Paul Farquhar
Legend
YMMMV.I don't know how old you two are, but I was born in the 70s roughly a full decade after it was cancelled, and The Addams Family television show was a staple of daytime television while I was growing up. The majority of teenagers who went to see the movie in 1991 were familiar with the property because they watched the show when they were younger. Contrast that with Dick Tracy, I doubt any of the teenagers who went to see it had seen the Dick Tracy serials from the 30s, the movie from the 40s, and I bet a lot of them had never read the comic. Dick Tracy was out of date and out of touch, but The Addams Family wasn't.
Oh, and The Addams Family gave us one of the best pinball games ever!
They didn't have daytime TV (apart from the Open University) when I was growing up.
But the point is, the Addams Family movies succeeded because they were good, not because of the IP.
Which brings us back to this:
Tim Burton's Batman succeeded because of Tim Burton, not because there was a huge public demand for highly stylised comic book movies. Stylised movies are distancing, and it's hard for an audience to empathise which characters who are portrayed as fundamentally unreal. If you aren't an auteur you should aim for naturalism, it's easier to pull off. The 1945 Dick Tracy movie was naturalistic, and a much better film.I don't think it was bad at all. It was was a perfectly fine movie for which no one was clamoring, with an advertising budget it couldn't hope to make up, and indeed put out in the wrong decade. It was trying to be the next Batman (all the Mystery Men movies of the 90s were), when it really would have done better alongside (and with a total budget equaling or being less than) Superman II. It was corny and knew it. It used bright primary colors (offset by shadows) instead of Batman black-in-shadow. It included a plucky kid who at one point saves the day. It features dueling female love interests for the male protagonist (a Helen and an Amy). The special effects are almost exclusively in the makeup department, with limited fantastic physics using techniques that were used in the 50s. It was a nice, simple, late 70s/early 80s hokey comic book movie that would have worked just fine in a pre-Batman world (and pre-Batman budget). Especially if it was a property that people wanted to see remade. As to that, I have no idea how it works. The Adams Family was out of date and out of touch (not as much, being peoples' parent's IP, not their grandparents) when the
Last edited: