Transcript
Anthony Ramirez: If you’re going to go into this idea of representing marginalized communities or people of color, in this specific case the Latinx, Latine community, go in, go in fully with it.
Teri Finneman: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told. I’m Teri Finneman, a professional journalism historian, guiding you through our own drafts of history, with audio editing by Cami Koons.
They’re ooky and they’re spooky and actually got their start in journalism history. Almost 90 years ago, the makings of The Addams Family started and most recently took shape in the Netflix show, Wednesday. In this episode, we examine how that moment in journalism history has led to some notable research of entertainment history and popular memory through an examination of the first season of Wednesday. Our guest today is Anthony Ramirez, who talks about his co-authored book chapter in the upcoming book, Popular Culture and Public Memory: Media Representation, Nostalgia and the Politics of the Past, edited by Lisa Burns and Carrie Isard.
Anthony, welcome to the show. I want to start out by talking about the history of The Addams Family, which I was fascinated to find actually has ties to journalism history. So, Charles Addams was a cartoonist for The New Yorker when he drew his first cartoon that set the stage for the creation of the family. Smithsonian Magazine wrote a story about it and said that only 58 of his 1,300 cartoons for The New Yorker revolved around what became The Addams Family, with most running in the 1940s and 1950s, but certainly a legacy was born that we’re still talking about today. So, tell us a bit more about the history of The Addams Family and where it went from there.
Anthony Ramirez: So, first of all, thank you, Teri, for having me on the podcast. It’s wonderful being here. And I’m going to be fully transparent with you. Prior to writing this book chapter with my co-author, Raiana de Carvalho, we both knew about the movies, we knew about the classic television series and the comic strips, of course, and even the cartoons that came out of the ‘90s, but we weren’t really familiar with the lore and the full extensive history that is The Addams Family franchise. And so, for both of us, this was a really cool way of learning and going down that rabbit hole of The Addams Family franchise.
And so, upon learning upon the various history of it, one of the things that I thought was so interesting, starting from the early aspect of it, so in 1964, that’s when… Well, it first started in 1938, as you mentioned, through The New Yorker, Charles Addams started to create the comic strip series that then grew into the franchise. And 30 years later is when The Addams Family television show premiered in the 1960s, 1964, I believe. And as popular and nostalgic as that series is, one thing I found so fascinating about it is that it only ran for two seasons. And it’s one of those things that I think lives in people’s heads a long time, because that show really did set the momentum for the franchise growing into what it is today.
And so, a couple of things that I want to highlight in terms of the history is that in 1991, in the 1990s, specifically within 1991, that’s when the history or kind of the rejuvenation of The Addams Family truly started to begin, because we started to see The Addams Family film and the sequel, the Addams Family Values. And that was with Raul Julia, Christina Ricci, Christopher Lloyd, Anjelica Huston. And then in the 1990s, we also had the animated series that I remember growing up and watching.
So, it was cool in the ’90s, there was a resurgence of The Addams Family, but then that kind of fell off a bit. But then in the 2010s, there was a Broadway show with Nathan Lane as Gomez Addams, and it got mediocre reviews and didn’t last too, too long on Broadway. But then we started to see the precursor to what would later be the discussion of our book chapter. And so, what that precursor was, was a YouTube series that focused on Wednesday Addams. And this was an unofficial piece of the franchise. It was just a YouTube series created by Melissa Hunter.
And one of the things that, again, is really interesting about this particular part of the history is that the people who own The Addams Family franchise and copyrights put a cease and desist letter to her and were like, “Please remove anything from this, because it’s not officially a part of the franchise, a part of the lore.” But I felt that it was important to include that, because it was just such an interesting piece that kind of correlates to the main subject of the book chapter, which is Wednesday from Netflix, which I’ll get into a little bit more.
But prior to Wednesday in 2019 and 2021, we had two animated films with Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron that again brought back the franchise of The Addams Family a bit more. But it was in between those two films where the topic of the conversation really began of Tim Burton’s new iteration of Wednesday on Netflix. And so, that series came out in 2022 and it was a pretty huge success. And, as you know, Jen Ortega became a huge star from that. And we also have Luis Guzmán who played Gomez Addams and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia. Then we had Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester, just to name a few of the actors in that show. But yeah, it was a huge success, huge hit, and it was really interesting to see how the franchise evolved and grew into what it is today.
Teri Finneman: Yeah. So why did you want to study The Addams Family in the first place and then more specifically the Wednesday Netflix show?
