WEDNESDAY, SEASON ONE

WEDNESDAY, SEASON 1 (2022)

review by BK MUNN

When I was a kid, like everybody I watched reruns of The Addams Family on tv. In retrospect, it’s amazing that the show existed at all, a family sitcom based on some macabre, downright antisocial and perverse cartoons printed in the high-toned New Yorker magazine, but in the context of the times it doesn’t seem out of place. The post-Kennedy, post-Cuban Missile crisis 1960s was a time of high-concept tv shows with increasingly fantastical premises (and The Munsters premiered at the same time, for Christ’s sake). As a show, it still holds up as a goofy, only partly moronic example of 60s culture. They made some good logical decisions, shoe-horning Charles Addams’ disconnected cartoons into a network format, essentially bowdlerizing it for a mainstream audience (not that The New Yorker isn’t mainstream, but you know what I mean). It’s no smarter than Gilligan’s Island or Hogan’s Heroes, and it’s not without its own boring, repetitive schticks and annoying tics, but it lucked out with a few things, like a catchy theme song, great casting, and some creative characterizations that paid off. And for better or for worse, sixty years later the tv show is still the basis for a massive pop culture enterprise. 

As an adult I think of the work of Charles Addams, including the roughly 150 cartoons and drawings he did that can be at least tangentially identified as “Addams Family” cartoons, as something like a holy text, my Bible or Shakespeare, and in many ways the epitome of comics art. I have to admit I’m a bit snobbish about them, and hold them close to my heart (I’m sure Addams was much less precious and, like Charles Schulz, was happy to cash any checks for prostituting his creations). These days, I think of the tv shows and movies as, at best, easily-forgettable aspects of the Addams legacy and, at worst, as something like a hideous boil on the face of the Mona Lisa (maybe like something you’d find in the Addams Family portrait gallery?). That being said, I’m still able to think about the original drawings and their ancillary spinoffs as separate things, and have even watched parts of the movie franchises over the years with a clean conscience (as a kid I also liked the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning animated show!). 

Like all pop-culture properties, The Addams Family has been seized on as something endlessly franchise-able, to be mined and re-imagined and transformed into a myriad of formats and genres; a universe (dare I say multiverse?) unto itself. Our modern sophisticated tastes demand more than some Boomer artifact, and so we have this new Wednesday show, which takes one of the least-developed, most projected-upon, parts of the universe, essentially a blank slate, and posits her as a teen heroine in a sort of Harry Potter meets Nancy Drew milieu, as a goth Hermione, if you will, in one of these now stereotypical fantasy private schools. The slow addition of *actual* supernatural aspects to the "mythos", above and beyond Addams’ bedrock surrealism, placed front and center, is the novelty here, giving some kind of superpowers to all members of the clan, and special precognitive witchiness to both Morticia and Wednesday, etc. (The full scale “magic-ization” I think very clearly takes away from what made the original concepts unique, but whatever.)  I turned off most of my grumpy critical nitpicking and enjoyed this (almost too long) short series. The casting was mostly good, the plots not too moronic (gleefully full of plot-holes, lacunae, and “traveling at the speed of plot” tv tropes), and overall those things I expected to dislike (dancing to The Cramps, Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester) instead were almost charming. It’s for kids but I’m adult enough to admit I’m basically a big baby and we live in an infantile society. Tim Burton, who has been making shit like this his entire career, had a hand in production and development, and directs half the episodes (the poster says this conglomeration of cliches and half-assed plots comes "from the imagination of Tim Burton" which is quite the self-own but also, which part?), and I can’t really say I hate it.

I’m Sorry, the Card Says “Moops"

by BK Munn

In the Season 4, episode 7 episode of Seinfeld, “The Bubble Boy”, George plays a game of Trivia Pursuit with the obnoxious Bubble Boy and finally gets the upperhand by spitefully refusing to accept that a misprint on one of the cards should read “MOORS” instead of the nonsensical “MOOPS”.

Vexed by bubble-bound Donald Sanger's bullying during the game, George disputes the answer to the question: "Who invaded Spain in the 8th century?" Donald answers "the Moors," but due to a misprint, the question card says that the answer is "the Moops." George refuses to give Donald the point, and Donald begins strangling him. When Susan tries to help George, she accidentally depressurizes the bubble, causing Donald to collapse.

The plot of this episode is based in part on the real-life experience of Seinfeld writer Bill Masters who found the “MOOPS” answer while playing a version of the Jeopardy boardgame (the 9th edition). Here’s the card, and the game:

Now you know!

