Trivia: Beverly Owen played the part of Marilyn for thirteen episodes believing the show would flop. When The Munsters became a hit, she started crying because of being away from her boyfriend who lived in New York. She was let go and the part of Marilyn went to Pat Priest who had such an uncanny resemblance to Beverly that people watching the show never knew the difference.
Trivia: Grandpa is only 3 years older than Herman Munster and 1 year younger than Lily Munster, in real life.
Trivia: From its inception, "The Munsters" was supposed to be produced in full color, and its earliest pilot was, in fact, shot in full color. The only reason the series was shot in black and white was because both CBS Television and Universal Studios refused to pay the additional $10,000 per episode for color.
Trivia: Fred Gwynne (Herman) in real life was 6 feet 5 inches tall. In order to achieve the character, he was fitted with shoes that were at least four inches thick in the soles. The make up for his face and head added the rest to make him 7 feet 3 inches tall, and the air cooled suit added girth, and weighed 40 to 50 pounds.
Answer: The comedic gimmick of both "The Munsters" and "The Addams Family" television shows in the 1960s was that both families were convinced they were normal and everyone else they encountered was odd. The Addams Family, for example, thought their "normal" visitors were mentally unbalanced because they always fled the Addams' weird home in panic. That was a running gag throughout the entire Addams Family series, so much so that easily half of nearly every episode was devoted to the predictably terrified reactions of their visitors (always accompanied by identical canned laughter). Meanwhile, in the Munsters' universe, the family thought "normal" people were physically deformed and even quite hideous. For example, the Munsters believed that their beautiful niece, Marilyn, was socially handicapped by her ugliness (the exact opposite of the truth); and, in the episode "Just Another Pretty Face" (S2E17), when Herman Munster was temporarily transformed into a "normal" person, his entire family found him utterly repulsive. The family's hidden revulsion to "normal" people was the running gag of The Munsters.
Charles Austin Miller