Joshua P. Warren Daily - Joshua discusses the history of The Addams family and how the beloved TV series came to be.

Joshua discusses the history of The Addams family and how the beloved TV series came to be.

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Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daly. Gotta be honest with you, I am pretty worn out today, being this time of year. Have a lot going on, long hours, so um don't have a lot of energy tonight, but uh I do want to share something kind of quirky with you. I was um I was reading earlier about a man who was born in 1912 named Charles Adams in New Jersey, and uh everybody said he was a quirky guy, kind of a mischievous young man, uh had the kind of a morbid sense of humor, liked to play pranks and whatnot. But he was very artistic and uh he would make lots of drawings. As a matter of fact, uh later in life he served in World War II, where he even worked on some films during the war. But uh back in those days, during his lifetime, if you had uh the right kind of mindset and the right talent, you could make a pretty good living as a cartoonist. So Charles Adams was uh producing quite a few comics for various publications, and in the 1930s he started uh drawing comics for the New Yorker, pretty good gig in those days. And uh a lot of the stuff that he was doing they said, you know, he he typically had kind of what people would describe as a sardonic sense of humor. For example, there was one comic a lot of people remember where um it's just one panel, and there's a sign there that says patent office, and there are two men wearing suits standing next to a window, pointing some object out the window, and the caption says death ray or fiddlesticks, it doesn't even slow them down. So obviously, somebody has gone into the patent office and says I have a death ray, and so they go to the window and start shooting it out at pedestrians to test it out. That was the kind of silly stuff he would do. But anyway, because he got this reputation for this uh sense of humor, um, he started drawing these oddball characters that didn't even have a name. Um people who lived together in a big mansion who were always just doing weird stuff. And so Charles Adams called this comic strip the Adams Family. Yep. And so for years the Adams family was just these uh these weird characters that he was putting in this strip, and it's uh interesting because there was one uh character that was you would presume uh so hideous that you did didn't even want to lay eyes on the thing. And so this character would always be sort of hidden, maybe behind a curtain or in the shadows, and all you would see is that character's hand sticking out. So later on in the 1960s, when producers came to Charles Adams and said, you know what? Why don't we turn your strip into a TV show, The Adams Family? They said, Well, first off, we need to give him a name. So he had to work through the process of the name. And they got around to this one character, however, that was always hidden from view because this thing was so monstrous. And they thought, well, it's not very interesting on TV to just have a shot of a hand once in a while in the background. So they decided to bring that hand to dynamic life, and that is why we have thing, this disembodied hand that's just sort of running around the house. So it's really interesting to see how um the imagination of Charles Adams gradually morphed into what we now know as these bizarre characters in the Adams family, um, which, of course, being this time of year, you might catch the Adams family on television a little a little bit more uh than usual. And uh I'll tell you this on a side note, uh oddly enough, they say that uh Charles Adams himself didn't come across as a weirdo. He was actually kind of a debonair man who was always well dressed and is uh he had uh silvery, well-styled hair, and actually was kind of a ladies' man. I think they said he even dated some models and actresses, people like Greta Garbo and whatnot. So um reminds you a little bit more of an Ian Fleming type than a uh a Gomez Adams type. But uh when he was in his 70s in the 1980s, he was driving his car to his apartment and got out of his car and had chest pains. And so they took him to the hospital where he died of a heart attack. I believe that was 1988. So, you know, I enjoy little quirky, interesting stories like that, uh origin stories of things that we take for granted in pop culture, and now you know where the Adams family came from, if you didn't know that already. So, anyway, uh busy weekend, everything's going great. Um, and uh I tell you what, man, the the tours are just they're incredible. They're just they're just packed out, they're sold out every night. So uh if you're gonna be in the area, don't forget to take advantage of that. So I'll talk to you again tomorrow, and I'll uh when I have a little bit more energy, I'll uh give you a longer podcast, and I want to tell you more about the first time that I encountered. What I know is a sentient, cognizant, spiritual entity. Um what I consider my night alone in what many call America's most haunted bedroom. So, hope your Halloween season is fun. Thanks for listening. Thanks for staying curious, and I'll talk to you again soon.