This book signing at Book Soup was wonderful – good people, good conversation (before and after the signing). Just another example of the kind of quality positive people who have been drawn to The Monkees across generations – I even met a former head of publicity for ScreenGems who had some fun stories to tell. — Rosanne
So it was very interesting, by using their own names they actually caused a difficulty in anyone really understanding who they were. I always say that if you think about it Davy Jones was the Neil Patrick Harris of his day, because he had come off Broadway and a Tony nomination for Oliver! — he played the Artful Dodger. So, after The Monkees was over he should have been able to return to Broadway, but nobody made room for him because they thought , “Ah, he’s just a bubblegum singer.” They completely dismissed him and yet he had been part of them where as Neil Patrick Harris has gone form Doogie Howser to Broadway, back to television in How I Met Your Mother, back to Broadway and winning a Tony for Hedwig. So, the times weren’t sophisticated enough yet to understand that ability.
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Rosanne: Treva Silverman was one of the first women to write comedy without a male partner on television and she worked on the The Monkees first and then she would move onto The Mary Tyler Moore Show and she would win 2 Emmys for that show. So I noted that if you were watching The Monkees, there is definitely the feminist perspective that she is going to bring to Mary Tyler Moore exists in The Monkees the best that it can in a show that doesn’t a female character.
Jean: Ok. So give us some examples of that. How is this feminist we’ll call is point of view or issue suggested.
Rosanne: When they met girls — again, I assume a group of rock and roll boys would go out with the cheerleaders, , airheads, groupies, the fan girls — and instead — as I clocked each episode — every time they liked a girl she was a girl with a purpose. There were girls who were going to college. There were girls who had jobs and were supporting themselves as young women. There were journalists.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
This book signing at Book Soup was wonderful – good people, good conversation (before and after the signing). Just another example of the kind of quality positive people who have been drawn to The Monkees across generations – I even met a former head of publicity for ScreenGems who had some fun stories to tell. — Rosanne
The other thing that’s really interesting is they made a choice in the show for all the actors and musicians to use their own names as their characters. Any other show — The Partridge Family — they were The Partridge Family but that wasn’t their actual names in real life, but on The Monkees they were using their real names and this gets into a whole chapter i have on political ideology and identity. How we decide who’s who and how publicists had to decide how to present these people. Are they — first of all, when Davy got married they didn’t tell anybody because they thought all the girls would stop liking him, so how hard it is to be married in the real world and have to hide your wife and how much does she like not being able to tell people who she really is. They had to make choices about that and the idea that on concerts they were Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones and Peter Tork and those were their names on the show. On the show they were a bunch of kids who couldn’t get a job to save their souls. So when the show was over that ability for Americans not be be able to separate out actors from characters was difficult. Because suddenly everyone thought that they were a couple of goofballs or they were famous rock stars who didn’t need to be actors anymore.
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Jean: So The Monkees are going strong now did they evolve in their message over these 52 episode?
Rosanne: 58 Episodes
Jean: 58 Episodes. All right. So they start out, did they change up what they were doing? I mean you’re the connoisseur of all the episodes.
Rosanne: They had a variety of messages and these come form the writers experiences. One of the things I push in my class is that we have to remember that we tend, in American, because the French taught us, to correlate the author of the piece with the director, but, in fact, the director can’t direct a bunch of blank pages. It’s the writer who comes up with the theme and the idea. The director enhances that through the visuals. So, for me, it was important to meet the various writers who I still could and it’s their thoughts and messages.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
This book signing at Book Soup was wonderful – good people, good conversation (before and after the signing). Just another example of the kind of quality positive people who have been drawn to The Monkees across generations – I even met a former head of publicity for ScreenGems who had some fun stories to tell. — Rosanne
When I talked to the writers about that they said it was because the censors didn’t get it. They had no ideas what they were actually saying.They just thought it was some sort goofy — I don’t know — you could have called it Italy for all anyone cared. They did not see the connection. That happened a lot. There are a lot of drug jokes on the show. They talk about taking trips a lot and that sort of thing. They talk about taking pills that will give you funny visions and they have a great moment in one of the episodes where they’re doing a little flashback — a fake fantasy — and Micky goes to visit Mike who is the “Middle Llama” because the High Llama is off sleeping it off out back. And it stayed on the air, but just a year after The Monkees went off the air The Smothers Brothers come on and they make the same jokes and they get canceled. They get canceled for being overtly political on television, but here were these guys doing the very thing for two years and nobody noticed. Partially because it was all slapstick humor — you’re talking about vaudeville — they were very much like The Marx Bros as we know and partially the censors just didn’t get it.
