The Downfalls Of Davy's Staggering Good Looks, August 2, 2002

To open things up, the boys are rehersing "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone" - note that their performance here is NOT a dub, but is done live; the boys had spent the first half of 1966 playing and recording together as a group (Mike has said "about a hundred" tracks of their pre-series recording were made) before filming of the series began; the hiring of Don Kirshner short-circuited their gestation as a real musical unit as he brought in studio pros to flesh out their sound; while this move certainly established a very strong musical baseline, it nonetheless unfairly restricted their own freedom of musical movement.

Back to the episode, the boys' rehersal is interrupted because Davy freezes at the sight of an awe-struck beautiful young woman (here played by unsung series heroine Valerie Kairys, who appeared in ten episodes total). When Micky, Mike, and Peter shoo her away, another appears when Davy makes a "no more girls" vow, then another (holding Peter's bass), and another (in Micky's icebox), and still another (by the door). The boys shoo them away, but they all pop back, massaging a lovestruck Davy.

Exploiting this opening, tea-leaf reader Ms. Badderly, hoping to team her daughter with Davy, gives the boys a warning about Davy, with additional warnings about the Monkeemobile and Peter that come true, and causes the boys to keep Davy locked down for 24 hours - until a phony beauty contest introduces him to Fern Badderly (Kelly Jean Peters in bathing suit - most prints show the near-naked Ms. Peters covered by a strategically smudged lens via NBC Standards & Practices, though a syndicated print supposedly circulated in the 1970s and early '80s - I'm citing this by memory - showing her attractive cleavage uncensored), and the two fall in love and Davy consents to help her on a big amateur hour performance show.

Peter, Mike, and Micky then appear on Mr. Hack's Amateur Hour - Peter as an inept magician, Mike a mike-frightened folk singer (his song is "Different Drum," which launched the career of Stone Poneys frontwoman Linda Ronstadt and which Mike himself used with Red Rhodes to beautiful effect on his "And The Hits Keep On Coming" LP), Micky a manically unfunny Frank Gorshin wannabe - to sabotage Fern's duet with Davy. This is the part I hated the most, because Fern is such a sympathetic character that she deserves better treatment than what she gets here.

Despite this, the episode closes with the full video of "I'm A Believer."

Davy's staggering good looks get him in trouble again in the second seasoner "Everywhere A Sheik Sheik." An Arabian princess (Donna Loren) is approaching the age at which she must consent to marry, but her father's first choice - Vidaru - is repellent, so she chooses Davy from a magazine article about the Monkees. With that the boys are swept into an Arabian emirate's political troubles - Micky becomes defense minister, Mike foreign minister, Peter an interior minister - and all become targets for death - Peter by bad-tasting soup, Mike by a concrete block he razzes at, Micky by a knife after he tries to cut his budget, and Davy by an Arabian cupid's arrow fired onto a neckborne amulet. Surviving these attempts, the boys then find golden grecian goblets to guaratee graves, and thus the stage is set for a swordfight amid the strains of the group's greatest number, "Love Is Only Sleeping."

Having helped the Arabian emirate, the boys perform a vaudville number to the tune of Harry Nilsson's "Cuddly Toy," an innocent-sounding rap on a biker gangbang that (perhaps rightly) infuriated producer Lester Sill.

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