Season 1, episode 2, My Fair Munster is the full version, in black and white and with the changed characters, of the unaired "Munsters" color pilot (also called My Fair Munster), which was just the first ten minutes of this plot. This episode is also smoother in terms of writing, acting and direction--prior to the first episode, but not so strongly in the pilot, producers Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher had already hit on a well developed structure and flow to these characters.
In the early sections of the episode, writers Ed Haas and Norm Liebmann again play with the basic show premise where the Munsters, a family of horror icons, or iconic figures, believe that they're normal and that the rest of the world, or at least their immediate suburban neighborhood, is off-kilter, whereas the rest of the folks think otherwise. Lily Munster (Yvonne De Carlo), a Bride of Frankenstein, has a niece, Marilyn (Beverly Owen), who is "normal" (to us), and thus a disturbing embarrassment to the rest of the family.
Marilyn's "normal" boyfriend runs away, frightened, when he walks Marilyn to the door, and the Munsters blame Marilyn's handicap--her unfortunate, disturbing looks. So Grandpa (Al Lewis), a vampire, hits on an idea--he cooks up a love potion guaranteed to avoid Marilyn becoming an old maid. Of course, things go wrong.
Even more interestingly than playing with the core premise, in the middle of this episode, Haas and Liebmann make the Munsters a very thinly veiled metaphor for folks of alternate ethnicities invading a homogenous, whitebread neighborhood--and in fact, that may very well have been the core premise all along instead.
In terms of direction, and less seriously, during one later sequence that consists of characters running up and down hallways and going in and out of sliding doors and secret compartments, David Alexander actually achieves an effectively silent film slapstick mood for a couple minutes. It's a nice, somewhat self-reflective touch, as a lot of the comedy in the series (and in most other television sitcoms in the 1960s) was pleasantly rooted in cornball vaudeville humor.
In the early sections of the episode, writers Ed Haas and Norm Liebmann again play with the basic show premise where the Munsters, a family of horror icons, or iconic figures, believe that they're normal and that the rest of the world, or at least their immediate suburban neighborhood, is off-kilter, whereas the rest of the folks think otherwise. Lily Munster (Yvonne De Carlo), a Bride of Frankenstein, has a niece, Marilyn (Beverly Owen), who is "normal" (to us), and thus a disturbing embarrassment to the rest of the family.
Marilyn's "normal" boyfriend runs away, frightened, when he walks Marilyn to the door, and the Munsters blame Marilyn's handicap--her unfortunate, disturbing looks. So Grandpa (Al Lewis), a vampire, hits on an idea--he cooks up a love potion guaranteed to avoid Marilyn becoming an old maid. Of course, things go wrong.
Even more interestingly than playing with the core premise, in the middle of this episode, Haas and Liebmann make the Munsters a very thinly veiled metaphor for folks of alternate ethnicities invading a homogenous, whitebread neighborhood--and in fact, that may very well have been the core premise all along instead.
In terms of direction, and less seriously, during one later sequence that consists of characters running up and down hallways and going in and out of sliding doors and secret compartments, David Alexander actually achieves an effectively silent film slapstick mood for a couple minutes. It's a nice, somewhat self-reflective touch, as a lot of the comedy in the series (and in most other television sitcoms in the 1960s) was pleasantly rooted in cornball vaudeville humor.