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Jean: So how many season did The Monkees run?
Rosanne: You know it only ran for 2 seasons. Back in the day, you had more shows — nowadays you do 13 or maybe 20 episodes — so they did 58 episodes in total in 2 seasons. They were going to come back for a 3rd season after a very successful couple of years of concert tours, but they had decided that — the actors has decided — that they were tired of the formula of the show, which was a sitcom and it was usually some crazy adventure going on. They felt that they wanted to do a variety show ala The Carol Burnett Show, but there were no rock and roll groups hosting variety shows yet, so the network said, “no. We don’t believe that will work.” They said, “Look, we’ll do little sketches in between and will do music and have musical guests,” The network said no and they said, “If that’s the case we’ll just cancel it.”
Jean: Even though Donnie and Marie did do that, right?
Rosanne: But later in the 70’s and the next year Sonny and Cher will do that a and they were a rock and roll group of the day and, in fact, Coslough Johnson, who’s one of my favorite writers for the show who I got to interview. He moved from The Monkees to Sonny and Cher and so that style was going to work, but the network didn’t — I think it was a big mistake monetarily. If they had morphed the show it would have brought that audience along with them.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
This book signing at Book Soup was wonderful – good people, good conversation (before and after the signing). Just another example of the kind of quality positive people who have been drawn to The Monkees across generations – I even met a former head of publicity for ScreenGems who had some fun stories to tell. — Rosanne
I think also the show introduced the audience to a lot of new political ideas that weren’t supposed to be on television, but as the writers told me, they were young. They were hip. They were using language that the censors didn’t quite understand so, by accident, they got through some ideas. One of my favorites is a scene where all four of the guys are playing a game of dominos and, at one point, they drop all the dominos flat on the table and Davy says to Peter, “What do you call this game?” and Peter says, ‘Southeast Asia.” Because the Domino Theory of communism that Johnson had put fortth — as putting forward was that we had to stop communism any time it started to spread or it would domino through the whole of Asia. So, literally they had just made a comment about the Vietnam War and the censors didn’t cut that out of the show.
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Jean: So here we finally have television trying to deal with these difficult issues, but in a way that made a difference to people.
Rosanne: I think so. It made people start talking about those things in their own lives and that’s what TV’s always done. We credit Will & Grace with giving us a weekly gay character who came into people’s homes and it made people start talking about issues like gay marriage and gay adoption and things like that. So it’s really — people don’t realize — we think movies are influential, but you choose what movies you’re going to go see. You choose with your money to pay for those messages. So, often movies are preaching to a choir. TV comes into your home uninvited. You don’t know what you’re going to stumble upon when you change the channel and so there’s more of an ability to find things you didn’t think you wanted to know about.
Jean: Right, because it was there and it was free. So everyone’s going to sit down that evening — you’re not going out to a movie to watch something controversial and go “Let’s start flipping the channels. Oh look at these kids running around. That’s pretty funny”
Rosanne: Exactly. It attracted — the energetic feel of the show and that they were cute young boys made them pay attention.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Rosanne: So, in fact, because we just lost Mary Tyler Moore a couple weeks ago there was a lot of discussion
Jean: God rest her soul
Rosanne:…about here show. Exactly and how she introduced a gay character on her show. She talked about birth control pills.
Jean: She was the working woman by herself. That’s why I watched it.
Rosanne: Exactly. Exactly.
Jean: I was shocked. She got a real job on her own.
Rosanne:…and she spent the night with boys without them coming to her apartment. We would see her come home wearing the same clothes she wore on the day before.
Jean: Oooo….Where’s my fainting couch?
Rosanne: So we were moving into that area where these things were going to be more open and so The Monkees couldn’t quite be blatant about it, but they could be subtle about the things they were saying.
Jean; Right and actually I do like the subtlety. I think it is an artistic thing that I appreciate.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Jean:Your saying that part of thing was that this was just this era was the dawn of trying to show people more real life situations as opposed to fantasy like, for example, you cited in your book, the “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” film about an interracial couple, which is this huge production back then and this was already happening in film, but not so much in TV, right?
Rosanne: Now, TV is interesting. I have to give credit, of all things, afternoon soap operas are some of the places where controversial stuff happened first. AIDS stories were first done. Gay characters were first introduced. People didn’t take the soaps seriously because they were just for housewives to watch.
Jean: Right.
Rosanne: … bit as those things seeped into daytime TV then they slowly can seep into nighttime television and usually in the hipper, younger, new programming.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
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