I'm not sure whether the 1960s "The Addams Family" TV show ever made its way to Japanese channels like so many other American sitcoms and dramas of its time, but the 1991 movie adaptation did make its mark in Japan, spawning a half-decade campaign involving most of the cast from the movie to hawk the Honda Odyssey that I remember seeing all the time.
What connected the 1964 sitcom to the 1991 movie though was the famous theme song. Now, I was probably too young to remember watching "The Addams Family" in its first run (September 1964 - April 1966) but the show always showed up in reruns on the local ABC affiliate in Buffalo, New York in the late afternoons. And of course, I was greeted by the fun if gothic theme by composer and singer Vic Mizzy. Mizzy is already here on KKP due to his creation of the "Green Acres" theme a year later that I posted as a ROY article.
Until I looked up Mizzy on Wikipedia, I had no idea that he had been behind both the themes for "Green Acres" and "The Addams Family" and that he was the one singing the "ooky and kooky" lyrics for the latter song. The song wasn't only catchy but it was audience-participatory because of the need to snap those fingers. By the way, at the time that I first got to know Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the Addams clan, I hadn't known that they were based on the cartoons by Charles Addams in "The New Yorker". I think Raul Julia's Gomez from the 1991 movie looks to be the closest to Charles' depiction in "The New Yorker", but I will always have a softer spot for John Astin's slightly unhinged Groucho Marx-like portrayal of the suave Gomez on the TV series.
