Do you have a fondness for root beer soup? Are your eyes like cupcakes, floating in a sea of sour cream? Have you ever found your feet on backwards? Then this episode guide is for you. Welcome to Monkees A La Episode: The Ultimate Monkees Episode Guide: a fun, yet vaguely factual, episode by episode guide of the The Monkees TV show.
💜 The Monkees Season 1 💜 The Monkees Season 2 💜
💜 Daydream Believers: The Monkees Story 💜
The Monkees phenomenon is a historical controversy often mislabeled and misrepresented to this day. The Monkees began as a TV show about a fictitious band, then halfway through the series The Monkees became real a band. This fascinating metamorphosis has created drama, passion, controversy, anger, hatred and wonder among people everywhere.
The Monkees show first aired on NBC September 12, 1966. The show ran for two seasons, the last episode airing March 25, 1968. The show won two Emmy Awards in 1967, for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. The series was later re-aired on CBS from September 1969 to September 1972, then on ABC from September 1972 to August 1973, then sold into syndication in 1975. It has since been aired on MTV, Nick At Nite, Antenna TV, and many other networks, and has been released on VHS, DVD, and Blue-ray, making this series accessible to multiple generations of fans.
The Monkees show portrays a fictionalized American pop and rock band living together on the beach in Los Angeles, California who find themselves in bizarre comedic situations, zany, madcap adventures, and unexpected romance, as they struggle to make it as a band. They live meagerly and much of the plots circle around their foibles and lack of success, often in the face of square adult adversaries.
In the beginning, music was created for the TV show by some of the most talented song-writers and session musicians of the era, the fictional band members adding in only their vocals to the final tracks; later, this music would be created entirely by the Monkees themselves. This ensured that each episode contained two songs, including song “romp”: a vignette of something that may have nothing to do with the episode while one of The Monkees songs played along with it, a precursor to the later created “music videos”. Many of these songs would become some of the greatest hits of the 1960s.
The Monkees series was daring and experimental for its time. Creators Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider developed The Monkees with avant garde film techniques, such as breaking the fourth wall, jump cuts, and improvisation. The Monkees used their real names in the show, which added to the verisimilitude (a favorite word of Micky’s 😉), the confusion, and the controversy over where the lines between fantasy and reality begin and end. The Monkees also challenged social stigmas, such as showing men with long hair and trendy, hippie-style clothing, both of which were seen as dangerous and counter-culture during the radical socials shifts of the 1960s–but The Monkees were not dangerous. “Which is probably the legacy, or would be one of the legacies,” Micky Dolenz said in a Cheat Sheet interview, “making it OK to have long hair and bell-bottoms in 1966. Because at that time, the only time you saw long-haired kids with bell-bottoms, they were being arrested!”
Bob Rafelson was drafted into the US Army, and stationed in Japan, prior to creaing The Monkees. While in Japan he translated film from Japanese to English, worked as a disc jockey, and analyzed Japanese movies, “I’d have to watch an Ozu movie over and over again… I was hypnotized by the stillness of his frames, his sureness of composition… I suppose my own aesthetic evolved from looking at certain kinds of pictures.”[source] Bert Schnieder was working in Los Angeles at the time and joined with Bob to form RayBert Productions, which produced both The Monkees, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show.
As Time magazine contributor James Poniewozik wrote upon reflecting on the death of Davy Jones in 2012, “Even if the show never meant to be more than entertainment and a hit-single generator, we shouldn’t sell The Monkees short. It was far better TV than it had to be; during an era of formulaic domestic sitcoms and wacky comedies, it was a stylistically ambitious show, with a distinctive visual style, absurdist sense of humor and unusual story structure. Whatever Jones and The Monkees were meant to be, they became creative artists in their own right, and Jones’ chipper Brit-pop presence was a big reason they were able to produce work that was commercial, wholesome and yet impressively weird.”
“Commercial, wholesome, and yet impressively weird”. I’ll take that.
🦋 Emily Wells