Butch Patrick Spills Secrets From The Munsters Set

Picture this: you're a young kid playing Eddie, the boy werewolf on The Munsters, and one day, Fred Gwynne, the guy who plays Herman Munster, decides to pull a prank. "I remember doing an exterior shot in the Munster Koach," Butch Patrick, the former child actor, tells Closer. Here's what happened next: "Fred takes off, instead of turning around, he drives right out the front gate of Universal Studios and heads to the Hollywood Bowl. People on the street were losing their minds seeing us drive by in full makeup!"

For Butch Patrick, now 71, those days filming The Munsters were nothing short of magical. The show aired from 1964 to 1966 and turned the quirky family of monsters into beloved characters. "It was hilarious and so well-written," Butch reminisces. "There wasn't a single episode that didn’t hit the mark." He also loved how Universal shot the show using the same lighting techniques and shadowing from their classic horror films. "That gave it the feel of a monster movie rather than a typical sitcom," he adds with pride, running a fan site called munsters.com to this day.

Butch’s day on set started early, around 7 or 8 a.m., and the transformation into Eddie wasn't quick—it took a solid hour just for makeup. "Then I had three hours of school, an hour for lunch, another hour for recreation, and finally, three hours of filming," he explains. During the summer breaks, though, he got to spend even more time in front of the camera, bringing Eddie to life.

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Learning from the Legends: Butch Patrick's Costars

Butch didn’t just learn how to act on set; he learned from the best. "Fred Gwynne was incredibly well-educated, had a great sense of humor, but he was also very serious," Butch recalls. "He was a brilliant artist and musician." On the other hand, Al Lewis, who played Grandpa, was more of a "carnival-vaudeville-circus type." Despite their differences, the two were best friends. "They had already worked together on Car 54, Where Are You?, so they were a comedy team long before The Munsters," Butch adds. Later, Butch starred in Lidsville, which you can now catch on the New Sid & Marty Krofft Channel through Cineverse.

The Munsters Cast: A Family of Stars

Completing the Munster family were Pat Priest as Marilyn, who joined after 13 episodes, replacing Beverley Owen, and Yvonne De Carlo as Lily Munster. "Yvonne was Hollywood royalty," Butch says with admiration. "Back then, movie stars didn’t usually do television, but she brought an incredible energy to the set."

What made the show even more thrilling were the props they pulled from Universal’s archives. "We used some of the original stuff from the old Frankenstein movie," Butch shares. "We had an amazing, authentic-looking dungeon and laboratory. And let's not forget the Creature From the Black Lagoon costume for Uncle Gil and the Wolf Man for Uncle Lester. We were really tapping into the Universal monster universe."

The Magic of The Munsters

At its core, The Munsters was a quirky mix of monster family and classic sitcom. "We combined the two, and it worked like a charm," Butch says. "In the '60s, people just wanted to relax after a long day at work. They wanted to watch shows like The Flintstones, The Munsters, talking horses, Martians, and genies. It was all about pure entertainment."