The New Monkees
 

Why am I making this thread? Fuck if I know. But I was having a conversation recently where I mentioned these guys and the person I was talking to didn't remember them. I'm bringing it up here in the hopes that those that remember feel a little nostalgic and those who've never heard of this are amused.

What happened was this: The Monkees twentieth anniversary in 1986 was a big hit so some marketing geniuses decided it was time for the next generation. In 1987 they unveiled the New Monkees, the updated 80s version of the old concept, complete with their own TV show. This time around they were all actually pretty skilled musicians too! How could it fail?

Turns out nobody was interested. Their album was a flop and the TV show only lasted 13 episodes.

Here was the intro to the show:



And one of their singles:

One of the most painful memories of The Late 80's for me. At first I was not against the concept, but after catching the debut, this turned into everything that was so wrong about the Late 80's in one 13-week show. In the original 60's series, there was a chemistry, some subversive humor, and a room to develop which had some damn cool music to promote it with, but the 80's show was a bunch of people acting stupid in loud neon colors with anonymous 80's Pop that nobody bought (yeah, the reunion of 3/4'th of the original team was also just as bad, but it was Boyce/Hart level compared to the NM's sounds).

I felt happy that nobody bought into it! This tanked like New Coke!

Watching the show was like a going into a theme restaurant that had a splashy opening but a quick falling down due to the lack of a true quality - you enter the place with loud TVs blaring out crappy music videos and loud decor and you get a burger with an over-sweet HFCS-filled sauce with crappy fries served by a waiter with a dyed blond mullet while someone would catch e-Coli quickly enough to bring the health department over to shut it down without the years of success to grease the wheels to overcome that. They would perfectly fit my Ghost Mall Music blog - and I'm sure that cut-out centered blogs have already went on about the wretchedness of the whole thing. The album hit the cut outs in quick time and the single did hardly anything to make Mister Mister worry.

Dino was a "VJ" from Back Porch Video, a show that was on Group W Cable based in Detroit (and started by Russ Gibb of Grande Ballroom fame), and I think he was a fan of the original Monkees with a silly sense of humor which worked, although on BPV and not this series. I liked the fact that he tried and that there was some focus on trying to get actors who could play their instruments, but this seriously did not work.

^ The reference to the show tanking like "New Coke" is quite an apt comparison. The doomed show was actually distributed by Coca-Cola Telecommunications. :laughing:

A couple of my friends, who were in a band at the time, actually went to NYC for the open casting call and auditioned for the show. Needless to say, after the audition they didn't get the phone call they were hoping for.

Here's a clip from BPV using the Real Monkees 1970 hit sped up. Was this the audition tape?



Here's another clip, in the studio.

I just wasted 18 and 29 seconds of my life listening to the the beginnings of the first and second songs, respectively.

Here's how they should have done the remake...


The Grungies (Monkees spoof) - The Ben Stiller Show [For the Love of Grunge] - YouTube