‘The Munsters’ Theme Song Was Openly Trolling Another Classic Sitcom | Cracked.com

The central conceit of classic sitcom The Munsters was that the family of vampires and ghouls was just like the clan on Leave It to Beaver, except the relatives occasionally transformed into bats. To get the point across, the earliest seasons of The Munsters patterned their opening theme song off another classic sitcom, only with a morbid twist.

While The Donna Reed Show hasn’t stayed in the public consciousness as long as The Munsters (heck, Rob Zombie made a Munsters movie just three years ago), it lasted for a whopping 275 episodes over eight seasons from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. Families didn’t get much more whitebred than the Stones, and each episode began with Donna Stone (Reed) handing out nutritious lunches to her children and husband as they left for another mundane day outside the family home.  

In its first season, The Munsters openly mocked The Donna Reed Show open, recreating each of its beats but with a ghoulish flourish. Lily Munster, like Donna Stone, apparently stays home all day and begins each morning by sending her family members off into the world. First up is Grandpa, who’s looking for his lunch just like the Stone kids, but he’ll get his by biting into Lily’s radial artery. With a tsk-tsking finger wag, she refuses to be a blood donor and shoos the elderly vampire out the door.  

She sends human niece Marilyn and werewolf son Eddie off to school with their books, then hands an oversized lunchbox to her monstrous husband Herman as he leaves for his gravedigging job. Just like Donna Stone, she gets a quick kiss for her trouble. Unlike hubby Alex Stone, the kiss seems to send Herman into orgasmic orbit, a look of goofy post-coital bliss on his face as he stomps out the door. 

The whole business was a funny way to tell viewers, “You’ve seen this before, but we’re going to get weird with it.”

Like their respective shows, the Munsters theme song has lived on well after the forgettable Donna Reed melody. People still share the groove on social media…

…and YouTube is full of alt covers, including rockabilly and heavy metal versions. The song also had lyrics, although they were never used on the air. 

Maybe this version with a children’s chorus was just too creepy, adding an extra layer of shiver to lyrics like:

If when you’re sleeping you dream a lot
Ghoulish nightmares parade through your head
And then you wake up and scream a lot,
Oh the Munsters are under your bed.

Say what you want about Donna Reed, but she rarely hid under your furniture. 

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