Friday, October 05, 2012

31 Days of Dracula | Grandpa Munster (1964)



While Hammer was succeeding at making classic monsters scary again in the UK, people in the US had decided that they were pretty silly. Monster Mania caught on in pop culture during the '60s, but it was a tame, funny version. For the most part, classic monsters were tamed down versions for the kids of their original fans.

Even Universal contributed to the transition. In the late-'40s, Looney Tunes animator Bob Clampett had pitched Universal a series of cartoons about a family of monsters and the idea was kicked around for a decade or so until Universal's parent company, MCA decided to run with it as a live-action sitcom. When word got out that ABC was doing a series based on Charles Addams' popular comics about a macabre family, MCA got moving and quickly sold their show - with Al Lewis as the Dracula-like grandfather - to CBS. Both The Addams Family and The Munsters ran from 1964 to 1966 and were cancelled within a month of each other due to the popularity of Batman and color TV in general.

4 comments:

Erik Johnson Illustrator said...

Batman upstages a Bat-Man. Just chew on that for a while.

Michael May said...

I'll never think of Batman: Red Rain the same way again.

Wings1295 said...

I never realized Grampa was actually DRACULA when I was a kid!

Michael May said...

I don't think he's literally Dracula (though I could be wrong about that). I just included him because he's so obviously in that...er...vein.

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