The Addams Family - What the Heck Happened?

An animated Addams Family movie came out in 2019. I skipped it in the theater and I'm glad I did. It had very little to do with the traditional characters and was just kind of boring.

The Addams Family began as recurring characters in cartoon drawings by Charles Addams. They were a bazaar set of characters employing black humor. What we think of as the Addams Family came from a 1960s TV adaptation. That's where the names and personalities came from. The Addams family was made into a pair of movies in 1991 and 1993 with some direct-to-video sequels and a brief revival of the TV show using updated versions of the 1990s scripts.

At presented in those versions, the Addams Family was a gentle, living family who make a point of not judging people. They assumed the best of nearly everyone. People might break into their house to rob them and still be greeted with open arms. If the kids wanted to do something that to the Addams's seemed strange and weird (like join the Boy Scouts), they went along with it.

The 2019 version lost all that. In the new version, the family was driven from Europe by ignorant villagers who thought they were monsters. They settled in New Jersey in an run-down mansion overlooking the town of "assimilation" that was being redeveloped into a place of forced conformity. But here's the twist, the Addams Family was presented as just as conformist. The children were miserable because they were expected to follow the family's traditions and values. In the TV show, Morticia wore a Boy Scout bandana to make her son happy. In the movie she had a fit when her daughter wore a colorful hair clip.

In the TV show and the live-action movies the Addams Family was presented as the ideal family once you got past their strange culture. Not so the animated version.

None of the character traits from the TV show or movie were present in the animated movie, either. It's like the writers looked at a few of the cartoons and watched the first movie then decided to ditch everything and write a movie about tolerance involving monsters. Hotel Transylvania did it better as did a bunch of other movies.

Did I mention it was boring?

There were some attempts at humor. They weren't very successful.

When you get down to it, it wasn't really the Addams Family. It was some people who looked like them but were completely different people.