Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 5 Episodes 57 & 58
And here we are at the end of the series. It's been a fun little ride.
Season 2 Disc 5 Episode 57: The Monkees Blow Their Minds
Synopsis: [Mock interview in which Michael and Frank Zappa dress as each other] Seeking a cure for writer's block, Peter turns to the mentalist Oraculo; seeking to steal the ten-week gig the Monkees are auditioning for, Oraculo and his servant Rudy sneak a mind-control potion into Peter's tea. At Club Cassandra, the other three Monkees have set up for the auditions, but Peter arrives clearly out of it, putting his bass on backwards and breaking one of Micky's drumheads. The club manager dismisses them, and Oraculo steps up, auditioning with Peter as his mental slave and winning the gig. Mike and Micky hatch a scheme to get Peter back; Micky reads every book in the public library on mentalism, and Mike calls up Oraculo with a phony story about amnesia and a missing valise filled with cash. Micky and Davy sneak into Oraculo's lair and trick Rudy into going to find Oraculo; they attempt to lure Peter away while Mike stalls for time (all during a romp set to "Valleri"). Finally, Davy conks Peter on the head and they haul him off unconscious; unfortunately, when they arrive home, Oraculo has successfully tricked Peter into drinking the potion and has spirited him off. Micky and Davy move a poster and chain Peter to the wall with the shackles behind it (!). They then run off to free Mike, but Rudy conks them on the head with the same mallet they used on Peter, and Oraculo doses them and summons Peter mentally. Peter yanks the shackles from the wall, and after a false start joins them. At the club, Oraculo leaves the boys with Rudy and goes out to work the audience, but is stymied by a young lawyer (played by Jones) and a drunk (played by Dolenz). Rudi checks the boys to see if they need another dose of potion, but accidentally slaps Micky, waking him from his spell; after Rudy leaves, he repeats the trick on Mike, Davy, and Peter. They go onstage when summoned, but proceed to fail follow orders, devolving into a dog act (to an instrumental version of "Gonna Buy Me A Dog"). By the end, Rudy and Oraculo are in the places of the dogs, but Oraculo shrugs it off, as it's still show business. [Unrelated and previously seen video for "Star Collector" follows]
Again, this is shown out of the order it was filmed, as evidenced by shaggy!Micky.
This episode has a lot of Fetish Fuel for me personally (Psychic and physical bondage? And Micky with a whip in the end romp? Why yes, don't mind if I do), and it's short, so there's not a lot of places for the admittedly thin plot to go off the rails. It's not clear to me whether we're supposed to understand Oraculo as a fraud whose only "power" is actually Mad Science (he refers to the blue stuff as "magic potion," not a formula), or whether he's actually supposed to have some mentalist abilities - his being able to summon Peter from a distance suggests the latter, but all of his stage tricks are shown to be fakery. (As with spiritualism, they seem to want it both ways - the medium/mentalist is a fraud, but ghosts/telepathy are real in-universe.) It's also not clear whether the lawyer and the drunk are supposed to be Davy and Micky somehow bilocating, or if they're just doppelgangers (this universe seems to be full of them).
Not exactly Mad Science, but the research role falls to Micky here, and Davy gets an unusual-strength gag in the romp. Peter gets a gag where he 'reads' Oraculo correctly; the gag is repeated with Mike, but he has a better idea of who Oraculo is by then, where Peter's reading was cold. During their frantic search for Mike, Micky climbs up the outside of the spiral staircase.
There's a lot of Picasso-esque art in the background at the Pad that I don't think appears in any of the other episodes. We also don't usually see the wall that Micky and Davy remove the poster from; in addition to the poster, it also has a large number 4 on it, which makes sense, as the reason we don't normally see it is because the camera's there. So when Peter yanks out the shackles, he's literally breaking the fourth wall. Har-de-har, guys.
Oraculo is Monte Landis, and it's not at all hard to imagine that he's in league with Zero one way or another. Rudy is played by Jim Frawley, who's apparently not directing this time. The Penguin has a cameo for no particular reason.
Nesmith has a somewhat rambling commentary on the episode, the first half of which is the story of how he got Zappa to appear on the show, and the last half of which is mostly about how much the show had become a job for him by the end of the second season. There's some other interesting bits in there, including a few odd remarks about the Monkeemobile itself, but that's most of it.
