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Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
She turns down the cute boy to do her job. Her job and her responsibility is being queen. Right? That’s what she’s become/ It’s not about can I get the cute boy? And I’m like Wow! Every girl in America would have said yes to the cute boy. So that was an interesting, to me, feminist thought that you should think about your position and what you’re there to do in the world. It’s not just to make some boy happy. Right? And then she invites him to come and it’s kind of cute because he says “No. What I have to do is here with the guys and our music. We have to spread our message through the world in music.” So even he is led by his purpose in the world not by “Who am I going to have sex with this week.” So I think that’s really kind of a big statement for a TV show that I was watching as a kid. My thesis at the end of the book is, if you were a girl watching in 1966, you learned that to get a Monkee you didn’t want to be a cheerleader. You wanted to be a woman of value.
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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About Rosanne Welch, PhD
Rosanne Welch, PhD is a writer, producer and university professor with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Touched by an Angel and ABC NEWS/Nightline. Other books include Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture (McFarland, 2017) and Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List, by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association. Welch has also published chapters in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television (I.B.Tauris) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color (Lexington Books, 2018) and essays in Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology and Outside In Makes it So, and Outside in Boldly Goes (both edited by Robert Smith). By day she teaches courses on the history of screenwriting and on television writing for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting programs. Her talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP is available on YouTube.
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