The show also stars Rashida Jones as Ann Perkins, Aubrey Plaza as April Ludgate, Rob Lowe as Chris Traeger and Chris Pratt as Andy Dwyer. Starring Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, a ditzy bureaucrat who works in the Parks Department of Pawnee, she seems airheaded at first but eventually shows her intelligence when she wins a seat on the Pawnee City Council. Parks and Recreation is a political satire that takes place in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. Parks and Recreation (2009 to 2015) 125 episodes “We had a lot of love in this house.Parks and Recreation 35. “I told them, don’t run your toys in the cobwebs.” She smiles. “I had six grandchildren grow up here,” she tells me. Sandra adores her family so much that she doesn’t give tours on Halloween because she likes to take the kids trick-or-treating. The McKees, too, are typical, if you don’t count the coffin phone built into their wall. The Munsters were monsters, but they were otherwise a traditional, loving sixties family. The Munsters, which aired for only two seasons, was produced by the creators of Leave It to Beaver, and like Beaver, it depicted suburban life, albeit satirically. Well, Grandpa burned it right here with his cigar-yeah, I’ve got his cigar, too-so I bought the tuxedo from him, didn’t have it dry-cleaned or anything. “When Grandpa Munster came to our charity event, the town next to us donated this tuxedo for him to wear for the weekend. “My favorite piece in here is this tuxedo,” she says, touching the formal suit with red bowtie.
Once she’s given me the grand tour, McKee shows me the memorabilia room, crammed with photos and figurines. Marshall Hinsley/Courtesy of the Munster Mansion “But it was up to me, so here we are in the Munster House.” The Munster Mansion stairway. “If it were up to him, we’d be living in the Starship Enterprise,” she says. They’d dress up like Lily and Herman and have the show’s cast members over for visits, but they didn’t build the house with the intention of making money. They opened it for tours and charity events a couple times a year. For years, the Munster Mansion was simply the McKees’ house. There’s something so impressive, almost subversive, about giving one’s life to something that no one else has likely even conceived of, something that many people wouldn’t understand. We can’t do fire out the nose, of course, because you’d burn down the house, but we used to have fog coming out.” She adds, “On tours, a lot of people have breathing problems, so we don’t do fog anymore.” Even the candelabras and beaded-fringe lampshades and cheesecloth cobwebs look just like the originals.īut the Munster Mansion is less spooky than simply extraordinary. He did the fiberglass and the mechanism to make the mouth open.
Spot, the Munsters’ pet fire-breathing dragon, lives under the stairs: “We did a cardboard mock-up,” McKee recalls. The dishes laid out on the dining table are the real dishes the cast ate from on the show. It’s not just a tribute to the original but a nearly exact duplicate. Now they live next door and open the mansion for private tours as well as for monthly murder mystery dinner parties catered by the Olive Garden. The McKees lived there until a few years ago.
Twenty years ago, McKee and her husband, Charles, built a Victorian-style home in Waxahachie and designed it to look just like the Munsters’ house. She loved it so much that she decided to recreate it.
“You could flow from any room without turning around and going back. McKee is talking about the home at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the fictional city of Mockingbird Heights in the sixties TV show The Munsters. “Most people didn’t get past the characters to notice the house,” says Sandra McKee, a lifelong Texan, former lingerie store owner, great-grandmother, and Waxahachie resident.