Season 2 Disc 5 Episode 58: Mijacogeo (a.k.a. The Frodis Caper)
There's sort of no point in doing a synopsis, as the plot doesn't make much sense, but here we go:
Synopsis: The sunlight through the window sets off a Rube Goldberg contraption that drops a needle on "Good Morning, Good Morning" as the four Monkees' alarm clocks go off. Mike, Micky, and Davy dump theirs on the floor, but Peter's continues to ring; they get up and search the Pad for him, missing him twice because he's sitting in front of the TV, frozen in place by the emanations from a mysterious eye on the screen. Mike's quick thinking saves the other three from getting frozen, and they go to search the other houses (as an offscreen gunshot destroys the still-ringing alarm clock). Their neighbors are similarly frozen, and the boys go to the TV station to find the source of the disturbance; it's the evil Wizard Glick and his henchmen, who is channeling the power of the Frodis to control the minds of his watchers, and will soon activate the Freeble Energizer (look, I know, just go with it, okay?) to boost its power to cover not only the city but the world. The Monkees head to a phone booth to change to the Monkeemen, but find that an ordinance prohibits them from doing so. Glick's henchmen release a two-headed org to attack them, but the Monkeemen handbook explains how to defeat it, which they do. Glick then releases the TV repairmen, who attempt to trick the Monkees into gazing on the Frodis's broadcast eye, but are foiled by tricky footing, dumb luck, and the arrival of a girl to distract Davy at the right moment. Eventually caught conventionally, the boys are tied up, and summon Peter using telepathic vides guided by a chant Micky got off of a cereal box top. Still entranced but now mobile, Peter arrives at the station and is tied up with the others. He calls the police by hopping over to the phone, although Mike has slipped out of his bonds and proceeds to untie the others. The Monkees, reunited and freed, surround Glick and his henchmen, but are interrupted by the cops, who take the long-haired weirdos prisoner instead of Glick. The Monkees trick the cops into watching the Frodis eye in the TV in a shop window, but Peter gets caught again, too, and the other three carry him back to the TV station. They make it in easily, and Mike wonders if it's a trap; it is, and they end up in chains and handcuffs. They play a game of kreebage for their freedom, and bamboozle the card-sharp guard. Unable to carry Peter further, they hang him on a coatrack just as they discover the Frodis room (helpfully labeled). They prepare to shoot it with a peashooter, but the Frodis itself tells them to stop - it is a friendly alien enslaved by Glick, and if they can get it back to its spaceship, it can undo the damage done. Micky grabs the Frodis, Mike and Davy grab Peter, and the sign that says "Typical Monkee Romp" appears on the screen as "Zor and Zam" plays (it's actually not; it's just a slightly psychedelic chase sequence). The Monkees successfully get back to the spaceship, and the Frodis recharges just in time to blast Glick and his minions with a cloud of smoke that causes them to stop running, lie down in the grass, and be cool. Peter recovers his senses, and the Monkees rejoice. [Unrelated Tim Buckley song follows]
More mind control, tied-up Monkees, a telepathic summons, and more fourth wall breaks than the structure of the story can stand. This was (a) right up my alley, and (b) obviously co-written by Micky as well as directed by him (he has the commentary on the episode [finally!]). Is it necessary to point out that "frodis" was Monkee code for pot? I'm utterly delighted by the episode, myself; this does for me what straight-up dada seems to do for most of my more artistic friends. This is more of a cut-up, taking the tropes and cliches of every other Monkees episode and stringing them, like beads, before dialing them up to eleven.
My only actual complaint is that Peter is damselled so hard that he's barely present in the episode. The framing of various scenes is such that his ability to stay very, very still is absolutely crucial, and he does it quite well, but it would have been nice if he at least got a dramatic recovery scene instead of it being an afterthought.
The opening scene is explicitly in the upstairs bedroom (we get an angle on the Pad that we almost never see, shot from the kitchen, as Mike, Micky, and Davy come down the spiral stairs), and once again all four beds are in there.
Character!Micky cries three times in the series. Once is when Davy's being shipped back to England (Episode 6), once is when he and Mike think Davy's been ground up for moonshine mash (Episode 39), and once is here, when he think's Peter's disappeared. Character!Mike shares two of those, but not the one in this episode. (I'm not sure character!Davy ever cries. Character!Peter melts down at the drop of a hat, of course.)
