How Christina Ricci Made Wednesday Addams An Icon – Nifey

The Addams Family, what started as a chilling subversion of the family sitcom tropes of its day has morphed into a franchise that has been going since 1938. The scariest, goofiest family has its fingers in TV, film and musicals of Broadway with people falling in love with them all over again every time. However, despite the size of the family itself and all their strange individual qualities, there are a few quirks. The first is the relationship between Gomez and Morticia, the parents who are completely in love and devoted to each other from the start, setting the gold standard of fictional relationships for decades to come. The other is Wednesday Addams, the girl with the twin braid.

The fanfare behind Wednesday is a more recent development, however, and is the direct result of two films and one iconic performance. Christine Ricciperformance as a character in both The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993) turned not just a star on Wednesday, but a child’s first gothic icon, with many additions to the franchise centering around her, including the upcoming Netflix series. But how did we get here?

What can you say about Wednesday Addams before the 1991 movie, watching The New Yorker cartoons and the 1964 sitcom? She’s got the look, sure, the braided hair and the little black dress, but her personality is pretty lacking. She’s an adorable little girl for the most part. Her tastes, like the rest of her family, are suitably macabre, but she’s pretty standard when it comes to sitcom kids, especially next to her brother, Pugsley.

RELATED: 7 Things You Need To Know About The Addams Family Before ‘Wednesday’

This was during a time when kids in sitcoms were more vehicles for childhood antics than their own people with individual personality traits. Both Pugsley and Wednesday’s identities were “childish” – endearing and a bit mischievous but understandably innocent. In short, they were boring, unlike the adults in the series, accomplices but doubles of each other. Wednesday is an Addams of course, so she stands out from the other little girls with her, at the time, very un-girly fun of spiders and dynamite, but she didn’t really come into her own until 1991.

Christina Ricci: A High Point in a Brilliantly Acted Adaptation

Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams with a dinosaur toy in'The Addams Family'
Image via Orion Pictures

The first Addams Family movie is a brilliant casting masterclass, up there with Scooby-Doo live-action movies. Angelica Huston and raul julia Absolutely shines as Morticia and Gomez, there’s no doubt, but the best example of perfect casting is Christina Ricci as Wednesday. Not for the things that have stayed the same necessarily, although she definitely sums up the look, but how is her performance and which director Barry Sonnenfeldand screenwriters Caroline Thompson and larry wilson changed behind the screen.

Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Doom – that was the old quote that originally inspired the name, but no version of the character held true until the 1991 film. While Pugsley, played here by Jimmy Workman, takes on the personality of an ordinary little boy with an incredible resistance to pain and a love of all dark and macabre spirits, Wednesday becomes something of the Lisa to her Bart. She’s an incredibly intelligent girl, and with that intelligence comes an incredibly serious and austere demeanor, delivering her lines with a deadpan smile and a monotonous voice. This has become the birth of the version that people have come to know and love, especially since with the removal of censorship she is actually capable of violence, and her hobbies are getting a bit more macabre , like electrocuting his brother.

As iconic as Wednesday and Pugsley’s scenes are in that first film, their school play and their “is there a God?” game, they give way to their parents and especially to Uncle Fester, played by Christopher Lloyd. It wasn’t until the sequel that we got to see Wednesday Addams take center stage.

‘Addams Family Values’ is Wednesday’s movie

Addams Family Values ​​- Christina Ricci

Addams Family Values ​​(1994) is widely considered the superior product of the two live-action films for several reasons, one of which is a cracking performance by Joan Cusack as the villain, Debbie Jellinsky, and the other practically gives half the film to Wednesday. It definitely reflects life in an era of “Kids Rule” family movies filled with childhood rebellion, but Ricci finally had his chance to change from star to icon on Wednesday. From the attempted murders of her new baby brother to her misadventures at Camp Chippewa, we see her both in her element and out of it. We see her a few more years, as a preteen, and the parts of her that stand out from other versions of the character are magnified. Her intelligence progressed with age, she also got rid of her adorableness to make her, ironically since she would come out four years later, a smaller, scarier one. Darya. Fervently anti-establishment, sardonic and insightful, it was the film that really made Wednesday Addams who she is today.

Influential is the best word to describe Ricci’s performance, because there’s so much about it that numerous adaptations across a wide range of mediums have taken him by himself. From there, it became established that Wednesday was the older brother and mastermind of Pugsley’s madness, still conspiring together but with more organization and a clear chain of command. More importantly, of Chloe Grace Moretz in animated films, Melissa Hunter in the missing but not forgotten web series adult wednesday addamsat Jenna Ortega in the upcoming Netflix series, they’re not so much inspired by the original character as Ricci’s interpretation.

The reason is simple: Ricci made Wednesday Addams a real character, an individual rather than just one of the two children. The character created by his performance is a commodity machine, beloved by members of the goth/alternative community for being dark, brutally honest, and mildly murderous. Most important of all is that she knows who she is and has given her a fleshed-out personality, quirks that are uniquely hers, and incredibly memorable quotes.

Wednesday Addams Thanksgiving

Wednesday, the Netflix series, which will be released on November 23, will see Ortega Wednesday alone being taken to Nevermore Academy, a school with other outcasts and its fair share of paranormal mysteries. We can already see from the released images that she has Ricci’s dry wit, an expansive vocabulary and subtly violent tendencies, and a tribute is paid to who created this version of the character we see today, including Ricci herself appearing in the series.

It is important to respect the captions, fictitious or not. And even though it’s only been 31 years, it’s clear by the merchandise sold, the Halloween costumes worn, the lines quoted and the people inspired, that Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams is undeniably one of they.

We would like to give thanks to the writer of this article for this outstanding material

How Christina Ricci Made Wednesday Addams An Icon – Nifey