The Dr. Strange-George Costanza Connection: From Master of the Mystic Arts to Master of His Domain

by BK Munn

There's an interesting echo of the origin of Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange in one of the more famous episodes of Seinfeld, 1993’s “The Puffy Shirt”. In the episode, written by Larry David, sad sack George rockets to the top of the hand model game, but just as he feels his life is turning around, his brief career is cut short when his hubris is rewarded with inevitable destiny in the form of a carelessly-placed clothes iron.

George’s vanity is reminiscent of that displayed by high-flying surgeon Stephen Strange, who destroys his precious hands in a car accident and subsequently wanders the world searching for a cure that can restore his skill and dexterity, until he eventually winds up at the hidden Himalyan monastary of the Ancient One who trains him in the mystic arts.

George’s doom is foreshadowed by the tale of a hand model whose story is eerily similar to Stephen Strange’s and also contains a callback to another famous Seinfeld ep, “The Contest”. At his first (and last) photo shoot, George learns of the mysterious “Ray McKigney” who had “the most exquisite hands you've ever seen.” 

As the unnamed hand model agent tells it, McKigney fell victim to self-love:

MAN: Tragic story, I'm afraid. He could've had any woman in the world.. but none could match the beauty of his own hand.. and that became his one true love..

(Long pause)

GEORGE: You mean, uh..?

MAN: Yes. he was not.. master of his domain.

GEORGE: (Makes a gesture saying he understands. The man nods) But how.. uh..?

MAN: (Quick, to the point) The muscles.. became so strained with.. overuse, that eventually the hand locked into a deformed position, and he was left with nothing but a claw. (Holds hand up, displaying a claw-like shape) He traveled the world seeking a cure.. acupuncturists.. herbalists.. swamis.. nothing helped. Towards the end, his hands became so frozen the was unable to manipulate utensils, (Visibly disgusted by this last part) and was dependent on Cub Scouts to feed him. I hadn’t seen another pair of hands like Ray McKigney's.. until today. You are his successor. (George looks down at his hands) I.. only hope you have a little more self-control.

GEORGE: (Smiling to himself) You don't have to worry about me. (Nodding, gloating) I won a contest.

The egotistical Ayn Randian superman who is humbled and must painfully learn the lessons of true heroism is a Marvel Comics mainstay, from Peter Parker to Tony Stark to Dr. Strange, and the story of a professional man who suffers the loss of his hands must have had a special resonance for a cartoonist, but the Stephen Strange/Ray McKigney story has other precedents in popular culture. “The Hands of Orlac” is a 1923 silent film that popularized the medieval legend of The Hand of Glory --the disembodied body part of a dead criminal endowed with magical powers. In the film, a concert pianist loses his hands in an accident and has the hands of a murderer grafted on by an experimental surgeon. The film was remade many times, with two versions appearing just before the origin of Dr. Strange was published in Strange Tales #115 in 1963:  1960's “The Hands of Orlac” (with Mel Ferrer as Orlac and Christopher Lee as the magician “Nero”), and 1962’s “Hands of a Stranger”. It’s entirely possible that Ditko and/or his editor Stan Lee saw or read some version of this story before penning the Dr. Strange story. The film was even remade by Oliver Stone in 1981 as “The Hand”, with Michael Caine as a cartoonist (!) who loses his drawing hand in a car accident, only to have the hand return to haunt him as a murderous appendage. The cartoonist’s art in the film was supplied by real-life Marvel veteran Barry Windsor-Smith. Did Larry David encounter any of these iterations before concocting his tale of the masturbating hand model? Who can say...

The Completely Bonkers Story of How Uncle Scrooge Creator Carl Barks Also Created Lost in Space

It may be entirely apocryphal, but fan lore has it that Carl Barks pitched a Space Family Robinson comic to Gold Key editor Chase Craig around 1960, based on the then popular Disney film adaptation of Swiss Family Robinson. Barks' duck stories were full of science fiction elements and the Disney connection is a no-brainer. The actual comic debuted in 1962, written by Del Connell and designed and drawn by Dan Spiegle. When a tv series called Lost in Space featuring a family of marooned-in-the-stars Robinsons started in 1965 on CBS, the publisher and network came to an agreement that the comic book could use the Lost in Space title, since it seemed there was a clear case of influence, if not outright plagiarism involved. So now there is a new Lost in Space on Netflix. Do we owe it all to Carl Barks?