One of the neighbors' houses (at least the one room we see) is full of empty TV dinner trays. It's a cute visual gag.
Glick's four henchmen are the four Monkee stand-ins. Val Kairys has a non-speaking walk-on bit. Glick is played by the same actor as the casino manager in Episode 46. Oddly enough, while Babyface Morales and Zero both figure fairly heavily in the general body of fanfic, Glick doesn't.
Peter gets snared by the Frodis energy twice. Micky almost gets snared by the Frodis energy twice. Davy only nearly gets it once, and Mike only once and only partially (possibly because he's wearing sunglasses, although that's not made explicit). There may be a coded message there, given their known extracurricular habits at the time.
This episode reinforces that aliens exist in the Monkeeverse, but so far none of them have been animal - the aliens in Episode 49 are explicitly robots, and the Frodis is clearly plant life. Also, if the last episode didn't establish working telepathy, this one does.
The color of this episode is off; everything looks too orange. I wish they'd included better color correction in the remastering process; the same thing happened to several other episodes' credit sequences.
Dolenz's commentary is fun but doesn't add much to the episode (it's mostly him joking about what's on the screen and naming various bit players). There is one odd inconsistency, though - Tork (in one of the commentaries) and actor!Micky (in one of the interviews) state explicitly, and Nesmith implies strongly (in one of his commentaries), that the Itali-fro is what Micky's hair naturally did at the time. Photos of him from throughout the '70s and '80s would tend to confirm that - at least, he never appeared with the curls grown partially out. But Dolenz here in the commentary states it was a perm.
It bugs me slightly that the last song heard on the last Monkees episode (aside from the end credits, of course) wasn't a Monkees song. Tim Buckley's bit is lovely, but it seems out of place.
So, that's the series. Head riffs on the series but isn't canonical. 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee barely even does that. There is a 1997 special, written and directed by Nesmith with input from the others, that is their idea of what an episode would have looked like if the show had continued through the '90s, and which probably ought to be canonical, but which is impossible to find anywhere.
And now that I have their onscreen adventures well in my head, off to find what they've gotten up to in the wild, as it were.
Season 2 Disc 5 Episode 57: The Monkees Blow Their Minds
Synopsis: [Mock interview in which Michael and Frank Zappa dress as each other] Seeking a cure for writer's block, Peter turns to the mentalist Oraculo; seeking to steal the ten-week gig the Monkees are auditioning for, Oraculo and his servant Rudy sneak a mind-control potion into Peter's tea. At Club Cassandra, the other three Monkees have set up for the auditions, but Peter arrives clearly out of it, putting his bass on backwards and breaking one of Micky's drumheads. The club manager dismisses them, and Oraculo steps up, auditioning with Peter as his mental slave and winning the gig. Mike and Micky hatch a scheme to get Peter back; Micky reads every book in the public library on mentalism, and Mike calls up Oraculo with a phony story about amnesia and a missing valise filled with cash. Micky and Davy sneak into Oraculo's lair and trick Rudy into going to find Oraculo; they attempt to lure Peter away while Mike stalls for time (all during a romp set to "Valleri"). Finally, Davy conks Peter on the head and they haul him off unconscious; unfortunately, when they arrive home, Oraculo has successfully tricked Peter into drinking the potion and has spirited him off. Micky and Davy move a poster and chain Peter to the wall with the shackles behind it (!). They then run off to free Mike, but Rudy conks them on the head with the same mallet they used on Peter, and Oraculo doses them and summons Peter mentally. Peter yanks the shackles from the wall, and after a false start joins them. At the club, Oraculo leaves the boys with Rudy and goes out to work the audience, but is stymied by a young lawyer (played by Jones) and a drunk (played by Dolenz). Rudi checks the boys to see if they need another dose of potion, but accidentally slaps Micky, waking him from his spell; after Rudy leaves, he repeats the trick on Mike, Davy, and Peter. They go onstage when summoned, but proceed to fail follow orders, devolving into a dog act (to an instrumental version of "Gonna Buy Me A Dog"). By the end, Rudy and Oraculo are in the places of the dogs, but Oraculo shrugs it off, as it's still show business. [Unrelated and previously seen video for "Star Collector" follows]
Again, this is shown out of the order it was filmed, as evidenced by shaggy!Micky.
