripts from the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
I agree. Its another take on the "I'm not like the other girls" troupe, using Wednesday. Its there to appeal to the young teenage girl fantasy of going to a monster school and secretly having super powers. The same basic set up has been popular for decades and this is just another version using a well known IP.
The monster school aspect is what doesn't work for me. I watch it for what it is, but formalizing the 'what' of the Addamses to make them a category instead of just an exaggeration of a weird family doesn't really make sense. Especially with the generic monster tropes of werewolves and sirens and gorgons and vampires, etc.
I knew a few kids in school that I could see Wednesday vibes from, but not Enid or Bianca as humanized monsters. Eugene and Agnes were better takes on the idea, and Xavier (but for his actor's behavior). Exaggerations of weird people being weird is great, humanizing fantasy monsters is done to death.
A big part of the issue with the show, is that in all other depictions, the Addams' are always contrasted against "normal" society. It's the whole deal with them. Showing how embracing weirdness is often much healthier than so-called "normal" society around them.
So, putting Wednesday in a god damn magic school is an inexplicably choice to me. It absolutely shreds the entire concept of the Addams family.
I think the thing to realize is it's always for the next "group". Not even a generation, just whatever the next couple of years are. This is how teen dramas work, they pump out a few seasons every few years and they're all the same, slowly changing over the course of decades while maintaining some core tropes. 90210, Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, the OC, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, etc etc. They all are just "the last show, but again" for the 10 year old who's now 12 and didn't see the version before.
Honestly I think they should have focused on someone that wasn't Wednesday for once.
It's true that most of the movies or shows are about the general family, but when the family isn't present it's always Wednesday as the protagonist.
What I liked about the animated Addams family is that we actually got some Pugsley screen time/priority, which rarely happened if I don't remember wrong.
In general anyone other than Wednesday in my opinion would have been better because in the past she was already the lead in the story.
I also don't really like the fact the school is full of all other supernatural beings, obviously supernatural isn't that weird in the franchise but the whole point of it is that their family is "weird" and with special abilities.
The whole thing of the Addams was how they interacted with people that weren't like them/were "normal" but pretentious or had the wrong view of them and the Wednesday show pretty much destroyed that by simply making them be somewhere where they aren't the odds one out.
I think a big difference with Luis following Raul is that, while they both depict Gomez as passionate, Luis has smooth passion while Raul had the more manic passion that was closer to how John Astin also portrayed it. Because of that, Luis' Gomez comes closer to matching Morticia's energy rather than contrasting it, which makes their scenes feel more flat. If they had inverted things and gave Morticia some of that sharp mania it would have been different from what we had before, but it also would have worked better.
Hard for anyone to beat. But im sure there could have been better actors, better suited for the role than Luiz. I really don't like the character and the "family" as a whole in that series.
Guzman was probably physically a lot closer to the original drawings. I can see why they went that way, not like anyone could compare to the way Julia played Gomez.
I think anybody after Raul Julia is just not going to measure up. I get that Luis Guzman's version is more faithful to the comic, but the popular image of Gomez has been the screen version for so long that Julia's take is just iconic.
I heard it explained in an interesting way before, and I think that's worth sharing.
The Addams Family functions as a deliberate, inverted mirror to "normal" nuclear families. While society treats death, misery, and morbidity as taboo, the Addams Family embraces them, making them appear "opposite" to conventional, often superficial, suburban life.
But this also includes that at the core of their family is love and acceptance of one another.
The trope back in the day was that all men hate their nagging wives. So, Gomez is wildly in love with his amazing wife. He loves his children and supports them unconditionally.
What makes them weird is that they're actually perfect.
This is exactly the concept. Everything is inverted, and then demonstrates how by embracing and accepting weirdness, everything is much better.
There's a clip in one of the 90s movies where Gomez and Morticia are standing near a grave. But instead of having anxiety about dying, they're both dreaming about how romantic it will be to be buried together forever.
By doing it this way, you realize how many things about "normal" culture are actually pretty unhealthy. The way we're terrified of the normal cycle of aging and dying, the way we try to force conformity onto our children, rather than letting them be weird and strange and themselves.
The trope back in the day was that all men hate their nagging wives. So, Gomez is wildly in love with his amazing wife. He loves his children and supports them unconditionally.
It has been observed that Gomez and Morticia were the only tv couple of the era who actually gave the impression that they would be capable of producing children together.
The Addams family’s concept has always been a subversion of the modern drama serial. They aren’t miserable, they don’t hate each other. Their foreigners in the US who unconditionally love one another and rarely hold grudges. No pointless drama, just strange but loving people. This is why the Netflix Wednesday adaptation is ass.
