omorka | Project Rewatch: Season 1 Disc 1 Episodes 1-3

Yup. I've picked up four new muses. Time to rewatch the canon. Fortunately, given that this is an even more episodic series than RGB (other than objects recurring, I don't think there's any episode-to-episode continuity), the Monkees canon is pretty . . . flexible.

I wonder who I'll end up slashing by the end? When I last watched this show, I was 13. I shipped Micky/Me. (Yeah, not very subtle. And sometimes it was Mike/Me, but usually Micky. Noetisexual, remember? They were the two who were given all the bits that required either cleverness or intelligent pre-planning.)

I'll be otherwise occupied for most of the next weekend, so I went ahead and got started. The first disc has six episodes, of which two of the first three have two commentary tracks (they're the only four commentary tracks on the disc).

Season 1 Episode 1: Royal Flush

I was terrified, putting the disc in, that this just wasn't going to hold up at all, that the jokes would fall embarassingly flat. In retrospect, I shouldn't have worried. My first watchthrough was in the '80s reruns starting in 1986, twenty years after first airing, on MTV and its sibling Nickelodeon. If that were going to be the case, it wouldn't have survived long enough to make re-runs two decades later. It's a cornfest, but the feeling (which is cited as inspiration by both the episode director in the commentary for this one and Rafaelson in the commentary for ep. 3) is the black-and-white team comedies of the '30s. Have I mentioned that I like the Marx Brothers? So far this feels dated, but it's still funny. It's certainly better than Gilligan's Island, which has had similar longevity (and which it ran opposite at the time - and usually beat.)

This is the first Davy-in-love story - from the very first episode! - and he gets a lot of screentime, including a fencing scene (Davy [RIP] also has a commentary track, and most of what he talks about are the girl who co-stars this episode and his swashbuckler turn). Both Micky and Mike get a standout scene; Peter doesn't, but he does get one very funny sight gag when he returns to a hotel linen closet in the beginning of a chase scene specifically for the purpose of stealing a towel.

In the hotel sequences, they're all wearing suits of exactly the same color, but different cuts. Davy's and Mike's are double-breasted, and Mike's has some Western detailng at the yoke that the others are all missing. Peter's and Micky's are single-breasted, and Peter's seems to have one button fewer.

There's a long romp sequence on a beach in Malibu in which Micky's hair is much curlier/shaggier than it is in the soundstage bits. According to the commentaries, they weren't filmed that long apart - that's just his hair reacting to the humidity. Someone must have flat-ironed the hell out of it in makeup every morning.

The eight-button shirts don't appear in the episode proper, but they do show up in the interview segment added at the end (to couteract overactive editing). It's the red versions.

Season 1 Episode 2: Monkee See, Monkee Die

Very '30s comedy setup - haunted-house hijinks, including a psychic/medium who switches back and forth between proper Spiritualist guide and world-weary New Yorker. There's a girl for Davy to fall for, but that's a very tiny portion of the plot. This is the first appearance of the landlord character, and the first appearance in the show itself of the eight-button shirts, in this case the red ones worn with slightly bell-bottomed jeans and black belts with large round silvertone buckles.

At one point all four of them are sharing a bed. Might come back to that once I figure out how the goggles are going to fit this time.

Micky having a chemistry experiment on him is a plot point, as is him re-wiring a telephone to a radio. Looks like mad science got handed to his character very early on.

There's a double switch at the end - all of the "supernatural" happenings have turned out to have human explanations, and then what is at least framed as a 'real' (albeit literary) ghost speaks in the very last shot.

Actually not as good as the previous one, despite some fun goofing around in the middle of the episode and a nice two-part gag centered on Mike. This one didn't get its own commentary, and I think I see why.

Season 1 Episode 3: Monkee vs. Machine

Ah, the first Message episode. Starts with a phone call from the landlord character, then heads straight into the theme - Peter has a job interview with a punchcard '60s computer (complete with blinkenlichten and card-spitting), which he fails. This is the first extended Peter sequence we've had, and I have to say, he sells the vulnerability of that character. (He's on one of the two commentary tracks for the episode, and talks a lot about the acting training they got before filming started, as well as some of Micky's on-set tutoring. He wasn't an actor prior to the show, but he'd developed the "sensitive but a bit simple" persona as a stage persona prior to being cast.)

Then Mike comes in, armed with Peter's experience, to confound the machine, which he does in fine James T. Kirk style. The two job interview segments both involve the single-word question "Sex?" In Peter's case, it's clearly a reference to gender, and he answers it as such, although he's out of sync with the computer at that point. In the second case, it's Mike asking the question, and it's a bit more - ambiguous. These guys are masters of Getting Crap Past The Radar. Having blown up the machine, he of course gets hired, so the episode can argue for human creativity being superior to machine efficiency. It's a tired theme now; it was probably less so at the time. The antagonist for the episode is vaguely visually reminiscent for me of Robert MacNamara, and I suspect this is not a coincidence.

And then I fell out of my chair and said "Holy crap, is that -?" IMDB says yes - the vague ineffectual toy company president who can't make his own decisions (until the end of the episode, when of course he finally stands up to the antagonist) is played by the same actor who plays the vague and out-of-touch university president in Real Genius. New headcanon for RG! (Also, dang, the dude has a million TV appearances between the two roles and I don't - HOLY FREAKING CRAP, he has an appearance on the 1970's "Ghost Busters" series! - well, okay, apparently I do recognize a couple.)

Micky gets assigned to blow things up, although it's not quite as mad-sciency as the last episode.

Anyway, despite the anvilicious moral, delivered by Mike (IIRC, anytime an episode has a moral, he gets to deliver it, except for one season 2 episode when Peter gets it instead), this is one of the tighter scripted episodes and the best of the first three, despite having 'comedic drag,' which I kind of hate (so does Tork, apparently) and a brief mistaken-identity sexual assault that's played entirely for laughs (the antagonist is unmasking the Monkees in drag and mistakes another lady for one of them, ripping her skirt off; it's oddly slapsticky and out-of-place). This is one of the ones I really remember from my last runthrough, and it holds up pretty well.

So far, so good. I'm cautiously optimistic - I remember the Season 2 episodes being stronger than the Season 1 ones, so if the ones early in Season 1 are still watchable and mostly enjoyable, I imagine there'll be some pretty good stuff later.