The Munsters
Debut: January 01, 1964
Ended: January 01, 1966

A TV series on CBS about a series of benign monsters. The Munsters live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the city of Mockingbird Heights, a fictional suburb in California. The family, while decidedly odd, consider themselves fairly typical working-class people of the era. Herman, like many husbands of the 1960s, is the sole wage-earner in the family, though Lily and Grandpa make (short-lived) attempts to earn a little money from time to time. While Herman is the "head of household," Lily actually makes many decisions too. Despite the novel approach of the family being (mostly) supernatural creatures, the show followed the typical family sitcom formula – the well-meaning father, the nurturing mother, the eccentric live-in relative, the naive teenager and the precocious kid. There are some superficial similarities between The Munsters and Addams Family in that both were shows with a gothic look that featured families of horror-movie characters incongruent with their mainstream suburban communities, the two shows were quite different in tone and characterization. Overall, the characters of The Addams Family were wealthy eccentrics who generally stayed at home, while the Munsters were a blue-collar and generally outgoing family of legendary monsters. The costumes and appearances of the family members other than Marilyn were based on the classic monsters of Universal Studios films from the 1930s and 1940s. Universal produced The Munsters as well, and was thus able to use these copyrighted designs, including their iconic version of Frankenstein's monster for Herman. Other studios were free to make films with the Frankenstein creature, for example, but could not use the costume and style of makeup originally created by Jack Pierce for the 1931 Universal Studios film Frankenstein. The make-up for the show was created and applied to the actors by horror make-up legend Bud Westmore, who pioneered many make-up effects and designs for many of the Universal Monster movies.

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