Anthony Ramirez: So, I like to think of this as the origin story of the conversation that. So, when Raiana and I first met, we had met through our mutual advisor who’s now in Syracuse, Dr. Srividya Ramasubramanian, shout out to Dr. Srivi. And Raiana and I met through Dr. Srivi through conversation and through a convention that we went to, an academic conference. And so, I went to go support another friend of mine, but Raiana was also part of that panel conversation. And I saw that she was doing a presentation on another Netflix series called On My Block, and she was analyzing Latinidad of the series along with two other co-authors of hers. And so, afterwards I had a chance to talk with her, and we were talking about them like, “One of these days we’ve got to work on a project together and see what we can do.”
And so, in between that time, that’s when we started thinking about… I had started thinking about Wednesday, the Netflix series Wednesday, because I started to notice that within that series that there was a lot of cool, little, I’ll call them Easter eggs or cultural signifiers of Latinidad. And that got me thinking, “Ooh, this would be an interesting paper to cover in regard to this series, because I would’ve never have thought of The Addams Family as Latinos, Latinx, Latine,” whatever term you want to use or the audience is comfortable using or hearing. I always like to give that preface.
But once I talked to Raiana about that, she was like,” Oh, that’s a really cool idea.” So that’s when the project started to first build its foundation and take shape through that one conversation. And we started thinking about it in that aspect and we started thinking, “Okay, how can we talk about Wednesday or The Addams Family’s form of Latinidad?” And then like I said, the project then evolved into what it became today, into the book chapter that you had a chance to read and hopefully your listeners have a chance to read down the line as well. So it definitely built upon our conversations and just wanting to work and collaborate with one another. But then through those little cultural nuances that we saw in the series, that’s what kind of propelled the project forward.
Teri Finneman: Yeah. So, for those who haven’t seen Wednesday on Netflix, give us just a 30-second summary of what the show is about.
Anthony Ramirez: It’s a young adult comedy drama starring Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, the title character. It builds on the franchise of The Addams Family lore, for sure. And so, yeah, the series definitely follows Wednesday Addams and she attends this new academy called… This academy, excuse me, not new academy, this academy that’s dedicated to “outcasts” that are… And the outcasts are people who are with supernatural abilities. And through the series, she’s attending this academy and trying to learn more about herself as she’s developing these new psychic abilities. And then at that moment, there’s a lot of tensions within the area of Jericho, Vermont, where Nevermore is, between the outcasts of Nevermore and the normies of Jericho. And so, the normies are just regular people. That’s just the terms that are used within the series.
And so, through that, there’s also another mystery that starts to unfold about a monster that’s lurking within Jericho and Nevermore. And on top of that, there’s also aspects of Wednesday’s own family past and history that comes into play. And so, it’s a really cool, interesting mystery, young adult comedy drama, like I mentioned, that really focuses on, again, Wednesday being this title character and how she learns about herself, learns about her history and the secrets of Jericho and Nevermore in the process of things.
Teri Finneman: So, a key focus of your book chapter is about examining public memory and mass media. In this case, you’re focusing on entertainment media, but these same lessons apply to journalistic media as well. So, talk about what you mean by public memory and why it’s important to understand here.
Anthony Ramirez: So when Raiana and I were starting to work on this book chapter together, that was one of the questions that we though about, too, because when we saw the call, that was kind of our way of thinking, “Okay, how can we reformat what we already began with this paper into something that discusses this idea of public memory and what does that mean for us, especially as media scholars?”
And so, we started breaking that down and we thought public means, in our particular perception, public means audience and audience memory, okay? And then, so from there, we thought of keywords like nostalgia, or… Nostalgia was a big one for us. And so, we’re thinking, “Okay, how does nostalgia relate to The Addams Family as a whole? And how does this interpretation of The Addams Family, particularly Wednesday, change this narrative for us as a whole?”
And so, based on our own research of the series, of that first season, we started to kind of look at, oh, there’s parts of memory that are definitely included within the series, and the creator did take some creative liberties with it as well. And so, one of the things that we started to notice is that there’s the idea of memory with this character by the name of Goody Addams and that there’s some generational trauma that’s alluded to that throughout the series. But one of the things that we talked about, too, is that the creators really took this idea of history and memory and took a little bit of creative liberties with the perception of history.
And so, what the creators of the series did, they were very inspired by the Salem witch trials and things like that. And while it wasn’t necessarily set in Salem or anything like that, they took a lot of that inspiration and used that to kind of oversimplify these complex historical events to make it generalized for the public. And so, that’s where that comes into play a lot within the conversation about public memory and how we tie it into this book chapter as a whole.
Teri Finneman: Through your analysis of the show, you found three key themes: colorblindness, monstrosity, and commodification. Let’s break down each one of these. What did you find in relation to colorblindness?
