Ted Cassidy & LURCH-Mania
If I get enough people saying they want a 30 DAYS OF HALLOWE'EN again this year, I'll do it. In the meantime tho, this is for boyfacedgirl, and austices and and Lil Zaira Z-Bomb from work, who will love what the dancers are doing down below as much as what the lip-syncher is up to.
"Where Were We Before YouTube?" Dept.:
For every TV show that has a devoted following, usually as the following for the program gets it's feet up under it, there's one or two characters who start off in a secondary role who devellop a real fan following. We see characters like Newman and Puddy steal thunder from characters like Kramer who steal thunder from the show's protagonists if the show goes on long enough. This is also something that happens in TV drama as well (Peter MacNichol's character in ALLY McBEAL was meant to only appear in two episodes - the Lone Gunmen in THE X-FILES got their own spin-off). This was a lot less prevalent in the 1960s tho, than it was in the 70s and after (where Norman Lear and MTM Productions made a small industry of spin-off programs). Which is why this is interesting - submitted for your approval a phenomenon known as THE LURCH.
Almost as soon as THE ADDAMS FAMILY started up in 1964, ABC television started getting a flood of letters from ardent young female proto-Goths demanding more attention for one character in particular and that character was Lurch. Teen gossip magazines like TIGER BEAT started getting floods of letters as well, and the producers chalked it up to the fact that Gomez as a character was deliberately, comedically, creepy, and that Ken Weatherwax as Pugsley and Jackie Coogan as Fester were too young and too old and both about as opposite a teenybopper figure as could be. Ted Cassidy on the other hand had that weird kind of strong, silent, brooding, artistic quality that would later piss William Shatner off about the way Spock was written on STAR TREK, and all of this resulted in a mild form of Lurch-mania amongst the female fans of the show.
This resulted in bits like this:
Click to viewand in this episode where the writers decided to take advantage of Lurch's new-found popularity and have it milked by the family itself in a dead-on parody of prevailing pop music material (incidentally Vic Mizzy wrote the theme song and all the incidental music for the show, as well as the theme for THE GHOST AND MR CHICKEN - the fact that the music agency is named the way it is, is a direct wink to that):
As these things usually went in the 60s and 70s, a novelty 45 was released to take advantage of it:
Click on the 45 cover to download the MP3, kids!
and Cassidy showed up on ABC's teen show HULLABALOO roughly around the same time that the single was released to perform the piece (or lipsynch it anyway...)
Cassidy made one other appearance on HULLABALOO doing a country and western patter song as himself, but like most things relating to Cassidy and LURCH, the character was a lot more popular to most people than Ted was. This was something he remained bitter about til the end of his short life in 1979 at age 46 from complications following open-heart surgery. We still have him at his best in movies like BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID and despite the fact the really hated the exploitation of it all, there are an awful lot of us who loved him as LURCH.