47 Fun Facts About The Munsters

On which network did The Munsters originally air, from 1964 to 1966?

CBS carried The Munsters for two seasons from September 1964, then cancelled it in 1966 after its ratings sank to a series low.

What is the Munsters' street address?

1313 Mockingbird Lane doubles the unlucky number 13, and in 2012 NBC named its Munsters reboot pilot Mockingbird Lane after the address.

What kind of creature is the family pet, Spot?

A fire-breathing dragon, Spot lives under the staircase and is rarely seen whole; like any dog called Spot he chases cars, but he sometimes catches them.

Who plays Herman Munster?

Fred Gwynne's height, about six feet five, helped win him the part of Herman; at Harvard he had been president of the Lampoon humour magazine.

Herman and Grandpa were played by two actors who had just co-starred in which police sitcom?

The two actors had played Officers Muldoon and Schnauser on Car 54, Where Are You?, the police comedy that ran on NBC from 1961 to 1963, which helped win them the roles of Herman and Grandpa.

Which classic movie monster is Grandpa based on?

Count Dracula is Grandpa's model, cape and Transylvanian roots included; Universal co-produced the show, so it could borrow the studio's own classic monsters.

Which actress played Lily Munster in the original 1960s series?

Yvonne De Carlo was a Hollywood film star who had played Moses's wife in The Ten Commandments before she took the role of the vampire housewife Lily.

In the first unaired pilot for The Munsters, Herman's wife went by what name?

Phoebe was the wife in the 1964 pitch pilot; the actress was judged to look too much like a rival sitcom's Morticia, so the part was recast and renamed Lily.

Who took over the role of niece Marilyn from Beverley Owen after episode 13?

Pat Priest played Marilyn from episode 14 after Beverley Owen left the show to get married; the 1966 film then recast the role with Debbie Watson.

Who plays Eddie Munster?

Butch Patrick played Eddie, the family's werewolf boy, throughout the series; a different child actor had played Eddie as a nasty brat in the unaired pilot before the part was recast and softened.

Which voice actor supplied the voice of the raven in the Munsters' cuckoo clock?

Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, played Charlie the raven, who heckles Herman from the clock until Herman throws things at him; Bob Hastings also voiced the bird.

Where does Herman work?

At a funeral parlor: Herman, the family's sole wage-earner, works for the aptly named Gateman, Goodbury and Graves, where he started out as a box boy.

What is the name of Grandpa's pet bat?

Igor is Grandpa's pet Transylvanian bat and hangs around his laboratory; the 2022 film makes him a human servant who is turned into a bat so he can travel to America.

The Munsters' producers had previously created which wholesome family sitcom?

Leave It to Beaver came from the same producing team, and The Munsters sends up that wholesome formula: the well-meaning father, the nurturing mother, the precocious child.

How is Grandpa related to the rest of the Munster household?

He is Lily's father, so the popular name 'Grandpa Munster' is wrong: Munster is the surname of his son-in-law Herman.

Writer Allan Burns admitted the 1963 proposal 'sort of stole the idea' from whose New Yorker cartoons?

Charles Addams had drawn his macabre family for The New Yorker since 1938; the studio reworked the borrowed premise around the classic monsters whose film likenesses it already controlled.

Which show, new on a rival network, is blamed for the ratings collapse that got The Munsters cancelled in 1966?

Batman premiered on a rival network in January 1966 and drained the audience; 'Batman just came along and took our ratings away,' the actor who played Eddie later said.

What do the Munsters pity about niece Marilyn?

Her looks: Marilyn is a pretty all-American blonde, which her monstrous relatives see as a misfortune, and she has grown up agreeing that she is the odd one out.

The Munster Koach and DRAG-U-LA were built by which celebrated car customiser?

George Barris's shop built only one Koach for the series and the 1966 film; when an unauthorised copy was later offered to him, he declined to buy it.

On screen, Lily has the Munster Koach built by joining a hot rod to which other vehicle?

A hearse: Lily has a used hot rod and a hearse customised into one car as Herman's birthday present; the real Koach was built from three Model T bodies and ran 18 feet long.

DRAG-U-LA, the dragster Grandpa builds, was made from what?

A coffin: one could not legally be sold without a death certificate, so the builders paid a funeral director in cash and collected it from his back door after dark.

Which rocker's 1998 single took its title from Grandpa's dragster?

Rob Zombie named 'Dragula' after Grandpa's dragster, yet in the song's video he drives the family's other car, the Munster Koach.

The Munsters theme, a Grammy nominee in 1965, is built around a riff on which instrument?

Electric guitar: composer Jack Marshall was himself a jazz guitarist, and his riff replaced the light music from a Doris Day film that the pitch pilot had used.

Which band sampled the Munsters theme in its 2015 single 'Uma Thurman'?

Fall Out Boy built the 2015 single 'Uma Thurman' around a sample of the Munsters theme, so the theme's writers share the songwriting credit.

Herman's actor played the kindly neighbour Jud Crandall in which 1989 Stephen King film?

