Wednesday's first official teaser is deliciously 'Burtonesque'

[embedded content] Tim Burton directed Netflix's new eight-episode original series, Wednesday.

Netflix released the first official teaser for Wednesday following yesterday's exclusive first images for the Tim Burton-directed series in Vanity Fair. Overall, it looks delightfully Burtonesque, and we can't wait to give it a shot.

As I wrote before, American cartoonist Charles Addams created the characters in 1938, originally as a series of single-panel cartoons published in The New Yorker. It was his satirical dispatch of American "family values", turning the whole social framework upside down. The characters proved so popular that ABC created a 1964 live-action sitcom, The Addams Family, based on them. (Not everyone was happy with the development. William Shawn was editor of The New Yorker at the time, and his refined sensibilities would have been so offended by the TV series that he actually banned Addams Family cartoons from the magazine; the characters did not return to its pages until its retirement in 1987.)

Animated versions of the family have appeared regularly in film and television since the 1970s, and Fox unsuccessfully attempted to revive the original television series in 1998 with The New Addams Family . But it was two live-action feature films from 1991 and 1993, respectively, that defined their canonical portrayal in popular culture: The Addams Family and Addams Family Values< /em>.

Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) gets revenge on her brother's bullies with piranhas. Youtube/Netflix

Poor Dalton didn't swim fast enough. Youtube/Netflix

Burton notoriously turned down the opportunity to direct the 1991 feature film. He was also originally supposed to direct a stop-motion animated film reboot. It's unclear what happened there, but it looks like MGM acquired the rights to the original series from Universal Pictures and opted to go in a different direction with 3D computer animation. The result was The Addams Family (2019) and The Addams Family 2, released last year. The former made a reasonable box office despite mixed reviews; the second was less successful and was widely panned by critics and audiences.

But now Burton and the Addams Family franchise have finally come together with Wednesday. Showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, best known for Smallville, expected Burton to turn them down as well when they made their presentation. He instead signed on to the project, stating his interest in the opportunity to truly explore Wednesday's character without the time limitations of a feature film. That said, "The ambition of the series was to make it an eight-hour Tim Burton film",