The Addams Family -- Uncle Fester's Toupee

DVD time, with the Addams Family. It's amazing how nice this show looks, how crisp, all the episodes, and the way the characters and running gags don't get tiresome.

This one features Uncle Fester. I wonder who's uncle he actually is. Gomez says to him that he has Addams' blood flowing through him, but when he's asked his last name, he doesn't know. So I don't know either. I've never looked it up at an official fan site, but I've always assumed Mama was Morticia's mother, and that Fester was her uncle, Mama's brother. That would explain the rancor seen between Fester and Mama from time to time, a little bit of competition. But in that case Fester wouldn't be an Addams, excluding inbreeding, of course. Maybe they want it to be intentionally vague, hence his lack of memory as to what his last name is.

The set-up for this one is that he has a pen-pal, a woman, and he's done what a lot of online people reportedly have done, make up things about themselves that aren't true. I seem to recall an Andy Griffith show with this premise as well, in which Howard the Barber makes himself out to be a wealthy playboy or something, for the sake of impressing a lady. Well, Fester, who doesn't actually seem like the pen-pal writing type, has this lady friend out there. He's represented himself as having a full head of hair, of being a football player, of being a Cary Grant type.

So what to do about the hair. We have a section in which toupees are tried on, not by Fester, but by Gomez, to give to Fester later. That's pretty funny. There's even a mohawk toupee!

The lady shows up, Fester looks great, it seems like they'll be a couple from then on. He even does the kissing her arm when she speaks French bit. Prompting Morticia to say the funniest line of the show, "You men have such a low boiling point."

The other Addams aren't too thrilled with this change in their lives, and so they turn her off to Fester, prompting her to dump him unceremoniously and even call him Baldy.

Lurch is up for some great growing in this one. Thing is there to do some things. And all works out well. Mama is nowhere to be seen, the kids, gone.

The episode is very SIT-COM.