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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Monkees Run A Restaurant And Then For Mayor, June 26, 2000
This review is from: The Monkees, Vol. 16 - Monkees a la Carte/Monkey Major [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Two excellent episodes, one from each of the show's two seasons, are featured.
Monkees A La Carte - aka The Purple Flower Gang - finds the boys battling a tough hood named Fuselli (Harvey Lembeck) and his outsized henchman Rocco (Paul Lukas) when they muscle in on the restaurant/discoteque at which they work. After a funny "board meeting" in their house, the Monkees get themselves hired as cooks, chefs, etc. - duties they perform amid the snarling strains of "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone." But as Micky points out in a voiceover, "Hey fellas, this is not gonna work out, we'd better get some help."
Attempts to gather evidence against Fuselli all fail, but the boys get their break when Fuselli invites other mobsters for a dinner meeting. Micky gets an idea - for reasons of safety none of the gangsters at the meeting have ever seen each other, and the boys have learned from the police that The Purple Flower Gang, a gang allied with Fuselli in the past, is behind bars.
Though they wear white carnations instead of purple flowers, the boys are accepted as the Gang, and then the real fun begins.
The boys close out the fun with the outstanding Boyce-Hart venom-rocker "She."
Next, the boys are stunned when the houses of neighbors are being torn down to build a parking lot. Mike's complaint to Mayor Yort Samuel Motley (Irwin Charone) goes unheeded - unknown as yet to the boys, Motley is in the back pocket of corrupt land developer Wilber Zeckenbush (Monty Landis in the final filmed episode in which he guested - Landis usually speeks with a mild British falsetto, but here he effectively switches to southern drawl) - and Micky decides that as Mike is the only one with a hat to throw into the ring, Mike should run for Mayor.
The campaign then gets going to the rip-roaring '50s-retro rocker "No Time" (Micky and Mike wrote the lyrics, but songwriting credit was given by the boys to engineer Hank Cicalo as a gift for all his work, and the resulting royalties enabled Cicalo to purchase a house), but "political sabo-tooge" (Peter's description) ensues. Zeckenbush, however, finds the Monkees tougher than he expected, so he then implements Plan W, and the boys unexpectedly find themselves swimming in donations for Mike's campaign - donations Zeckenbush can use against them.
The episode closes out with the video performance of perhaps the Monkees' best rocker, "Pleasant Valley Sunday." Also worth noting is the presence of veteran character actor Walker Edmiston - Enik from the later Land Of The Lost series.
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