This post begins: This piece is really about toys. Only we have to take a detour first…For you see, the monsters of the 1930s and 1940s trickled down to kids by the 1960s. The period between Frankenstein (1931) and The Munsters (1964-1966) was filled with the comedic monster films such as Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1945). This trend at Universal to play their horrors for laughs began the monsters down that slippery slope. Cartoonists like Charles Addams also gave them a shove in that direction. Addams’ cartoons are wonderfully gruesome and not for kids but cartoons, like monsters, all ended up in the nursery.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.