Ken Weatherwax, the actor who played Pugsley in the televised version of The Addams Family has died at age 59. Link here to the BBC’s obit.
For a refresher course in the Pugsley cartoon character, I turned to the Linda Davis biography of Addams, A Cartoonists Life, which documents the development of the Addams Family characters as well as the television series. Davis writes that Addams thought of his cartoon character Pugsley as “an angry little W.C. Fields” and that he named the boy “Pugsley” after a stream in the Bronx. And finally, Addams “wanted to call the boy Pubert, but a guy who was making dolls of the characters (as tie-ins for the upcoming television series) thought that sounded dirty.”
Davis wrote of Weatherwax that he “made an appealing and slightly creepy Pugsley.” Anyone watching the show would agree that those Addamsonian cartoon qualities made him exactly right for the part.