'Addams Family'

Google Doodle Honors 'Addams Family' Creator Charles Addams

• By Chloe Albanesius
• January 7, 2012 12:00am EST

Halloween was more than two months ago, but the Google homepage still has a rather ghoulish quality to it today. The search giant is celebrating the 100th birthday of Addams Family creator Charles Addams with a doodle featuring the famously spooky family.

Helping celebrate is the entire Addams family—Morticia, Gomez, Cousin It, Pugsley, Wednesday, Lurch, and Uncle Fester. They are drawn in black and white and shown standing in front of their mansion and the Google logo.

A New Jersey native, Charles Samuel Addams was born in 1912 (on Elm Street, no less).

By the age of 21, his artistic talents help him land his first cartoon in The New Yorker, though he did not become a full-time contributor until 1940. Addams remained at the magazine until his death in 1988, drawing more than 1,300 cartoons. The first Addams Family cartoon made its appearance in August 1938.

"It depicted a curvaceous, dark-haired woman in a spidery black dress inside a dark, dilapidated Victorian house listening patiently to a vacuum salesman who was oblivious to the home's disrepair—cobwebs, bats, and broken balusters," according to a biography from Pennsylvania State University. "More cartoons about the vamp, soon christened as Morticia, and her ghoulish family followed."

The family truly came to life in 1964, when a producer asked Addams to turn his comics into a TV series. The Addams Family was only on the air for two years, but can still be found in syndication.

The series became a feature-length movie in 1991 (with a sequel in 1993), starring Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia as Morticia and Gomez. Throughout the 90s, there was also an animated series and another live-action TV show. In 2010, the family came to Broadway in a musical starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth as the famous couple; it ran until Dec. 31, 2011.

"Ghoulish, macabre, demonic, depraved, bizarre, eerie, and weird have all been used to describe his work and the characters therein," according to a biography from the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation. "Adorable, sweet, charming, humorous, enchanting, tender, and captivating are also adjectives used to describe the same body of work, as well as the man himself, the extraordinary artist Charles Addams. His rare gift was the ability to enjoin such dichotomies in wonderfully crafted cartoons and drawings loved by millions worldwide."

The foundation was created in 1999 by Addams' widow Tee, who passed away in 2002. It is housed at the couple's Sagaponack, New York property, dubbed the Swamp.

For more on Google's doodles, meanwhile, see the slideshow below. One of the company's more popular doodles last year was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The company has also honored Gumby creator Art Clokey, Muppets creator Jim Henson, Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce.

In 2011, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

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From left to right, Pugsley, Wednesday, Gomez, Uncle Fester, Morticia.

The Addams Family is a group of fictional characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. As named by Charles Addams, the Addams Family characters include Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Thing.

The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal American family; an eccentric, wealthy clan who delight in the macabre and are unaware that people find them bizarre or frightening. They originally appeared as an unrelated group of 150 single panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker between 1938 and Addams's 1988 death. They have since been adapted to other media, including television series (both live and animated) films, video games, and a musical.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/the-addams-family#ixzz1iqWWXf1E