(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

—

SHOW: The Monkees
EPISODE: “Too Many Girls”
FIRST AIRED:  Dec. 19, 1966

The Monkees is one of the most beloved rip-offs of all time. Its primordial soup is a cynical stew of corporate calculation, an A-to-B paint-by-numbers formula meant to cash in on the popularity of a certain 1960s rock band that also just happened to have a misspelled animal-inspired moniker, four bowl-cut guys with dimples and endearing personalities, and a sense of rollicking fun and romantic whimsy that pervaded their entire oeuvre onscreen, onstage, and on the turntable.

Still, despite what boardroom schemers may believe, eventually something new and exciting, unexpected and genuine has to enter somewhere into the boiling pot in order to capture our collective imagination. So even though The Monkees was constructed as a Hard Day’s Night-esque TV show first and a band second, and even though the group was widely known since its inception as “America’s answer to the Beatles,” what aspects of the whole enterprise transmuted it from mere carbon-copycatting into a fresh and memorable entry into the pop culture landscape?

As demonstrated in “Too Many Girls,” an enjoyable Davy Jones-centric outing from Season One of the half-hour sitcom, the magic of The Monkees depended upon two things: the creative team’s masterful use of the medium, and hey hey, the Monkees themselves.

…

The episode takes the trope of the adoring female fan and heightens it to cartoon absurdity. Already exasperated at girl-crazy Davy getting stalked by female fans wherever they go, even their own shared bachelor pad, the band is besieged by a crazy and conniving mother, Mrs. Badderly, who aims to push her reluctant daughter Fern into a relationship with the unsuspecting Mr. Jones, hoping that she’ll marry into his fame and fortune. 

Despite Peter, Micky, and Mike’s efforts, Mrs. Badderly eventually gets Fern and Davy to perform together on a talent show. The Monkees rescue their forlorn resident heartthrob from the would-be mother-daughter con artists when they sabotage the talent show… and then, of course, break into a performance of “I’m a Believer.”

…

…

The Monkees’ brand of humor was one of the chief saving graces of the show. Weekly, it served up an eclectic blend of Abbott & Costello-inspired zaniness, fast-paced repartee, hyper-stylized editing, dreamlike non sequiturs, and a muted but omnipresent tongue-in-cheek snark that seemed to let the viewer in on the joke of the show’s own contrived artificiality. 

It also was expert at taking full advantage of the television medium itself. The current “golden age of American television” is said to have begun in the early ‘90s with innovative shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons pushing the kinds of storytelling tools available to the visual medium, and we’re now firmly in the land of single-camera comedy greatness, with Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and time-toggling (if attitudinally quaint) shows like Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother, all of which take liberties with the notions of reality and linear storytelling. To varying and significant degrees, these shows all share The Monkees as their sharp, caffeinated, and rambunctious ancestor. 

…

…

In the opening scene of “Too Many Girls,” Peter, Micky, and Mike try to fend off the girls that keep showing up to their apartment to admire Davy. Every time the three think they’re successful, the camera focuses on an apparently solo Davy… then zooms out to reveal another girl who, inexplicably, has defied the laws of physics and appeared out of thin air just to bat her eyes at Davy. The sequence eventually ends with the camera zooming out to reveal a whole gaggle of girls pawing at the lucky guy.

As broad and not exactly pro-feminist as it might be, the sequence is characteristic of how The Monkees pushed the tools of the medium. Its visual language was one that could not quite easily be replicated on a stage. Its sight gags depended largely on what the camera saw and what lay just beyond the frame lines. Meanwhile, its frenetic sense of humor also depended on the freeform editing style that presaged, for better or worse, the age of MTV and the reality show.    

…

…

The Monkees was also pumped full of delightful non sequiturs that at once echoed the “third panel punchline” zingers of Sunday morning comics as well as the liquid and often bizarre narrative tendencies of French New Wave. When the four guys visit a restaurant where Mrs. Batterly first comes into contact with them under the guise of a tea leaf reader, the Monkees get up and depart their table, which – apropos of nothing – falls apart entirely like a house of cards. 

Elsewhere, in one of the show’s funniest gags, the guys chain Davy to a large chair to keep him from Fern. Desperate to see her, he escapes. When the guys go looking for him, they ask pedestrians if they’ve seen someone matching Davy’s description hobbling down the street with a chair chained to him. The pedestrians point the guys in three different directions – apparently, there are several guys matching Davy’s description who have a chair chained to them.

…

…

These gags work precisely because there’s no reason for them. One might accuse the show of catering to the most short-stemmed ADD audience sensibilities, but there’s also a poking fun at the inherent artificiality of visual media here. Given the show’s target audience that they name right in the theme song (“We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say”), it’s not a stretch to surmise that these non sequiturs functioned as a kind of meta-critique designed to lambast the squarest of narrative conventions of film and TV ladled onto the table by none other than The Man himself.

Alas, no one truly remembers The Monkees because of its medium-pushing storytelling quirks. We remember the bandmates themselves. The Monkees might have been devised as nothing more than a drugstore-brand Beatles, but the team assigned to actually cast the four dudes did their job letter-perfect. Mike Nesmith’s sermon-serious yet light and open delivery made him the ideal straight man. Peter Tork got the brunt of the idiot jokes, but he somehow shined when given opportunities to display his particular brand of mock outrage. Micky Dolenz had an offhand smarm that made him ideal as the group’s resident kidder. 

…

…

And, of course, what hasn’t already been said about Davy Jones, the heartthrob centerpiece of the whole project? His manboyish features, “gee shucks” mannerisms, and – ironically, considering the whole impetus for The Monkees – prototypical British charm made him all but genetically engineered to attract and galvanize throngs of hyperventilating female fans. 

…

…

Individually, they were game performers not without talent, and together the four of them had insatiable chemistry. Decades later their onscreen rapport remains fresh as ever. The show’s scripts welcomed the four to improvise often, in some cases entire scenes, and that freestyle approach is the key ingredient that helped turn the factory-built origin story of The Monkees into a genuinely new and exciting theater for music and comedy.  

Much has already been writ about the behind-the-scenes sturm und drang of The Monkees, which eventually resulted in the demise of the series, declining album sales, and a critically and commercially scourged feature film. But within the whole messy epic tale of grotesque commercialism that is The Monkees, if you looked close and hard enough, you could find sparks of originality, wit, and creativity: their names were Mike, Micky, Peter, and Davy.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: Can you hear it? The screams! My hope is that you can hear the piercing screams of a girl stampede wanting to get a piece of cute li’l Davy. As one who grew up loving The Monkees, this entry is near and dear. I wanted to feature Davy’s shiny bright smile and his undeniable lady appeal. I thought it would be great fun to have the border as hands reaching out to touch Davy’s face. It was a challenge getting them positioned correctly to achieve the heart shape, but I think it works. Rest in peace, Daydream Believer. Your charm, talent, and undying love for your fans will always be remembered. ~ Aireen Arellano