The Munster's Are On!

During the 1970s, I could not wait to get home from school and watch old reruns of The Munster’s. The series originally aired on CBS on Thursday nights at 7:30 p.m. from September 24, 1964, through May 12, 1966. However, it was always one of my favorite television shows.

The show was produced by the creators of Leave it to Beaver, and 70 episodes were produced. It was an American sitcom about the home life of benign monsters. The series running gag is that the odd-looking family with strange tastes considers itself to be an average American family.

The Munster’s are a Transylvanian-American family living at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in a run-down looking old Victorian type of home in the fictional city of Mockingbird Heights.

Herman Munster is the family’s sole wage-earner who works at the city’s morgue. Herman (Frankenstein’s monster) was portrayed by Fred Gwynne. Gwynne also starred in Car 54, Where Are You? which aired on NBC from September 1961 through April 1963.

Yvonne De Carlo portrayed Lily Munster as Herman’s vampire wife. Al Lewis portrayed Grandpa Munster, (Count Dracula), Beverly Owen portrayed their average looking niece (the first year, later replaced by actress Pat Priest). Butch Patrick portrayed Eddie their werewolf son. The family pet named “Spot” was a fire-breathing dragon that lived under the stairs.

The Munster’s was known for its campy, slapstick comedy, playful supernatural themes, and quirky lovable characters. The show focused on Herman as the head of the household, and he was always getting himself into some strange situations and usually had to be rescued by Grandpa or Lily.

The show satirized the typical family sitcom of the era: the well-meaning father, the nurturing mother, the eccentric live-in relative, the naïve teenager and the precocious child. The show referenced several real sitcoms. In one episode Lily tells Herman to have a father-son talk with Eddie because a thing like this is up to the father.

The Munster’s reflected change in social attitudes during the civil rights era, and in 2020 a speech that Herman makes to Eddie in the 1965 episode “Eddie’s Nickname” went viral: Herman told Eddie, the lesson I want you to learn is that it doesn’t matter what you look like. Whether you are tall or short; or fat or thin; or ugly or handsome-like your father, (Herman was green) or you can be black, or yellow or white, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the size of your heart and the strength of your character.

Al Lewis, who portrayed Grandpa, once said, “We could do a lot of satirical things on society that you couldn’t do on an ordinary show. Lewis said, “Philosophically, the format is that in spite of the way people look to you physically, underneath there is a heart of gold.”

In 1965, The Munster’s was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series but lost to the Rogues.

The show was cancelled in 1966 after ratings had dropped to a series low in the face of competition from ABC’s Batman.

The Munster’s was not initially a ratings hit, but it gained a strong following and became a cult classic over the years, especially through reruns. The show found a large audience in syndication and the show’s influence continues. The Munster family is still considered one of the iconic monster families in pop culture.

The characters: Fred Gwynne, died on July 2, 1993, in Taneytown, Maryland, at his farm home after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Yvonne De Carlo suffered a stroke in 1998 and retired to the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s home in Woodland Hills, California. She died penniless on January 8, 2007, at the age of 84.

Al Lewis, in 2003, was hospitalized at Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City, for an angioplasty. Complications from the surgery led to an emergency bypass and the amputation of his right leg below the knee, as well as the toes on his left foot. He died on February 3, 2006, of natural causes at the age of 82.

Beverly Owen (The first Marilyn) died of ovarian cancer on February 21, 2019, at the age of 81 in Londonderry, Vermont.

Pat Priest (The second Marilyn) In 2001, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She finished treatments at Saint Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute and was later determined to be in remission. She is 88 and lives in Idaho today.

Butch Patrick, on September 11, 2016, he married his long-term girlfriend Leila Murray, and he is 71.  

 I met Butch Patrick at a car show in St. Petersburg, Florida in July of 2014. He was there with the gold coffin car that grandpa drove in one of the episodes of The Munster’s. We started talking about cars and the conversation turned to The Munster’s. I told him it was one of my all-time favorite shows of the 1960s and he told me he really enjoyed working on the series. Then he pulled out a gold ink pen from his shirt pocket and got a photo of him, and all the cast of The Munster’s, signed it in gold ink, and gave me a copy. He was a very friendly and humble man.