‘The Munsters’ Marathon Featured Halloween Weekend And 13 Facts You Didn’t Know About The Show

The Munsters TV series is remembered fondly by fans, especially during Halloween. Today, Paste magazine declared the show as one of the best TV sitcoms of 1966.

“The Munsters is a fairly cheesy show,” says Chris Morgan. “However, there’s a lot of fun inside that cheese, like the many, many times their adopted human [niece] Marilyn brought home a date who freaks out about meeting her family. And then there’s Grandpa Munster … kept every situation light with his Vaudeville style one-liners—at least when he wasn’t too busy driving his race car made out of a coffin.”

The CBS TV series aired for the first time on September 24, 1964, only a week after The Addams Family aired on ABC. The Munsters show was a mashup of the “all American family” TV shows like Leave It to Beaver and monster movies, which were both popular at the time. In fact, the opening credits of the show were a direct parody of The Donna Reed Show where Lily, like Donna, handed out lunches to her family members as they left for the day.

Filmed at Universal Studios, The Munsters family members resembled the studios’ classic monsters, including Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman. Filmed in black and white, the show’s ratings plummeted during the second season after Batman arrived on ABC in full color, and the show was finally canceled.

Fans of the show will be glad to know that COZI TV will air a Munsters Marathon for Halloween weekend on October 29 and 30 from 1:00-6:30 p.m. However, even some the show’s biggest fans might be surprised to learn some of these interesting facts about the sitcom:

• Fred Gwynne (who played Herman Munster) and Al Lewis (Grandpa) had worked together before on the NBC sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? from 1961 to 1963.
• Yvonne De Carlo, who played Lily Munster, was featured in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments in 1956, playing Sephora, the wife of Moses. Initially, both Gwynne and Lewis were not very keen about De Carlo taking the role, but after working with the actress, they soon agreed that the studio had made the right choice.
• Al Lewis was actually a year younger than Yvonne De Carlo, who played his daughter.
• There were actually two Marilyns during the show’s run. Beverley Owen played the “homely” niece of Herman and Lily for the show’s first 13 episodes. She left The Munsters and was replaced by Pat Priest. The two actresses looked and sounded so much alike that many fans never noticed the change.
• The Munsters‘ theme song was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965.
• Butch Patrick, who played Eddie, recorded a pop record to the tune of the show’s theme song in the early ’80s called “What Ever Happened to Eddie?” as Eddie and the Monsters.
• In 2015, Fall Out Boy sampled the show’s theme for their hit song, “Uma Thurman.”
• The Munster’s house was originally built for the 1946 movie So Goes My Love and has been seen in other TV series (albeit with some modifications), including Leave It to Beaver, Shirley, Coach, and Desperate Housewives.
• According to IMDB, the original pilot for The Munsters was partially shot on the Psycho film set.
• The family’s cars, the Munster Koach and the Drag-U-La, were both built by George Barris who also designed the Batmobile.
• Mel Blanc, who voiced many Warner Bros. cartoon characters, including Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, voiced the raven who would pop out of the family’s cuckoo clock and spout off “Never more!”

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With our body temperatures running at only 54° we are one cool family. #TheMunsters pic.twitter.com/QLfFiK1a3x

— Hermie (@justa_munster) October 22, 2016

• A syndicated remake of the show titled The Munsters Today aired from 1988 to 1991 and starred John Schuck (Herman), Lee Meriwether (Lily), Howard Morton (Grandpa), Hilary Van Dyke (Marilyn), and Jason Marsden (Eddie).
• In 2012, a re-imagining of The Munsters series was written by Bryan Fuller. Bryan Singer directed a pilot for the new series, Mockingbird Lane, that aired as a Halloween special on NBC and starred Jerry O’Connell (Herman), Portia de Rossi (Lily), Eddie Izzard (Grandpa), Charity Wakefield (Marilyn), and Mason Cook (Eddie). The new show had a much darker and even grotesque tone that didn’t resonate with either NBC executives or viewers, and the show was not picked up.

[Featured Image by AP Images]