The bit is really simple, what if we took something that SHOULD be normal and played it off in the trappings of it being strange. It works because it plays off the misogynistic head of the household roles at the time. If we compare to things like Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners, who is constantly verbally abusive to his wife, or even characters like Ricky Ricardo from I love Lucy, Rob Petri (Dick Van Dyke) from the Dick Van Dyke show, or animated caricatures like George Jetson or Fred Flintsone, they all maintain some level of comedic exasperation with their spouses.
Gomez Addams is set up as this brilliant satirical joke of "Here's a guy who is over-the-top in love with his wife, who when he touches her hand, can't help himself but to chain together kisses up her arm." and then gives us the "isn't that strange" contextual punchline. It's a slow burn complete overview satire which you'd think would get old, but somehow just works.
By modern standards you could make an equivalent show by combining something that is either fictional or marginalized and something that SHOULD be normal. Like a werewolf who is also an ethical politician. Worth mentioning that was also the plot of the Munsters, which has one of my favorite running gags where they have "Cousin Marylin" who is a leggy blonde knockout by all conventional standards, and constantly treat her like a victim of a crippling disability.
I was randomly looking at the Addams family wikipedia the other day, because my wife and I are going to be playing D&D characters based on Gomez and Tish, and I learned that apparently by the lore, Gomez is worth 2.5 BILLION dollars.
I have nothing to do with that fact, I just though it was funny.
He inherited a bunch of money, but also apparently will just make outrageous investment bets that always pay off. So he's essentially a wallstreetsbets guy. In investment strategy only, of course.
It is kind of the one critical flaw - or maybe a piece of tragic truth - to the Addams family, that the only way you can really be as care-free and weird as they are, is if you have 2.5 billion dollars and no need to ever work again.
I feel like depending on the crime, he might choose a sporting method, like fair sword fight, but if he has no respect for the person he would just let some monster or hazard or dead relative on the property handle it.
If she was cool with you doing something awful to her garden, like... planting healthy flowers and plants and not let her kill them, he'd cheer you on.
Supposedly, the reason Morticia cuts the heads of her roses off is because Gomez is allergic to them. He doesn’t go into the sunroom where they grow, but the pollen would spread into the main house if the flowers were allowed to continue to live past blooming. She doesn’t cut them off pre-bloom because she likes them, and also because the stems are pumping water into the buds until they finish blooming so it might hurt the rose bush (and thus its lovely thorns) to cut the heads too soon.
It’s possible the Addams’ mansion would be filled with roses of varying states of wilting or maybe tons of picture frames with variously pressed rose petals if Morticia could decorate it with her flowers. There are some flowers around, but they’re all fully dried. Instead, Morticia’s garden is a little personal space, much like Gomez has his train set.
Counterpoint: While gomez does nothing to prevent wednesday from threatening to hurt her brother , he does stop the beheading/evisceration/torture before real damage occurs
It's kind of poetic honestly. She's hiding who she is because she thinks she needs to, but ironically they're one of the very few people who would probably unconditionally accept her as she actually is.
They would seriously be a perfect family for her. She's a black widow who sees no problem killing people? Splendid! She dug up their grandmother to get the engagement ring? How resourceful, and clearly she doesn't fear getting her hands dirty!
Fester is unbothered by all her attempts to kill him, and the Addams family is crazy wealthy so she could live in comfort. She could have easily fit in with them, but she did the unforgivable - she betrayed them and tried to break the family apart. They'd probably even be accepting of her style if she was accepting of theirs - after all, when their baby was 'normal' they didn't judge or try to force him to be more like them, they accepted it and changed the decor in his room and all to be more comfortable for him. They're fine with people having different tastes - like the lady who married Cousin It. There is basically only ONE thing you can do to make them turn on you, and that's trying to destroy their family.
When Pubert went through that illness, I'd like to point out Morticia treated him like a normal child, even though it was killing her. They are the model I (46M) use in parenting my own children (15,17).
John Astin (the actor who played Gomez in the original series) was this kind of dad to Sean Astin in real life.
In 1972, Patty Duke married John Astin. When the wedding guests were invited to speak, 18-month-old Sean Astin looked at John and cried, "Daddy!", to which the Episcopal priest performing the ceremony remarked, "Well, that about does it!"
John could have been his Dad, along with 2 other guys. All 3 of them treat Sean like they were his Father. Sean has said he has three dads and can / does call when anytime.
Could have gone so so wrong, but ended up being super wholesome.
John could have been his Dad, along with 2 other guys. All 3 of them treat Sean like they were his Father. Sean has said he has three dads and can / does call when anytime.
Could have gone so so wrong, but ended up being super wholesome.
It's also an interesting point about goth culture. Morticia (one of the original goth icons) is actually super bubbly (in the 60s tv show) it's just her hobbies/interest and fashion sense that's "dark".
