Mother Goose gone Addams

January 8, 2013 11:54 AM

The Charles Addams Mother Goose
Three blind mice, see how they run!
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a sight in your life
As three blind mice?
Charles Addams, longtime New Yorker cartoonist illustrates the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose.
posted by caddis (16 comments total)

They're creepy and they're kooky! I love 'em!
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:04 PM on January 8, 2013

Thanks for this caddis. I love that the farmer's wife (and farmer) are Grant Wood's American Gothic couple.
posted by Cranberry at 12:57 PM on January 8, 2013

Oh, man. That last one is haunting.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 1:15 PM on January 8, 2013 [1 favorite]

Love it! Addams' art is so fantastic. We had a book of his collected cartoons lying around my summer house as a kid, and cracking it open each year was one of the things I most looked forward to doing as soon as I got there.

Plus, the pinball freak in me can't help but hear "OUT TO THE CEMETERY! COME ON EVERYBODY!"
posted by SpiffyRob at 1:21 PM on January 8, 2013

Man, MeFi is hitting all my sweet spots today. These are so wonderful! Thanks for sharing!
posted by Kitteh at 1:30 PM on January 8, 2013

The "Charles Addams Mother Goose" was the only book of nursery rhymes that my family had at at the house where I grew up. You could say that my family had a rather eccentric sense of humor.

Also, I had never seen the last cartoon.
posted by haiku warrior at 2:35 PM on January 8, 2013 [1 favorite]

While it's cherished now as a children's rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence began as a recruitment spiel for Blackbeard the pirate.
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:50 PM on January 8, 2013

Ah.. I'd advise you to check the citation on that one.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 2:59 PM on January 8, 2013

Reprise the theme song, the Snopes link you posted indicated that Smart Dalek was correct...
posted by sarcasticah at 3:16 PM on January 8, 2013

Wow, I had no idea he'd done this, and it's fantastic. What a treat!
posted by Lou Stuells at 3:24 PM on January 8, 2013

2013 of course has just arrived but this is definitely my favorite thing of the year (so far). What a fantastic ability Addams had, to take something that had been around for hundreds of years, like the Mother Goose rhymes, and make them completely his own.
posted by LeLiLo at 3:34 PM on January 8, 2013

My bad. I walked into that one.
posted by Smart Dalek at 4:00 PM on January 8, 2013

Okay, I really don't want this to turn into any more of a derail than it already has, but I just want to make sure this is clear:

Anything Snopes has with "http://www.snopes.com/lost/" at the beginning of the URL, is a part of The Repository of Lost Legends, or "TROLL" for short. It's the part of the site where they lie shamelessly. Each article in that section has a reference at the bottom linking to the page I linked to, which confesses the fabrication and explains why they did it.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 4:26 PM on January 8, 2013

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by ocschwar at 6:50 PM on January 8, 2013

(Which really needs to rhyme with something good now.)
posted by ocschwar at 7:02 PM on January 8, 2013

I have this book at home. It was my mother goose book when I was a kid. Explains a lot, really.

At any rate, when my mom passed away, I claimed very few books. This was one of the few.
posted by plinth at 3:50 AM on January 9, 2013