Pet Sematary cast him as Jud Crandall, the Maine neighbour who leads the Creed family to the burial ground behind their home; Stephen King wrote the screenplay himself.

The Munsters' home is described as what style of mansion?

The Munster home is a decaying Second Empire Victorian Gothic mansion, kept deliberately cobwebbed: when Lily 'dusts', her vacuum blows dust onto the surfaces rather than off them.

Herman's flat-headed look copies the makeup worn by which actor in the 1931 film Frankenstein?

Boris Karloff wore Jack Pierce's flat-headed monster makeup in 1931; Universal owned the design and co-produced The Munsters, so Herman could copy it.

What did the 1966 film Munster, Go Home! give audiences that the TV series never had?

The family in colour: the series was shot in black and white, and the Technicolor film was made partly to introduce the Munsters to audiences abroad.

A 1965 Easter special sent the Munsters to which attraction to pick out a pet for Eddie?

Marineland of the Pacific, an oceanarium at Palos Verdes, hosted the special Marineland Carnival, where the family went looking for something cuddly for Eddie, such as a shark.

In Munster, Go Home! (1966), Herman inherits a title and a manor in which English county?

Shroudshire is the fictional home of Munster Hall, where Herman becomes Lord Munster; his cousin Freddie, played by Terry-Thomas, poses as a ghost to scare the family off, then bolts at the sight of Herman.

How did The Munsters Today explain the family's 22 missing years?

A sleep experiment went wrong: Grandpa's sleeping chambers, set for half an hour, kept the family under for 22 years until visitors to the house woke them in the 1980s.

Who created the 2012 Munsters reboot pilot that NBC aired as a Halloween special?

Bryan Fuller, creator of Pushing Daisies, wrote the reboot pilot, which starred Jerry O'Connell as Herman and Eddie Izzard as Grandpa; two months after it aired, the network passed on a series.

Where in the Munster house does Grandpa keep his laboratory?

Down in the dungeon: Grandpa heads below the house to brew the potions and spells that set many of the show's plots in motion.

Who plays Lily in the 2022 film The Munsters?

Sheri Moon Zombie, the director's wife, plays Lily; he said he cast actors who had often worked together because he could not risk leads with no chemistry.

Al Lewis ran for governor of New York in 1998 on which ticket?

Al Lewis ran as the Green Party candidate; his 52,533 votes cleared the 50,000 threshold and won the Greens an automatic ballot line in New York for the next four years.

Al Lewis opened an Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street in 1987 called what?

Grampa's Bella Gente traded on his Munsters fame: Al Lewis ran the Greenwich Village restaurant for years and became a familiar figure around New York.

Herman's actor made his last screen appearance as Judge Chamberlain Haller in which 1992 comedy?

My Cousin Vinny was his final film: as the stern Judge Chamberlain Haller he repeatedly jails Joe Pesci's lawyer for contempt of court, and he died the year after its release.

Eddie's actor later starred as a boy trapped in a land of living hats in which Krofft show?

Lidsville cast him as Mark, who tumbles into a magician's giant top hat; in 1983 he recorded the single 'Whatever Happened to Eddie?' as Eddie and the Monsters.

Why could the 1960s Munsters comic show vampires despite the Comics Code ban?

Its publisher never joined the Code: Gold Key stayed outside the industry's self-censorship body, so the comic's vampires appeared without any controversy.

Which comic actor played the family's Dr. Edward Dudley in three early episodes?

Paul Lynde, later a Hollywood Squares favourite, played the family's doctor three times; Dr. Dudley is extremely nearsighted and sometimes examines Herman with his glasses off.

What is the name of Eddie Munster's werewolf doll?

Woof-Woof is Eddie's werewolf doll; apart from being a werewolf he is a typical boy, forever bragging about his father and volunteering Herman for feats beyond him.

In which fictional city do the Munsters live?

Mockingbird Heights is the Munsters' fictional home city, where a family that considers itself perfectly average never grasps why the neighbours react so strangely.

Lily's actress introduced the showstopper 'I'm Still Here' in which 1971 Sondheim musical?

Follies cast her as former showgirl Carlotta, and Sondheim wrote the song during the Boston tryout after her original number, Can That Boy Foxtrot, was not working.

What is mounted on the front of Grandpa's DRAG-U-LA dragster?

A marble gravestone, inscribed 'Born 1367, Died ?', fronts the dragster that, in the series, Grandpa builds to win back the Munster Koach after Herman loses it in a drag race.

What happened to the Munsters theme's lyrics?

Never aired: co-producer Bob Mosher wrote words for the tune, but the show used only the instrumental; even so, he shares the writing credit on a 2015 single that sampled it.

Which network aired the 1973 animated one-hour special The Mini-Munsters?

ABC showed The Mini-Munsters in its Saturday Superstar Movie slot; of the original cast, only Al Lewis came back, as the voice of Grandpa.

Which screen Catwoman played Lily in The Munsters Today?

Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1955, had replaced Julie Newmar as Catwoman on the big screen; in the revival she played Lily opposite John Schuck's Herman.