Category: Books

Monkees Question of the Moment: How did you decide what to watch in your childhood?

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

“I was a fan from the beginning at the age of 6 when the show debuted on NBC and caused what I often tease was the first great choice of a childhood lived without benefit of DVR.  Should I watch The Monkees or Gilligan’s Island?”

from Why The Monkees Mattered by Dr. Rosanne Welch

Receive on-going info about “Why The Monkees Mattered” book and more!

“The Monkees as a television show introduced young audiences to new ideas of political ideology, a new anti-military discourse and new concepts of class and feminist theory.”

from Why The Monkees Mattered by Dr. Rosanne Welch — Coming Fall 2016 – Click for more info!

Monkees Question of the Moment: What did you learn from The Monkees?

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Who Wrote The Monkees? – “Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth” by Dave Evans Part 3 of an on-going series

This week’s Antenna offering for The Monkees – “Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth” – was written by Dave Evans who is one of the nicest, kindest, men I have ever had the pleasure of interviewing.

Mr. Evans remembered being asked by Davy’s manager, Ward Sylvester, to write something that would highlight Davy’s ability with horses and hence this episode was born.  Mr. Evans also remembered being asked by Bob Rafaelson to be on set for rewrites as needed, which gave him the chance to get to know the actors early on – an opportunity not all the other writers shared.  After his two-season, nine episode run on the show he moved on to Laugh-in and Love, American Style, but told me no other job ever gave him the pleasure The Monkees did, so he eventually quit writing and went into conflict resolution, where he won awards for his ability to bring deeply distant parties together in compromise.

A 2014 article in the Los Angeles Times tells you all you need to know about him:

A tale of two churches — and a persistent racial divide, The Los Angeles Time

After the 1992 Los Angeles Riots Evans, the son of a minister, was a member of an all white Presbyterian church that created a cross town friendship with an all black Presbyterian church.  Members of each began to visit the other church to create community.  Twenty years later, Evans is the only member of his church still visiting the other church. 

---

Receive on-going info about “Why The Monkees Mattered” book and more!

---

More information on The Monkees:

• Read more about the writers of “The Monkees” own this article for Written By Magazine – Hey, Hey They Wrote the Monkees!
• “Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth” cast and crew information on IMDB

Previously in Who Wrote The Monkees?:

• Monkees in a Ghost Town” by Robert Schlitt and Peter Meyerson
• “Success Story” by Bernie Orenstein

Who wrote The Monkees? – “Monkees in a Ghost Town” by Robert Schlitt and Peter Meyerson  Part 2 of an on-going series

The second Monkees episode Antenna TV is airing this weekend is “Monkees in a Ghost Town”, by the writing team of Robert Schlitt and Peter Meyerson.  The partnership ended shortly after their work on The Monkees with Schmitt moving into one-hour dramas such as The Father Dowling Mysteries and, eventually, Matlock while Meyerson teamed up with fellow Monkees writer Treva Silverman on an episode of That Girl and a Buck Henry series called Captain Nice before eventually co-creating Welcome Back, Kotter.

---

Receive on-going info about “Why The Monkees Mattered” book and more!

---

I was lucky enough to interview Mr. Meyerson several months before he passed away and he regaled me with several stories about his time on the show and socializing with the actors, particularly at parties at Peter’s house, as Meyerson himself was quite the hippie, so their philosophies were well matched.

A few of the other writers I interviewed kept referring to Mr. Meyerson as their ‘college guy’ and in “Ghost Town” we see his homage to that perennial of literature courses –  Of Mice and Men.

Yes, that is veteran actor, Lon Chaney, Jr. on the right. 

More information on The Monkees:

• Read more about the writers of “The Monkees” own this article for Written By Magazine – Hey, Hey They Wrote the Monkees!
• “Monkees in a Ghost Town” cast and crew information on IMDB

Previously in Who Write The Monkees?:

• “Success Story” by Bernie Orenstein