The Munsters and The Addams Family both featured fantastical families when they first came to the small screen, but which show came first. Both television series have led to long-lived franchises, including multiple films, Saturday morning cartoons, Halloween costumes, and comic books. Additionally, both The Munsters and The Addams Family have seen their characters become pop culture icons over the last six decades. So, which series came first, and did the second show steal ideas from its predecessor?
The Addams Family and The Munsters debuted in 1964, and though both have had great staying power, the original iterations of the series only lasted for two seasons. The Addams Family was on ABC and starred two Academy Award-nominated actors, John Astin as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams. The Munsters originally aired on CBS, and starred several long-running television stars, including standouts Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster and Al Lewis as Grandpa Munster. Both series focused on a satirical approach to examining suburban life in the 1960's by inserting the monstrous archetypes of vampires, Frankenstein-esque abominations, and ghosts into everyday life in a humorous way. And despite their short, original runs, both series have lasted into the 21st century through reruns, reboots, and revivals.
Related: How Rob Zombie's Munsters Cast & Costumes Compare To The Original
Ultimately, it was The Addams Family that existed in the public eye first. The creator of The Addams Family characters, Charles Addams, was a well-known cartoonist for The New Yorker as early as 1932. In 1938, his first comic featuring The Addams Family was published. He would go on to publish more than 50 comic strips featuring The Addams Family prior to the television series. Series creator David Levy proposed the idea of the show by saying that it was critical to create full characters based on the creations of Addams. Levy didn't want the characters to be monstrous and villainous, but rather fully-realized, realistic people that viewers could empathize with, who were also intensely eccentric. Another television series, The Munsters, which debuted only one week after The Addams Family, took a bit of a different approach. While The Addams Family was a strange family that look somewhat normal, The Munsters, excluding Marilyn, were normally behaved people who looked scary.
It wasn't a coincidence that both shows began at the same time, either. Burns was quoted as saying, "We sort of stole the idea from Charles Addams and his New Yorker cartoons.... Because Universal owned the Frankenstein character and the Dracula character for movie rights, they decided to take their characters instead of the characters we had written." Upsettingly for Charles Addams, The Munsters not only stole his idea for their TV show with Universal character added in, The Munsters managed to consistently out-perform The Addams Family throughout the shows' respective two-year runs.
While Charles Addams' estate might justifiably be annoyed about The Munsters stealing his idea, lightly ripping off other intellectual properties to create something new is a time-honored tradition by many media companies, and continues to the present day. Regardless, generations of viewers have enjoyed both families - The Addams and The Munsters - and it is likely that both will live on in future iterations. Both The Addams Family and The Munsters have outlasted nearly all of their contemporary television series. The latest animated sequel of The Addams Family released in 2021 and Rob Zombie is actively working on his upcoming remake of The Munsters.