Nineteen sixty-four was a good year to be a TV tot.
I was seven-years-old that October and remember all these cool, black-and-white witches, vampires and severed hands invading our living room via network premieres of such sitcoms as The Munsters, The Addams Family and Bewitched.
Besides the shows themselves, there was the monster merch. At the neighbourhood known as Six Points in Etobicoke, this amazing hobby shop was in walking distance: Rigbys. They had Munster trading cards as well as models you could assemble and get sorta high gluing together of The Munster Koach and Grandpa’s Drag-U-La Coffin Car, the latter basically a coffin on wheels. For older kids, Rigbys’ also stacked copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, editor Forrest J. Ackerman’s photo-filled tribute to the early Universal horror films of Lon Chaney Sr., Boris Karloff, Bela Lagosi and others.
The Munsters and The Addams Family both only lasted two seasons but back then they cranked out a lot of episodes, over 30 per season. Fred Gwyne as Herman Munster and Al Lewis as Grandpa honed their comedy chops previously on Car 54 Where Are You? and, together with Vancouver-born Yvonne De Carlo, were an impressive, veteran cast. The Addams Family also featured dependable headliners who stepped into these campy roles with both feet, including John Astin as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones as Morticia. Add Hollywood’s original child star Jackie Coogan and frighteningly tall Ted Cassidy as Lurch and us kids were in front of that snappy theme song every single week.
I posted about Bewitched last week, and wrote more about The Munsters and The Addams Family at the suggestion of associate editor Mike Crisalago at Everything Zoomer. That’s where you can read my feature on the “Must Scream TV” trend that happened 60 years ago in 1964.
