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"The Addams Family" were recurring characters in one-panel cartoons that appeared in the New Yorker magazine starting in the 1930s. It was only when a TV show premiered in 1964 that they received appropriately creepy names like "Pugsley" and "Uncle Fester." Because the cartoonist's name was Charles Addams, the characters also became "The Addams Family." Now 70 years after the cartoons first appeared, The Addams Family will become a Broadway-style musical premiering in Chicago in the fall of 2009.

Though his name is spelled differently, Charles Addams was distantly related to both the second and sixth presidents of the United States - John Adams and John Quincy Adams! His childhood nickname was "Chill," according to Wikipedia, and his first wife had black hair and was said to resemble Morticia Addams. But his involvement in the TV series was limited to providing names for the characters and some details on their lives.

"The Addams Family" premiered in 1964, just six days before a similar show called "The Munsters," and both shows ran for only two seasons. (Originally the mother on "The Munsters" was a dark-haired gothic character named Phoebe, but producers realized she looked too much like Morticia Addams.)

Jackie Coogan, who played "Uncle Fester" had been a former child star 40 years earlier. His earnings were estimated at $4 million, but his mother and stepfather squandered the money. Coogan sued them when he turned 21, but received only $126,000, though his plight led to the passage of California's Child Actor's Bill.

Besides Gomez, and Lurch, the show had many interesting recurring characters. Cousin Itt's hair was so long, it covered his entire body. (He was played by a little person named Felix Silla, who would wear later wear the Twiki the robot costume on the TV series "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century".) And Morticia's mother was played by Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of The West in "The Wizard of Oz."

The show proved so popular in re-runs that a Saturday morning cartoon was filmed in 1974, and in 1977, the cast re-united for a made-for-TV movie called "Halloween with the Addams Family." When the show left the air, the Addams' famous mansion was used for a scene in the 1972 movie "Ben," about a boy who telepathically controls an army of rats. (Future superstar Michael Jackson sang its theme song.) In 1991 over $100,000 would be spent to recreate the mansion for the 1991 movie.

Producer Scott Rudin got the idea of making a full-length movie one day when a studio executive began humming the TV show's theme, and other executives immediately joined in with the lyrics. Though director Barry Sonnenfield planned to leave the theme out of the movie, he decided to include it after it drew a tremendously positive response in the movie's trailer.

Cher had wanted to play the part of Morticia Addams, though it eventually went to Anjelica Huston. She modeled the character on two elderly eccentrics living in a decaying 28-room mansion in a 1975 documentary called "Grey Gardens." (They were the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy.) But this movie ultimately showed the creepy characters coming full circle. The first shot shows the family preparing to dump boiling water from the top of their mansion onto a group of cheery Christmas carolers at their doorstep. It's an exact recreation of one of Charles Addams' cartoons, published just four days before Christmas in 1946!

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