The Addams Family is everywhere again, thanks to the success of Wednesday, Tim Burton’s runaway hit Netflix series. There’s a bingeable show, merch, food tie-ins everywhere from Wendy’s to Cheetos, and so much more. It’s a new boom time for the franchise, and it all started back in 1991.
The family as a concept has been around for nearly a century, as creator Charles Addams’ comics first began appearing all the way back in 1938. The modern Addams Family, though? That doesn’t come from those comics, or from the 1960s television series still beloved by a great many fans. No, if we want to trace the origins of the modern incarnation of the family, we have to start with Barry Sonnenfeld’s duo of Addams Family films from the early 1990s. And lucky for us all, courtesy of Kanopy, they’re now available to watch completely free with a library card.
Like the comic strips and the TV series before them, 1991’s The Addams Family and 1993’s Addams Family Values are wonderful macabre horror-comedies about the lives of the title family, led by father Gomez (Raul Julia) and mother Morticia (Anjelica Huston). The first film follows the family as they deal with a scheme to steal their riches through longstanding tension with Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd), while the second follows the family’s expansion as Fester gets a girlfriend and Gomez and Morticia add a new child to their brood. Both films are packed with dark humor, wonderfully inventive 1990s visual effects, and, of course, lots of instantly quotable lines.
So, why are the films having another moment right now on free streaming? We can thank Wednesday for a lot of that, of course, as well as the recently concluded Halloween season. Fans want something fun and comforting to watch amid all the horrors, and if you’re a ’90s kid with a dark sense of humor, few things are more comforting than a double feature of these two movies.
There’s just something magical about them, from the production design to the music to the wonderfully committed performances from Huston, Julia, and Joan Cusack, who steals Values out from under the rest of the cast. Yes, the franchise has a long history, but we wouldn’t have gotten the Addams Family animated movies, let alone Wednesday, without a deep and abiding love for these movies in the fandom.
So, if you’re a Wednesday fan and you feel like a little throwback, or you just want to watch two of your favorite movies from when you were a kid, The Addams Family and Addams Family Values are just a couple of clicks away.
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