Ages of the characters


Herman was supposed to be 150 years old and Grandpa was over 400 years old. What was their supposed life span?

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Probably indefinitely, b/c they were like zombies, I think, in other words I think they had already died, and were the living dead now. Both Lily and Grandpa both mentioned dying before.

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Odder than that. In "The Most Beautiful Ghoul in the World" Lily inherits $10,000 from, IRRC, her grandmother. At one point Herman says to her, regarding how to spend the money, that if Lily loses the money "The next time Grandma dies she won't leave you anything."

So dying doesn't seem to be a permanent situation for them at all. But they can die. They just don't stay that way.

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While their ages are brought up, the show never discusses their lifespans. And unlike the witches and warlocks of Bewitched, they never once refer to themselves as immortals. So we can only guess based on what we know of their Universal Monster counterparts, upon which the characters are (very) loosely based.

Grandpa and Lily are vampires, so presumably they are immortal but susceptible to being slain (although sunlight clearly doesn't impact them as it did Dracula in the Universal series).

Herman appears to be potentially immortal. There's numerous jokes about him having defective or damaged body parts which needed to be replaced, so presumably as long as there's available spare parts and a mad scientist available, Herman could live forever.

Eddie is a bit harder to guess. In the Universal Monster series, Larry Talbot (the Wolf-Man) is always trying to find ways to either rid himself of the curse or to get killed so he won't go on killing innocent people himself. His status as a werewolf makes him nearly indestructible (even being revived after getting killed by silver weapons) but there's no mention of immortality. Eddie's situation is different in that he appears to have been born a werewolf as opposed to cursed to be one. So who knows? Maybe Eddie is immortal.

Marilyn is a non-monster human, so presumably she'll live a normal human lifespan.

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sunlight clearly doesn't impact them as it did Dracula in the Universal series
I remember my younger brother and I watching the show way back when, and in the episode where Grandpa had turned into a horse, he pointed out that not only was he out in the daytime, but had a reflection. Monsters were my thing, so I was pretty proud of him.

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Regardless... great fodder for history jokes. Same as on Bewitched.

I dont know why, but Al Lewis merely mentioning having tea with Napoleon makes me guffaw. I guess I'm a softie for history jokes.

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There was an episode where Grandpa has a great line about being angry with someone.

"He stole my aspirin during the Black Plague." lol

The first time I heard that I thought that it was an error because aspirin hadn't been invented then. Yeah like THAT was the only problem with that comment!

The Munsters were not normal humans. They lived, they died, they lived again.

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Surely Grandpa is more like 4000 years old. He says in the first episode he's had 125 wives!

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