A sadder but wiser Addams Family
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - 1 Comment
Transformed into a Broadway musical, the kooky characters turn introspective
Photographs by Joan Marcus; Getty; Keystone; istock;
A musical about the Addams Family? How do you write songs for people who live near a cemetery and keep a disembodied arm as a pet? When cartoonist Charles Addams created his series of New Yorker cartoons about a family with scary tastes, he set in motion one of the longest-running pop culture franchises. There’s already been a popular sitcom and two feature films (The Addams Family and Addams Family Values), and director Tim Burton is about to make a 3-D stop-motion animated movie about the characters. But all those projects had to do was translate Addams’s humour, and his belief that death rays and guillotines are part of everyday life. The Addams Family musical, opening April 8 with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, is trying to do something even weirder: prove, as composer-lyricist Andrew Lippa told Maclean’s, that these characters are “human and feeling” and can “sing something heartfelt.”
That’s a pretty big risk, considering that the only previous song about the characters was the TV show’s theme, which told us they were “creepy,” “kooky,” and “altogether ooky.” The musical is expected to make Morticia (Neuwirth) sing about her fears of growing older, and give Gomez (Lane) what Lippa considers a “really touching” ballad. That could give a new dimension to Addams’s famous characters. But it could also be more gruesome than anything he ever drew.
Not that the basic set-up of the musical, written by Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman (Jersey Boys), is any different from other versions of the franchise. All of them—including a Saturday morning cartoon and The New Addams Family, a cheap Canadian-made remake of the original sitcom—follow the lead of Addams, who started drawing these weird-looking people in 1938. Kevin Miserocchi, who edited a new Addams cartoon collection called The Addams Family: An Evilution, says that the cartoons had “recognition and a following by the reading public 30 years before they were ever translated into television.” What Addams gave to the public was a wealthy couple, Gomez and Morticia Addams, who have two children (plus some elderly live-in relatives) and a family habit of dressing in black, collecting instruments of torture, and telling guests “if you need anything, just scream.”
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Making fun of Canadian history
By Alex Shimo - Friday, March 13, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 13 Comments
A 25-year-old’s comics feature characters like John Diefenbaker and Margaret Trudeau
Was Lester B. Pearson too nice to be prime minister? Was John Diefenbaker a mad, bug-eyed egotist? And was Pierre and Margaret Trudeau’s marital relationship a little like that of father and daughter? These are the sorts of questions 25-year-old Kate Beaton gently probes in her series of comics on Canadian history, which are unusual enough to have sparked the sort of praise most writers spend a lifetime cultivating.Originally from Cape Breton, Beaton is a Toronto-based cartoonist who has fans ranging from award-winning graphic novelists to geeky comic nerds. In the little over a year she’s been doing the comics, her work has been talked about on the website Wonkette and in Bitch magazine; a reviewer for Wired magazine called Beaton’s the “funniest comic that I’ve read in awhile.” Recently Daily Show writer Sam Means approached her to illustrate a children’s book he is writing. About 10 other agents and publishers have asked her to write a book, but so far she’s refused. Still finding her feet, Beaton wants to find out more about the industry so she doesn’t get shortchanged. Also, since she hasn’t yet drawn enough to fill a book, she doesn’t want to become “overwhelmed.”
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So a banker walks into a bar… II
By Jason Kirby - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 4:54 PM - 1 Comment
There seems to be quite a bit of demand for levity these days, judging…
There seems to be quite a bit of demand for levity these days, judging by the interest in my previous post about humour amidst the financial crisis. So here are some more jokes and cartoons to help ease the pain.
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Another Cartoon for the Commission
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 12:47 PM - 0 Comments
From the Seattle-Post Intelligencer: An insult to John McCain? Or to old people married to people who have abused prescription drugs and who want to bomb Iran while burning the U.S. Constitution? Or just an insult to people who believe that describes John McCain?
Update: No, wait, it’s the “irony challenged literalists” who didn’t get the first cartoon who should be launching the complaint for being subjected to such ridicule.
via Ben Smith and Andrew Sullivan
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Good News and Bad/Weird News
By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments
Good news: Popeye the Sailor vol. 3 will be released on DVD in September (the second volume comes out next week). This will give us all the Popeye cartoons made by the Fleischer studio, plus many of the WWII cartoons when Popeye beat up on the Axis powers. It’ll probably have a disclaimer about the racially-insensitive material, but the cartoons will be uncut, except for the titles — Warners has a habit of reconstructing the titles by affixing a Paramount logo to the old syndication prints.
Bad/weird news: On that same day, Warners is also bringing out four episodes of the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon series Popeye and Son. This was… this… no, I can’t even put into words how deeply wrong this is. You know that cartoon special a few years ago where Popeye was done in bad 3-D animation and it made you seasick just to watch him move? This is more offensive in many ways. And I love Maurice LaMarche, but he just isn’t Popeye.
Update: Turns out these episodes are not from Popeye and Son but from an earlier Hanna-Barbera version of Popeye, The All-New Popeye Hour. That was pretty bad too, but regular late ’70s Hanna-Barbera crappy, rather than insanely wrong like saddling Popeye with a wife and a blond surfer kid. Sorry for the confusion, and either way, get the good Popeye cartoons, not the bad made-for-TV ones.
