As for how those shows look on blu-ray, I’ve viewed more than half of the episodes at this point and they look utterly astonishing. Those grainy old reruns
and DVDs barely hint at just how vivid this show is. The new hi-def remastering
turns the whole series into one, big rainbow room. Episodes such as “Here Come The Monkees”, “The Monkees on Tour”, and “The Monkees in Paris” looked atrocious on Rhino’s old DVD
collection. They look like completely different shows on the new set, and I mean that in the
most wonderful way imaginable. Psycho jello!
The Extras: The
big reason to spring for this set and not wait for the more affordable but
austere one that will apparently be coming out sometime
in the future is the tenth disc of bonus material. There’s a lot of stuff on
it, but most of the bonuses come in under five minutes (there are also several commentaries and at least one full alternate version of an episode on the first nine discs). Some of this stuff is negligible.
You probably won’t be inspired to watch the cologne ads or even the romp
outtakes scored with “Saturday’s Child”, “Gonna Buy Me a Dog”, and “I Can’t Get
Her Off My Mind” more than once. The excerpts of Mike, Micky, and Davy on
“Laugh-In” amount to little more than two-minutes, and Mike looks like he’s dying
to get out of his contract throughout the whole thing. The “First Train to
Clarksville” featurette about a promotional trip the boys made in 1966 consists of a lot
of footage of screaming fans and only brief interviews with The Monkees.
There’s footage of them performing but no music. The recently unearthed color version of a “Randy Scouse Git” promo film is similar. There’s some good
quality footage of The Monkees and series creators Bob Rafelson and Bert
Schneider backstage at the Emmys, and it’s scored with a very cool acoustic
guitars and drums rehearsal of “The Door Into Summer”, but it’s only a minute
long.
More impressively, there’s an interesting promo film for “Oh
My My” that features Davy and Micky riding horses and motorcycles and Davy’s
appearance on a show called “Music Bag” to promote “Someday Man” by
lip-synching the song while doing his little Davy dance. It’s shocking to see how
much more he looks like a man than he did on the TV show he was making just a
year earlier. There are also several romps from the series featuring the alternate song tracks that appeared in reruns. I assumed the viewer would have the
choice to view these within the episodes, but most seem isolated to the bonus
disc. The only exceptions I’m aware of so far are the debut episode “Royal Flush”-- the entire 1967 rerun version featuring alternate songs “You Told Me” and “The Girl I
Knew Somewhere” is a bonus feature on Disc One (the episode guide
included with the set mistakenly indicates that the alternate songs are “Good
Clean Fun” and “Apples, Peaches, Bananas, and Pears”)-- and “The Monkees on Tour”, which can be viewed with “Steam Engine” from the 1969 rerun instead of “I’m a Believer” from the original 1967 airing.
The very best stuff on the bonus disc are the musical clips
of The Monkees’ appearances on Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash’s shows, which are great opportunities to see the guys perform oddities such as “Nine Times
Blue” and “Salesman” live (though an offstage musician is clearly subbing for Davy
on bass on “Salesman”) and all of the recently discovered Head outtakes. Beautifully restored footage is cut into music
videos for “Porpoise Song”, “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?”,
and “Can You Dig It?” Thirteen minutes of additional scenes are less pristine,
but they feature dialogue and flesh out the aftermath of the band’s doomed
make-out session with Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend and their imprisonment in the
Black Box. Nicholson, Rafelson, Frank Zappa, Annette Funicello, and Timothy
Carey all appear in these outtakes. In total, you get a little under a half
hour of Head outtakes.
What’s Missing: The
most glaringly absent thing on this set is more of those alternate song
selections that appeared in reruns. Several of these were the versions of the
shows that those of us who discovered “The Monkees” in the eighties grew up
watching on MTV and Nick-at-Nite. I was really hoping to hear “Forget That
Girl” in “One Man Shy” and “Shades of Gray” in “Success Story” again. I
understand they were not included because original film could not be located,
but I would have been perfectly happy with recreations or even crappy footage
ripped from someone’s old VHS tape of an MTV airing.
The other thing this set could have used was a retrospective
documentary. This was already a very expensive set to
produce, so making a new doc would have been out of the question, but VH-1’s
“Monkees: Behind the Music” or “Hey! Hey! We’re The Monkees” specials would
have sufficed. As it stands, the most substantial extra features on Disc 10 are that
13-minute bundle of Head outtakes and an unaired version of the pilot that includes a couple of brief scenes with a manager character dropped from the series, totally different opening and closing credits sequences, and Boyce & Hart’s demos of “(Theme from) The Monkees”, “I Wanna Be Free” (fast and slow versions), and “Let’s Dance On” in place of the superior Monkees versions.
So, “The Monkees Complete Series” has its flaws, but once
you get past them, you have a gorgeously restored version of one of the
very best TV shows of the sixties.
