‘The Munsters’ Star Butch Patrick Reveals Secrets From Set and Recalls His Jam-Packed Schedule
Playing Eddie the boy werewolf on The Munsters was truly a wild ride for Butch Patrick. “I remember doing an exterior shot in the Munster Koach,” the former child actor tells Closer of a practical joke played by Fred Gwynne, a.k.a. Herman Munster. “We get in, Fred takes off, and instead of turning around, he continues out the front gate of Universal Studios and leaves the property, driving up to the Hollywood Bowl. The funniest thing about it was the people on the street watching us drive by in full makeup, freaking out!”
Thrills like that made working on the TV classic extra fun, notes Butch, 71, who was just a preteen when his misfit family of monsters charmed audiences from 1964 to 1966. “It was funny. It was well written. It didn’t really have a weak factor in it,” Butch, who runs the fansite munsters.com, notes, adding he loved how Universal shot it with the same lighting techniques and shadowing as their iconic horror films, giving it “the look of a monster movie instead of a sitcom.”
The hour-long makeup process to get Butch into character (Fred’s Frankenstein effects took two) was just the beginning of his day on set, which started at 7 or 8 a.m. “Then I had three hours of school, one hour for lunch, one hour for recreation, and three hours for filming,” he reveals, though summer breaks freed up more onscreen opportunities.
Butch Patrick Learned From His Costars
Butch, who later starred on Sid and Marty Krofft’s Lidsville -- which is now available on the New Sid & Marty Krofft Channel (through Cineverse) -- learned a lot about his craft by watching his costars. “Fred was very educated and had a great sense of humor, but he was a very serious man and a great artist and musician,” he says. Al Lewis, who played Grandpa, “was very much a carnival-vaudeville-circus type, but they were best friends. Prior to The Munsters, they were both on Car 54, Where Are You?, so they were already a functioning comedy team out of New York.”
Rounding out the cast were Pat Priest, who after 13 episodes replaced Beverley Owen as Marilyn (“the normal one,” Butch notes), and Yvonne De Carlo as Lily Munster. “She was Hollywood royalty who dropped into doing television, which wasn’t done back then,” he raved about the energy the film star brought to the set.
Even more thrilling for the young actor were the props scared up from Universal’s archives. “We used a lot of the original stuff from the old Frankenstein movie in our sets,” he shares, including “a really cool, authentic-looking dungeon and laboratory. We also used the Creature From the Black Lagoon [costume] for Uncle Gil and Wolf Man for Uncle Lester. We tapped into the Universal monster base a lot.”
The show tapped into the ’60s mindset, placing a quirky monster family into a Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom. “We mushed them together, and it worked,” Butch says. “People were just looking for comedy, not social commentary. They just wanted to go home after work and watch The Flintstones, The Munsters, talking horses or, you know, Martians and genies.”