This episode has a lot of Fetish Fuel for me personally (Psychic and physical bondage? And Micky with a whip in the end romp? Why yes, don't mind if I do), and it's short, so there's not a lot of places for the admittedly thin plot to go off the rails. It's not clear to me whether we're supposed to understand Oraculo as a fraud whose only "power" is actually Mad Science (he refers to the blue stuff as "magic potion," not a formula), or whether he's actually supposed to have some mentalist abilities - his being able to summon Peter from a distance suggests the latter, but all of his stage tricks are shown to be fakery. (As with spiritualism, they seem to want it both ways - the medium/mentalist is a fraud, but ghosts/telepathy are real in-universe.) It's also not clear whether the lawyer and the drunk are supposed to be Davy and Micky somehow bilocating, or if they're just doppelgangers (this universe seems to be full of them).
Not exactly Mad Science, but the research role falls to Micky here, and Davy gets an unusual-strength gag in the romp. Peter gets a gag where he 'reads' Oraculo correctly; the gag is repeated with Mike, but he has a better idea of who Oraculo is by then, where Peter's reading was cold. During their frantic search for Mike, Micky climbs up the outside of the spiral staircase.
There's a lot of Picasso-esque art in the background at the Pad that I don't think appears in any of the other episodes. We also don't usually see the wall that Micky and Davy remove the poster from; in addition to the poster, it also has a large number 4 on it, which makes sense, as the reason we don't normally see it is because the camera's there. So when Peter yanks out the shackles, he's literally breaking the fourth wall. Har-de-har, guys.
Oraculo is Monte Landis, and it's not at all hard to imagine that he's in league with Zero one way or another. Rudy is played by Jim Frawley, who's apparently not directing this time. The Penguin has a cameo for no particular reason.
Nesmith has a somewhat rambling commentary on the episode, the first half of which is the story of how he got Zappa to appear on the show, and the last half of which is mostly about how much the show had become a job for him by the end of the second season. There's some other interesting bits in there, including a few odd remarks about the Monkeemobile itself, but that's most of it.
Season 2 Disc 5 Episode 58: Mijacogeo (a.k.a. The Frodis Caper)
There's sort of no point in doing a synopsis, as the plot doesn't make much sense, but here we go:
Synopsis: The sunlight through the window sets off a Rube Goldberg contraption that drops a needle on "Good Morning, Good Morning" as the four Monkees' alarm clocks go off. Mike, Micky, and Davy dump theirs on the floor, but Peter's continues to ring; they get up and search the Pad for him, missing him twice because he's sitting in front of the TV, frozen in place by the emanations from a mysterious eye on the screen. Mike's quick thinking saves the other three from getting frozen, and they go to search the other houses (as an offscreen gunshot destroys the still-ringing alarm clock). Their neighbors are similarly frozen, and the boys go to the TV station to find the source of the disturbance; it's the evil Wizard Glick and his henchmen, who is channeling the power of the Frodis to control the minds of his watchers, and will soon activate the Freeble Energizer (look, I know, just go with it, okay?) to boost its power to cover not only the city but the world. The Monkees head to a phone booth to change to the Monkeemen, but find that an ordinance prohibits them from doing so. Glick's henchmen release a two-headed org to attack them, but the Monkeemen handbook explains how to defeat it, which they do. Glick then releases the TV repairmen, who attempt to trick the Monkees into gazing on the Frodis's broadcast eye, but are foiled by tricky footing, dumb luck, and the arrival of a girl to distract Davy at the right moment. Eventually caught conventionally, the boys are tied up, and summon Peter using telepathic vides guided by a chant Micky got off of a cereal box top. Still entranced but now mobile, Peter arrives at the station and is tied up with the others. He calls the police by hopping over to the phone, although Mike has slipped out of his bonds and proceeds to untie the others. The Monkees, reunited and freed, surround Glick and his henchmen, but are interrupted by the cops, who take the long-haired weirdos prisoner instead of Glick. The Monkees trick the cops into watching the Frodis eye in the TV in a shop window, but Peter gets caught again, too, and the other three carry him back to the TV station. They make it in easily, and Mike wonders if it's a trap; it is, and they end up in chains and handcuffs. They play a game of kreebage for their freedom, and bamboozle the card-sharp guard. Unable to carry Peter further, they hang him on a coatrack just as they