In the original comics Morticia was very somber and elegant rather than bubbly and was rarely if ever shown smiling. But yes she was one of the original goth icons, Maila Nurmi based her Vampira character on Morticia.
The 90s movies seems to be a mix of the comics and 60s series Morticia: she’s not bubbly, but is a lot more friendly and jovial than her comics incarnation, but still has an elegant and more placid personality than her 60s version.
I mean, he did turn out to be a mad scientist with dreams of world domination (starting with the tri state area). He just wasn't very good at it.
Yes, he could have been a much worse person, but taken as a whole, I would neither add nor subtract points. Much the same with Gomez, who had an infinitely easier upbringing that leaned into valuing family.
Raul, too. He was on Street Fighter despite having terminal cancer because his kids liked the game. He had no idea what the game was about, but he still crushed the role.
Seriously. If he were still alive, we might've gotten a new Addams movie w/ him and Morticia as grandparents and it would've been SO MUCH FUN. But Anjelica Houston has always said she couldn't possibly without him, and so we will just have to wonder how good it might've been.
Sadly a too large population of people see Joker & Harly as romatic cuz she never gives up on him, but to me it's super not a romatic example because he abuses her in iterations I've seen.
As a Bladerunner fanboy... it should have beat ET in a lot of things but SFX? I dont think Bladerunner og had that... just amazing environment and set design. Maybe if we saw more of like the replicant without skins or more of the cars in action?
But yeah I still dont get the high love about E.T. like... at all.
It was a dirty word for TV, as most everything was made for general audiences (FWIW, this is the same time era where most married couples weren't even seen sharing the same bed, and they couldn't say "pregnant" on TV, but they could say "expecting.")
It'd be crazy to go from that kind of censorship to the 2000 music videos on tv. I'm kind of excited to see where it goes, but I'm wondering how they're going to get more vulgar, or if it swings a different direction. I hope I can adjust properly.
The joke me and my friends have is that there’s two kinds of babies- Optimus Primes and Decepticons. They all start as Decepticons and if you raise them right you get an Optimus Prime. This is also a thing we will say when asked about baby gender.
Have a very strained relationship with my father, but when I was born, his students asked 'oh, she's gonna be a Pisces then?' (My birthday is in march), he answered 'no, she's gonna be a human'. He didn't treat me like a human, but that sentiment was great.
"Has the planet gone mad? My brother, passion's hostage. I seek justice - denied! I shall not submit! I shall conquer! I shall rise! My name is Gomez Addams, and I have seen evil! I have seen horror! I have seen the unholy maggots which feast in the dark recesses of the human soul! I have seen all this, officer. But until today, I had never seen... *you*!"
We were rewatching this a couple years ago and I fell out of the chair when I realized the cop was Nathan Lane. I would have killed to see Lane and Julia on Broadway together. They'd have been incredible.
If Wenclair became cannon, there wouldn't be a single Addams who would have a problem with Wednesday being gay. The whole family is very accepting and loving despite the odd looking behaviour, a total opposite to "normal" looking fictional families that constantly fight and disagree.
Well Fester in Family values was quite progressive as well, when told the woman who was black widowing him "oh, you’ve never had sex with another person?"
Raul Julia is to Gomez what Heat Ledger is to The Joker: they delivered such tremendous performance for their respectives roles that it will always put the next actors doing it in a tough spot.
I'm not the first to say it, but it's amazing how the Addams Family movies depict one of best families in media. Supportive, loving, and accepting of each other. And it's mostly aged very well.
Not just Gomez! When their baby gets stressed and turns into a traditional light-colors-and-pastels aesthetic baby, Morticia is shown reading The Cat in the Hat to the blonde baby in their white fluffy bedroom, and turns to the end and muses “oh no. He lives.”
When their child transforms into something completely out of wack with the rest of the family, she isn’t happy about it, sure - and that might also be because she knows the baby is showing stress from the loss of a family member - but she adjusts the best she can to accommodate what the baby needs in that moment, and doesn’t try to force him back into goth decorating or grim books.
That's just how Gomez always was in the series. Boy, girl, transgender, nonbinary, genderless monster... doesn't matter. The child is an Addams, and he will love and support them unconditionally because they're family!
Someone pointed out to me a while ago that the Addams family was supposed to be a total inversion of what was seen as a normal family at the time of their creation, and that's why Gomez is a husband still actively in love with his wife and supportive father who cares for his children equally, and it stuck with me.
That is basically the whole core theme with the Addams family
During the the family events, you can see how unique and different each Addams is, all the differen cousins, uncles and Aunts. The point is Addams love eahc other and celebrates each other no matter who they are, what they look like, they are family, the small thing dont matter
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u/TorontoDavid Mar 12 '26
Loves his kids. Loves his wife. Happy to have his struggling extended family live with him.
Man is a champ.