Wednesday Addams

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Wednesday Friday Addams is a member of the fictional Addams Family, created by cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker.

In Charles Addams's cartoons, Wednesday and other members of the family had no names. When the cartoons were adapted to the television series The Addams Family (1964), he was asked to provide names for the characters, and came up with the name "Wednesday", based on the well-known nursery rhyme line, "Wednesday's child is full of woe".

As her name suggests, Wednesday is a quiet, somewhat pathetic child, full of woe. She is a pale, dark-haired, grim looking little girl who seems to have a fascination with death and the macabre. In the 1960s TV series she was a much more sweet-natured, happy child, whose favorite hobby was raising spiders. She also did ballet, of course in a black tutu. A favorite toy was her Marie Antoinette doll, which she had guillotined and which she often showed to visitors; in one episode she was shown to have several other headless dolls as well. Like most of the family, Wednesday had some artistic leanings; she painted several pictures (including one of trees with human heads) and wrote a poem dedicated to her favorite pet spider, Homer. Wednesday was stated to be six years old in the series pilot.

Wednesday had a close kinship with the family's giant butler Lurch. In the TV series, it was revealed that her middle name is "Friday" (when, upon hearing her first name, someone jokingly asks if her middle name is "Thursday"). She is also called "Merlina Addams" in the Spanish version. The movie The Addams Family and its sequels gave her a more serious personality with a deadpan wit, and a morbid interest in trying to inflict harm upon her brother, Pugsley.

In the movie Addams Family Values, Wednesday meets her first boyfriend, Joel Glicker (played by David Krumholtz), a neurotic, allergy-ridden boy with an overbearing mother, who would much rather read or collect Serial Killer trading cards than participate in outdoor activities. They are both outcasts at Camp Chippewa, and together stage a coup at the camp play of the first Thanksgiving, getting revenge on the popular young girl who had tormented them. At the end of the film, it is suggested that Wednesday purposely scares him to death after he brought up the subject of their relationship.

In the 1977 TV movie Lisa Loring plays a grown-up Wednesday, who mostly entertained their party guests with her flute, and could hear and understand coded help messages by bound-up members of the family, and dispatch help to free them. In the time interval between the original TV series and this movie her parents had had two more children who look just like the original Pugsley and Wednesday.

Wednesday was played by Lisa Loring in the original TV series, and in the second animated series from Hanna-Barbera, her voice was done by Debi Derryberry. She was portrayed by Christina Ricci in the film and its first sequel, Addams Family Values. She was then portrayed by Nicole Fugere in the movie, Addams Family Reunion and The New Addams Family TV series, which were both produced in 1998.

The Addams Family
Characters
Gomez Addams | Morticia Addams | Pugsley Addams | Wednesday Addams | Uncle Fester | Grandmama | Lurch | Thing | Cousin Itt
TV
The Addams Family | The New Addams Family
Films
The Addams Family (1991) | Addams Family Values (1993) | Addams Family Reunion (1998)
Games
Fester's Quest (1989) | The Addams Family (pinball) (1991) | Addams Family (1992) | The Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt (1993) | Addams Family Values (1994) | Addams Family (1994)