discover the Frodis room (helpfully labeled). They prepare to shoot it with a peashooter, but the Frodis itself tells them to stop - it is a friendly alien enslaved by Glick, and if they can get it back to its spaceship, it can undo the damage done. Micky grabs the Frodis, Mike and Davy grab Peter, and the sign that says "Typical Monkee Romp" appears on the screen as "Zor and Zam" plays (it's actually not; it's just a slightly psychedelic chase sequence). The Monkees successfully get back to the spaceship, and the Frodis recharges just in time to blast Glick and his minions with a cloud of smoke that causes them to stop running, lie down in the grass, and be cool. Peter recovers his senses, and the Monkees rejoice. [Unrelated Tim Buckley song follows]
More mind control, tied-up Monkees, a telepathic summons, and more fourth wall breaks than the structure of the story can stand. This was (a) right up my alley, and (b) obviously co-written by Micky as well as directed by him (he has the commentary on the episode [finally!]). Is it necessary to point out that "frodis" was Monkee code for pot? I'm utterly delighted by the episode, myself; this does for me what straight-up dada seems to do for most of my more artistic friends. This is more of a cut-up, taking the tropes and cliches of every other Monkees episode and stringing them, like beads, before dialing them up to eleven.
My only actual complaint is that Peter is damselled so hard that he's barely present in the episode. The framing of various scenes is such that his ability to stay very, very still is absolutely crucial, and he does it quite well, but it would have been nice if he at least got a dramatic recovery scene instead of it being an afterthought.
The opening scene is explicitly in the upstairs bedroom (we get an angle on the Pad that we almost never see, shot from the kitchen, as Mike, Micky, and Davy come down the spiral stairs), and once again all four beds are in there.
Character!Micky cries three times in the series. Once is when Davy's being shipped back to England (Episode 6), once is when he and Mike think Davy's been ground up for moonshine mash (Episode 39), and once is here, when he think's Peter's disappeared. Character!Mike shares two of those, but not the one in this episode. (I'm not sure character!Davy ever cries. Character!Peter melts down at the drop of a hat, of course.)
One of the neighbors' houses (at least the one room we see) is full of empty TV dinner trays. It's a cute visual gag.
Glick's four henchmen are the four Monkee stand-ins. Val Kairys has a non-speaking walk-on bit. Glick is played by the same actor as the casino manager in Episode 46. Oddly enough, while Babyface Morales and Zero both figure fairly heavily in the general body of fanfic, Glick doesn't.
Peter gets snared by the Frodis energy twice. Micky almost gets snared by the Frodis energy twice. Davy only nearly gets it once, and Mike only once and only partially (possibly because he's wearing sunglasses, although that's not made explicit). There may be a coded message there, given their known extracurricular habits at the time.
This episode reinforces that aliens exist in the Monkeeverse, but so far none of them have been animal - the aliens in Episode 49 are explicitly robots, and the Frodis is clearly plant life. Also, if the last episode didn't establish working telepathy, this one does.
The color of this episode is off; everything looks too orange. I wish they'd included better color correction in the remastering process; the same thing happened to several other episodes' credit sequences.
Dolenz's commentary is fun but doesn't add much to the episode (it's mostly him joking about what's on the screen and naming various bit players). There is one odd inconsistency, though - Tork (in one of the commentaries) and actor!Micky (in one of the interviews) state explicitly, and Nesmith implies strongly (in one of his commentaries), that the Itali-fro is what Micky's hair naturally did at the time. Photos of him from throughout the '70s and '80s would tend to confirm that - at least, he never appeared with the curls grown partially out. But Dolenz here in the commentary states it was a perm.
It bugs me slightly that the last song heard on the last Monkees episode (aside from the end credits, of course) wasn't a Monkees song. Tim Buckley's bit is lovely, but it seems out of place.
So, that's the series. Head riffs on the series but isn't canonical. 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee barely even does that. There is a 1997 special, written and directed by Nesmith with input from the others, that is their idea of what an episode would have looked like if the show had continued through the '90s, and which probably ought to be canonical, but which is impossible to find anywhere.
And now that I have their onscreen adventures well in my head, off to find what they've gotten up to in the wild, as it were.