The Munsters All Look Like Universal Monsters for the Most Hollywood of Reasons
The Munsters have drawn comparisons to The Addams Family for half a century, and it’s easy to see why. Both sitcoms premiered in the fall 1964 television season, both center families that would be more at home in a Halloween carnival than their idyllic suburban neighborhoods, and oh, yeah, The Munsters literally ripped off The Addams Family. Producer Allan Burns, who pitched the show alongside Chris Hayward, admitted as much. “We sort of stole the idea from Charles Addams and his New Yorker cartoons about these weird-looking people who lived in this house and were just bizarre,” he explained. “We envisioned this family of very weird people.”
What they didn’t envision — and what mostly differentiates The Munsters from The Addams Family, at least on a superficial level — was that those weird people would be actual monsters, including vampires, werewolves and Frankensteins. After Burns and Hayworth pitched the idea to Universal Studios, the network assigned the project to two staff writers, Ed Haas and Norm Liebmann, who remodeled the characters in the images of the icons of the Universal Monsters franchise. “Because Universal owned the Frankenstein character and the Dracula character for movie rights, they decided to take their characters instead of the characters we had written, which were just sort of bizarre, weird people.”
It made perfect sense from the studio’s perspective: They could tap into a preexisting audience, recycle props and costumes, and seamlessly pump out merchandise. If there’s an opportunity to save and/or make a buck, Hollywood is gonna take it.
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That included, in Burns’s estimation, ripping him and Hayworth off. Not only had Universal altered their idea in a way that they “hated,” “they’d also stolen it from us,” Burns said. “So we went to the Writers Guild of America … and the Writers Guild must have made veiled or maybe not-so-veiled threats of lawsuits, and they settled and gave us a settlement mostly based on merchandising and a credit of ‘From a format by.’”
Although he and Hayworth became “persona non grata at Universal,” Burns bragged that the settlement helped him and his wife buy their first house.
It’s unclear how much of it he gave to Charles Addams.
