Halloween celebrates the domestication of the macabre, and that's the spirit coursing through The Addams Family Volume One, a collection of episodes from the 1964-66 black and white TV series. Gomez Addams (John Astin) and wife Morticia (Carolyn Jones) may live with their brood in a creepy mansion overlooking a cemetery, blow up model trains, receive their mail from a severed hand and employ the sepulchral Lurch (Ted Cassidy) as their butler, but they're sweet-tempered and better adjusted than the busybodies who visit them. The show delights in this contrast between the gruesome accoutrements and the happy-families tone. House-proud Morticia: "It is nice and dismal, isn't it?" Gomez: "Don't be modest, my dear. It's absolutely bleak."
The series was inspired by the New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams, but it wasn't until Addams sold the TV rights that he named his characters. Gomez was almost called Repelli (for repellent), and son Pugsley narrowly escaped being named Puber (the network objected). The show was blessed (if that's the right word at Halloween) with perfect casting. Astin, with Groucho Marx cigar and Groucho Marx delivery, smooches his way up Morticia's arm whenever she speaks French and looks on proudly as Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan) powers a light bulb with his mouth.
It's a shame Astin shows up only for a few minutes in one of the bonus features. He would have been great company in the audio commentaries, instead of which we get low-wattage reminiscences from the now-grown Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax, whose aunt was actress Ruby Keeler), sister Wednesday (Lisa Loring) and the little person who wore a hairy costume as jabbering Cousin Itt (Felix Silla).
Silla reappears as a Halloween goblin in one of 33 episodes on Bewitched: The Complete Fourth Season (1967-68). Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) is still the cutest witch ever (nice try, Sabrina), Sam's husband Darin is still played by Dick York (his back hadn't yet given out and forced his replacement by Dick Sargent), and the plots are as contrived and irrelevant as ever. The point is to see toys come alive or people turn into goats at awkward moments and to have Sam wiggle her nose and set the world straight.
The shelves are brimming with new collections of films starring such horror veterans as Boris Karloff (Sony's Icons of Horror Collection: Boris Karloff, with The Black Room, Universal's The Boris Karloff Collection, with The Black Castle, and Warner's Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection, with Mask of Fu Manchu) and Lon Chaney, Jr. (Universal's Inner Sanctum Mysteries: The Complete Movie Collection, with Calling Dr. Death). And the two granddaddies of Hollywood horror films, Dracula (1931, with Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein (1931, with Karloff), are out yet again with new bells and whistles added to those from the 2004 "Legacy" editions. Frankenstein: 75th Anniversary Edition has an excellent 95-minute documentary called Universal Horror, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, and an absorbing commentary by British historian Christopher Frayling. Dracula: 75th Anniversary Edition has the same Universal Horror doc -- what, Universal doesn't expect the same people to buy both? -- and a commentary by Steve Haberman, screenwriter of Mel Brooks's Dracula: Dead and Loving It, who is on a crusade to show that Dracula is superior to a Spanish-language version (included here) that was filmed at the same time, on the same sets, with different actors. On the second disc, the female lead in that film, Lupita Tovar, says that "according to the critics, I think" her film was the best version. Let the duel begin. Fangs at 20 paces.
A terrible film, but just loopy enough to amuse viewers with expectations set on sub-low, is Milton Moses Ginberg's Werewolf of Washington (1973), in which Dean Stockwell is bitten by a werewolf in Hungary and joins the staff of a U.S. president (Biff McGuire) given to such Nixon-ish lines as, "I would like to make one thing perfectly clear." It's poorly shot on a minuscule budget, which may be why it was mocked on a 1980s TV show hosted by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Elvira's Movie Macabre: Werewolf of Washington lets the viewer watch the film with or without Elvira's lame jokes.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the team behind the cartoon series South Park, decided to base a live-action series on a sitting president of the United States, not so much to satirize the president as to satirize situation comedies. In brief commentaries
on That's My Bush! The Definitive Collection, they say the delayed vote count in the controversial 2000 election meant it took weeks to find out whether Al Gore or George W. Bush would be their star/target, but they were lucky that the eight-episode cable series ran before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush acquired a brief immunity (since expired) from ridicule. That's My Bush!, with Timothy ( The Last Picture Show) Bottoms, below, nimbly playing Bush and Marcia Wallace (the receptionist on The Bob Newhart Show) playing the sassy maid, is scathing, tasteless and brilliant. It blends inane sitcom conventions (two people stuck in an elevator, a visit by an interfering
mother-in-law) with complex issues (abortion, capital punishment) and goes to extremes that are very wrong (Bush conducts a real execution thinking it's a mock one) and, for those with a high threshold of offence or an appetite for satiric excess, very funny. But "I don't know how long we could have kept going [with the show]" one of the creators perceptively observes, "because to some degree it was a parody of itself."
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
It's only Halloween, but this week's reissue of The Snowman (1982) is as good a premature glimpse of Christmas as any. The almost wordless 27-minute animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs's illustrated book was drawn for Britain's Channel 4 in a coloured-pencil style that captures the book's dream-like tone. A boy builds a snowman; the snowman comes to life and joins the boy in exploring his house; the snowman flies them both to the North Pole; morning comes; the snowman has melted. For some reason, an adaptation of Briggs's amusing but more conventional Father Christmas has been reissued separately rather than, as in 1998, on the same disc.