Quick! Name the color of the Addams Family‘s living room wallpaper!

Black? Brown? Corpse green? Wrong! The correct answer is … pink?

Ever since famed New Yorker cartoonist drew the first one-panel cartoon back in 1938, the gleefully ghoulish Addams Family–Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Thing–have seemed to exist in a world with a palette as muted as an Arkham graveyard. Yet Morticia’s interior design swatch was apparently more Romy Schneider than Edward Gorey. A recently rediscovered shot of the 1964 sitcom’s Addams Family set reveals that the black-and-white world we think TV’s most morbid family inhabited was actually far more colorful than any of us expected.





The picture was taken by photographer Richard Fish. A freelancer who took a number of on-location shots for publications such as Better Homes and Gardens and the Los Angeles Times, this particular shot was taken for TV Guide and reveals that the Addams Family set featured a very surprising palette of salmon, sea glass, buttercup, and more.

When you actually think about it, of course the Addams Family set was colorful. Instead of going to all the expense of creating a set that would feel at home in a Tim Burton film, all they needed to do was reuse props from other TV shows and film in black-and-white with atmospheric lightning. And yet, it still seems so wrong to think of Gomez bounding down a bright, florally carpeted staircase, or for Morticia to drape herself mysteriously against some buttercup-yellow curtains, not just because we associate the Addams Family with monochrome, but because in many ways our brains really do believe that, somehow, color is a fairly recent invention, and that the past exists without color until we see that color for ourselves.





It may seem weird to see the Addams Family set as it really was, but why must the ghastly, the gruesome, the aberrant and the macabre be forced to embrace such consistently monotonous color schemes? Who are you to tell the Addams family that pink can’t be creepy, when they know creepy better than anyone? Never forget the Addams family motto: Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc. “We feast on those who would subdue us.” That goes doubly for those who would subdue their palette.