Anthony Ramirez: So, one of the things that we were thinking about, like I first mentioned, is we were thinking about the aspect of Latinidad first. And so, we were trying to investigate and research how Latinidad was represented through Wednesday, especially since the series does a really good job, well, did its job of showcasing that this iteration of The Addams Family is Latino, Latina, Latinx, Latine. And so, throughout the series, we see little subtle cultural markers, cultural signifiers such as Gomez saying, “Oh, mi cariño, mi tormenta,” or saying things like gracias or little things like that, or even musical cues of songs throughout the series or even Wednesday hitting a pinata. And so, little things like that, we were like, “Oh, okay, cool. We’re starting to see a little bit about this, right?”
But the thing that really started to come into play, too, is that we started to notice is that while these cultural signifiers were included throughout the series, it wasn’t fully emphasized and fully fleshed out, if you will. And so, we were interested in talking about that more and trying to think about, okay, the Mexican ancestry, the Mexican culture isn’t truly fleshed out fully. They’re trying to, again, generalize this concept of Latinidad while still trying to make her Latino. But even Jenna Ortega herself said that she didn’t feel like she was a proper representative of Latine culture, even though that she’s trying to fit that space. This series did… Again, it’s trying to balance a sense of ambiguity of am I Latino enough or not? Or am I Latina enough or not? And so, this is where that conversation of colorblindness comes into play, that we’re starting to see that in terms of the series.
But on top of that too, I thought it was really interesting that when they do go into that Goody Addams part of the series, again, it doesn’t showcase the Mexican ancestry or the Latino ancestry that comes into play of the character. Again, it’s just kind of subtle, but it’s not like one of those things that’s like, “Oh, yeah, I was a part of this part of Mexico and this and this.” Again, it was very inspired by the Salem witch trials and then more about the witchcraft aspect rather than being a part of Mexican or even Indigenous colonial history. And so, that’s where we started to notice a little bit more of that color blindness that the creators of the series took or had with these characters, that they didn’t fully bring up the Latinidad of these characters, which was a big argument within our book chapter.
Teri Finneman: And then what did you find with the monstrosity theme?
Anthony Ramirez: Monstrosity was an interesting conversation for us and something that really took shape early in the stages of our project. And so, in the series, obviously there’s the dynamic of the outcast versus the normie. And again, the outcast are seen as monsters or others or people of marginalized communities. And so, we had that conversation about monsters within this “Wednesday universe” are people of marginalized communities. And so, we started to think about that in terms of the idea of monstrosity and how it’s approached within this series. And we’re also starting to think about how monstrosity evolves even deeper, too, besides it being just marginalized communities, but also monsters themselves. We see one of the characters in the film, or excuse me, in the series is an actual monster. And we have a couple of other horror-centric characters like a werewolf and other characters that are centered around horror genre.
And so, the term monstrosity kind of revolves around the series in a variety of ways, including like we talked about the outcast versus normie dynamic, the marginalization aspect, and the actual sense of the horror genre monsters. And so, monstrosity was really an interesting concept that we enjoyed discussing and having a really interesting conversation about how it relates to race, how it relates to marginalization, how it relates to, again, mass media version or popular culture’s version of what is and what isn’t a monster.
Teri Finneman: And finally, what did you find with commodification?
Anthony Ramirez: So again, Wednesday was trying to package this show or Netflix was trying to package the show as it being a Latina hero, that Wednesday is this Latina hero or anti-hero, whichever way you want to think about it. But they do it in such a broad way that, again, they’re trying to appeal to a global and general audience that they bring in these familiar tropes, these symbolic markers, but there is no specific historical weight that’s connected to Latinidad fully. And so, again, it’s a very generalized approach into Latinidad that, again, it’s kind of like a watered down approach to Latinidad that we argue within the book chapter that, again, it commodifies, excuse me, the idea of Latinidad instead of making it truly something that’s embraced fully.
Teri Finneman: I found this to be a very interesting line in the chapter. “While Mexican culture and ancestry are referenced as an expansion of The Addams Family, Mexican struggles for the most part do not become historical anchors that can guide the character’s storylines, even when it would make sense to do so.” Overall, talk about how both entertainment media and journalistic media can do better.
Anthony Ramirez: So, when I was thinking about that, and when Raiana and I were thinking about that, we were thinking about how important representation is, both in a journalistic front, to highlight that part of your question, also in the popular culture and media front, representation matters. And one of the things that I think both entertainment and journalism do is that they highlight what’s going on within society. One thing that I think that could have been better or stronger is this idea, again, if you’re going to go into this idea of representing marginalized communities or people of color, in this specific case the Latinx, Latine community, go in, go in fully with it. And I know there have been series on Netflix and other platforms that have done that. For example, I mentioned how Raiana did a series called On My Block. That did a really good job of highlighting that Latinidad a lot better in comparison to Wednesday, in my opinion.
