When two Monkees fans get together, magic always happens, as you’ll see when you read what Wendy Fawthrop of the Orange County Register thought of my last Monkees lecture, which was open to the public. — Rosanne
And after Rosanne Welch spoke recently to a gathering of Cal State Fullerton students and faculty, many of them were left also believing that the Monkees, the 1960s boy band, had a greater impact on television, music and pop culture than they had thought.
Illustrated with slides of the Monkees with Paul McCartney and Janis Joplin, on cereal boxes and in pop culture references long after their heyday, Welch’s talk laid out evidence that the group’s TV show made strong feminist statements and advanced such TV practices as characters addressing the audience, used today on such shows as “Modern Family” and “House of Cards.”
“They influenced so many of today’s modern-day performers and yet people keep forgetting about that,” said Welch.
For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
Transcript:
You may never have seen a Tom Baker Doctor Who. You should check it out, but you have in fact seen Tom Baker as Doctor Who if you saw the 50th Anniversary special. That was his special guest starring moment. Right? And I think it’s quite adorable. It was quite fun. He was, as I said, replaced by Peter Davison who happens to be my favorite Doctor. Although there was some controversy with the announcement of the new lady Doctor. He actually said he was sorry that they had chosen to make her a female because boys would lose a role model that they needed. And there was a whole lot of … Oh, you’re old-fashioned. You’re all bad. We don’t like you. You have to listen to what he’s saying. He’s saying that what’s special about Doctor Who is he shows a different side of gender. He counters the toxic masculinity in our society. The kind of stuff that’s been discussed in the news right now over the Weinstein thing and Loius CK. The toxic masculinity. The Doctor has always been a man driven by his intellect, his brain. He’s not using violence to solve problems and so what Peter Davison was saying was he regretted little boys not having this kind of man to look up to. An argument on the other side could be why can’t little boys look up to women who are in power positions. So you could go and look at it that way. I think it goes either way.
Rosanne Welch PhD teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.
Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.
* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library
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
In the book world, not only have I don the Monkees book, but I’ve done — in our library here — the Women in American History. It’s a four-volume encyclopedia series — I think they have an ebook version of it here — that I just put out last year, as well, which is really interesting because we cover women in history and popular culture and often you don’t blend those,. So our little tagline was you’ll meet Lady Bird Johnson and Lady Gaga all in the same book. So That;s Cool. My most recent one is a novel on Filippo Mazzei who was the man who owned the plantation next door to Thomas Jefferson. he was an Italian immigrant and he wrote the words “All Men Are Created Equal” in a pamphlet and Thomas Jefferson liked it and you know where it appeared later. He’s a pretty cool guy. I liked him. So that’s what I do. I’m also on the book review board for the Journal of Screenwriting and, as I just noted, Written By Magazine.
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.
For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
Transcript:
Is this the first time anyone’s ever considered a lady Doctor? As a matter of fact, it’s not. This has been in discussions for a while but it’s as if society wasn’t ready for it and they knew it. They had to wait for us to catch up to what the writers wanted to do. Tome Baker who some of you, if you know old Who, should know as one of the most popular, previous Doctors — he actually said, when they were switching Doctors and that was in 1980 — “I wish my successor, whoever he or she might be, the best of luck.” So he was already planting the seeds of this possibility and I think that’s really interesting in 1980. What’s funny is, I often tell people, it’s wonderful to watch news from other countries to realize there are different perspectives than our American perspectives and my favorite story is, in 1980 when they announced the new Doctor, the first story on the BBC news that evening was that Peter Davison would take over for the job of Doctor Who from Tom Baker. The second news story in England that day was that Ronald Reagan had just won the American presidency.
Rosanne Welch PhD teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.
Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.
* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library
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
…and they won for Best Director who happened to be James Frawley who was a new young guy in town. He grew up to direct the original Muppets Movie and win several awards in his career. So this is how he got started and you’ll see some similarities between the four guys and The Muppets. They’re all just kind of characters having fun. So, just to let you know who I am as John was happy to say, I was television writer for many years. I wrote on Beverly Hills 90210, a show called Picket Fences which I adored but was canceled in its third season and I spent a long time on Touched By An Angel. I did a documentary for ABC News Nightline which was based on the American Legion Boys Nation group. There 50th anniversary year for 1963. They had all met President John F. Kennedy and 1993 Bill Clinton who was one of them was President of the United States and they had a reunion at The White House and so I got meet with them and interview them about their life and what they had lived through.
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.
For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
Transcript:
Finally, we’re now looking at what will happen to the show with a new writer Chris Chibnall and Chris Chibnall is a really interesting writer. He worked on Torchwood as a staff writer. He created this program Broachchurch which I highly recommend if you have some time. One of the best-written mini-series I have ever seen. Very good stuff and in doing the show he worked with Jody Whittaker who played the mother on Broadchurch of a 10-year-old boy who went missing. Jody, blonded out, is going to be the new Doctor Who. So through working with Chris on this previous program, he decided she had the chutzpah and the charisma and what was necessary to be the new Doctor Who and also, as I said earlier, in his writing for Doctor Who he invented Kate Lethbridge-Stewart who is a head in the military. Her father was a head. We’re going to talk about in a minute. So, I think Chris is a really interesting writer. I think he’s going to do a lot of good work for the show. So that’s what I want to think about.
Rosanne Welch PhD teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.
Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.
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