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Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel map the branches of the Addams Family Tree. We start at the beginning with Charles Addams’s single-panel cartoons for The New Yorker, move through the classic TV show and legendary 90s movies, to the 2019 animated film and the Netflix comedy Wednesday. With a special focus on perhaps the franchise’s greatest single work, the 1993 comedy Addams Family Values, we focus on the inverted relationships between the Addamses and historical ideas of American sociopolitical norms and myths, spun in jokes and in horrors and modes of marginalization. From futile efforts to guillotine a baby to a murderous takedown of the First Thanksgiving, the Addams lampoon and problematize harm and harmlessness in human experience. Do they have superpowers? Are they really killers? What is Uncle Fester’s marriage saying about intimate partner abuse? What is the deal with the disembodied hand; is Thing enslaved? Is Thing happy? Is it all ookiness, set up and punchline, or, in the model of Gomez and Morticia, might it be the greater virtue to behold the horrors of the world, and, with them in full view, embrace duty and love? Plus, the obligatory Raul Julia appreciation that must be echoed whenever encountering the work of the legend.

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Episode 874: Here’s the Thing about Thing originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]