And so, I think representation is the idea that really needed to be fully fleshed out a lot better and really showcased in a way that, again, we understand it’s meant for broad audiences and generalized audiences, but also it’s a way that those audiences can learn about the culture, can learn about these cultural signifiers in a deeper way that is important for people who are a part of that racial and cultural background, that I think is super important to… That I think audiences can take away from it.
Teri Finneman: Do you plan to continue doing any work with The Addams Family universe, like studying the original cartoons? Or what are you looking to do next?
Anthony Ramirez: I chuckle, I laugh with it, because when Raiana and I did this project, it’s about five years old now that we’ve done this.
Teri Finneman: Oh.
Anthony Ramirez: Yeah, yeah. So it’s about five years old that we started this project.
Teri Finneman: You are a member of The Addams Family now.
Anthony Ramirez: At this point, right? At this point, it feels that way. But that first season, I saw it maybe at least five to seven times because of the research process and taking notes and just… One, I saw it for fun. And then the other times that I saw it, again, it was for notes and to have discussions with Raiana to build up this book chapter. And I told Raiana afterwards, “I don’t know if I can see the second season.” One, it took a little too long to come out. And two, I think I got a little burnt out from watching the first season that I didn’t even see the second season yet. Even though I know that there’s a third one coming out, again, I think I got a little burnt out from that first season of watching it, even though I enjoyed it tremendously. Let me put that out there. I enjoyed that first season tremendously, hence the reason why I saw it so many times and wanted to do a paper on it.
But I don’t know if I’ll continue this or if Raiana will want to do a part two of it, but it’s a conversation that her and I will have to have down the line for sure. But off of the top of my head, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Teri Finneman: All right. Let’s ask you a fun question. So, you spent a lot of time with Wednesday, but who is your favorite Addams Family member?
Anthony Ramirez: Uncle Fester is a lot of fun, just because he’s just an interesting character. I remember watching the ‘90s Addams Family films and I used to like Uncle Fester a lot because he would just blow up stuff and just do all these crazy experiments. But honestly, Gomez Addams also is another one of those characters for me that I always really liked a lot, because even as a kid, I would see the character in the cartoon or even seeing him in the film when he was played by Raul Julia, seeing that as, I don’t know, I felt represented. I felt represented in that character in the sense of it’s a Latino, it’s Gomez. So that in itself was kind of like, even as being a kid, I recognized like, “Oh, cool, there’s representation of a character, whether it’s Latino, Puerto Rican, or whatever form of Latinidad.” It was really cool to see that there was a character like that on there, too.
And so, I think I really resonated with those two characters strongly. I just found them to be interesting and funny. And again, it was nice to see some form of representation on screen, whether in the cartoon or in the film series. And even with Oscar Isaac now in the animated films.
Teri Finneman: And then our final question of the show is always why does journalism history matter? But we’ll ask you more broadly, why does media history matter?
Anthony Ramirez: Again, it goes back to the idea of representation that history is a reflection of society. Whether it’s media history, journalism history, it’s a reflection of society. And so, that reflection is through representation. And so, I think whatever form of media, whatever is being told in the news or in journalism, it’s important to really highlight and reflect what’s really out there. Talk about people of color, talk about marginalized communities, talk about why it’s important to highlight these individuals and tell their stories, tell their history, tell their lived realities. Because again, you never know the impact it might have on someone.
Again, for me, a majority of my work focuses on Latinidad and people of the US-Mexico border. And so, being from the US-Mexico border myself, reading or watching movies or reading books or comic books or anything within popular culture that centers around that topic really resonates a lot with me. And it’s important to feel represented, whether it’s in the news, whether it’s in a movie, whether it’s in any form of mass media or popular culture, it matters, because you never know who it’s going to impact or affect and the type of way it’s going to resonate with somebody. And that’s a powerful thing to have. And I just think that as long as there’s a reflection of that within journalism, within media, representation matters. And I’m always going to want to reiterate that any way possible. And I think it’s important to, again, feel represented and seen.
Teri Finneman: Okay. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.
Anthony Ramirez: No, thank you. I really appreciate it. And I can’t wait for people to read the book chapter and hear what other people think about it.
Teri Finneman: Thanks for tuning in and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Until next time, I’m your host, Teri Finneman, signing off with the words of Edward R. Murrow, “Good night, and good luck.”