Wednesday Addams as a deadpan child who is genuinely dangerous is the 1991 film's invention, not Charles Addams's cartoons and not the 1960s series, where she is a small girl with a spider. Christina Ricci's performance made the character the family's centre of gravity, and the series takes that reading as its premise and builds a show around her. The casting of Ricci in the series is the acknowledgement. The gothic household, the servant hand and the family silhouette come from the cartoons; the character the show is named after comes from the film.