This Day in Pop Culture for September 24

1964: ‘The Munsters’ Moved Into the Neighborhood

Ironically, both monster sitcoms The Addams Family and The Munsters sitcoms debuted in the fall of 1964 just as TV shows were starting to turn to color, but both were shown in black-and-white. While the Addams were modeled after the Charles Adams comics found in The New Yorker, The Munsters were a mix of Universal’s monsters and traditional family values. In fact, the show was produced by the same people who created Leave it to Beaver. The show only ran for two seasons, but the show’s fan base has grown through years of syndication. In 1987, a new version of the show, The Munsters Today, was also filmed at Universal Studios, but it never measured up to the original. Universal tried the formula one more time in 2012 with Mockingbird Lane a modern, more spooky and even mean-spirited version. It aired as a Halloween special but was not picked up as a series.

1968: ’60 Minutes’ Begins Ticking

The stopwatch on the cover of the CBS video news show, 60 Minutes first began ticking on this day in 1968. The magazine-styled show was created by Don Hewitt which began as a bi-weekly program that was hosted by Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace. The show also featured Morley Safer, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Charles Kuralt, Roger Mudd, Bill Plante and Eric Sevareid. In addition to the three long-format news stories, the show often included a Point/Counterpoint segment featuring James J. Kilpatrick representing conservative views and Nicholas von Hoffman representing liberal views on a different topic each week. Beginning in 1978 and stretching all the way to 2011, many of the shows ended with “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” who often ranted about a variety of topics but usually with a comical tone.