Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Jared Drew Moody
When John Astin’s three oldest boys were growing up, Halloween around his home always mirrored the two-year period in his life, during the mid-60s, when he was Gomez Addams – a romantic, a bad lawyer and a father who allowed his two children to keep jaguars, lions and octopuses as family pets. He didn’t just portray the wiry man, who considered a hangman in the family to be better than royal blood and employed a harpsichord-playing butler who grumbled and looked freshly unearthed, he was inescapably that man. Costumed people lined up down the street for a cameo on his doorstep and a few chunks of candy or whatever was being doled out. His sons would string wires across the yard with ghosts running all along them. And no matter what Astin wanted or didn’t want to do, he was in costume and a smash hit for all the temporary ghouls of the neighborhood.

“There I was with a black mustache and black hair,” Astin told Daytrotter last week. “I was Gomez.”

It hasn’t just been the last weekend in October that Astin has found himself the object of fascination. He’s found that this character of his and the show that was cancelled in 1966 after just two seasons on ABC, is everlasting – the power of syndicated re-runs made this true.

“Not a day in my life has passed that – if I’d gone out of the house – someone hasn’t stopped me to talk about ‘The Addams Family.’ Even with a bald head and a white mustache they recognize me,” said the lively 77-year-old Astin. “My voice is a giveaway. I try not to talk to myself when I’m walking alone (laughs). But even when I don’t say a thing, I’ll hear behind me, ‘Ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-bum…’ It doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but it still does.”

Astin thinks it might pick up now that the first season of the show has been released on DVD, 40 years after its cancellation. He suggested that he and his wife might get better tables at restaurants, but he and the other original cast members insist that they’ve already gotten their just rewards for the show that aired during the same time as “The Munsters” and was cancelled at the same time due to both the ABC and CBS studios fearing that the brand new “Batman” series was going to sink them anyway. The plugs were pulled in absentia before any imagined bloodbaths could be taken.

“It took such a little period of life to do it. We do this to reach people and we’ve gotten so much out of it,” Astin said. “It’s been a great fortune for us.”

The show is one of the very few from that period of time that still holds up when watched today. You can’t say that about “Green Acres.” The laugh tracks are grotesque, but the writing was surprisingly superb for a network comedy. To use a current albeit awkward similarity, what’s to stop us from making the comparison between its short-lived life and the short-lived life of one “Arrested Development”? Both involved families that were so incredibly daffy, but intelligent, that they carried more than enough weight to stick out from the rest of the pack. For the Addams’, most of the struggle was with outsiders, who didn’t know how to accept their moribund ways. They were afraid for undue reasons and those in the Addams Family never assumed it was them. The Bluths dealt with the inner struggle between personalities, but ultimately didn’t give a damn about how they were looked at. Like the Addams’, they were gone too quickly as well. Astin quotes Aristotle frequently in explaining the show, but falls upon one of the philosopher’s most famous bits as the majority synopsis.

“Aristotle said, ‘Know thyself.’ The Addams’ knew who they were. We were weird on the outside and we were strange, but when you looked closer, you saw that this was really a very healthy family. There wasn’t a lot of conflict in the family. We were never telling anyone else how to live. Moralizing was absent,” he said. “They were all about the joy and wonder of life. It was a creation of magic and wonder that’s rare even today in motion pictures.”