Mood:
celebratory
This web site launched on this day 26 years ago, on the afternoon of Pleasant Valley Friday, October 24, 1997.
Micky Dolenz, the late David Jones, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, known collectively as that Emmy-winning 1960s made-for-TV rock band The Monkees, had been reunited in the throes of their 30th anniversary.
It was literally a week over a good 8 months to the day all four appeared together in prime time for what became the last time in their 60-minute reunion special on ABC: the Michael Nesmith-written/directed Hey, Hey It's The Monkees (a.k.a. A Lizard Sunning Itself On A Rock).
Having become one of an ocean of viewers who became doting and devout second-generation fans of The Monkees from that Pleasant Valley Sunday, February 22, 1986 marathon of episodes of The Monkees' 1966-68 TV series on MTV (back in the day when they were, you know, generally known for music [hence the "M"!]!) in their 20th anniversary year, I collected a lot of data on it and related film projects from the get-go, and had done so for years. In summer 1994, responding to an ad I saw in Monkee Business Fanzine (to which I'd just subscribed), I recieved a copy of The Monkees' Screen Gems' Storyline booklet from Rob Fill of Columbus, Ohio (who ran a Monkees Fan Club [Pisces, Aquarius Capricorn & Jones Ltd.] from 1982-88), which became the main architect for my Monkees EPG! (The thing was, a number of the synopses listed within had material which didn't apply to the actually aired show, so I rewrote many of them to the best perfection I could!)
In December 1996, I perused through an old 1968 TV Guide microfilm at the Miller Library, Loyola University, New Orleans, LA, and discovered something quite surprising: new information on The Monkees' last NBC-TV primetime airdate! I encountered a September 9, 1968 listing of the repeat of Episode No. 49, "The Monkees Watch Their Feet" (a.k.a. "Micky And The Outer Space Creatures"); under which was a caption which read: "Last show of the series. Next week, 'I Dream Of Jeannie' takes over this timeslot." Well, I can tell you I was nothing less than ecstatic! And to think, everyone believed the August 19, 1968 repeat of Episode No. 56, “Some Like It Lukewarm” as the end of The Monkees' prime run on NBC (and still do!)...they were wrong by 3 weeks! With this data, I can set the TV historian world on its ear! So, of course, I wasted no time adding this to my already grown-to-tenfold assemblage of Monkees film and TV data. (In 2010, I also discovered Episode 34, "The Picture Frame" [a.k.a. "The Bank Robbery"], aired on several other NBC stations as the last Monkees episode to air as a repeat on NBC that Labor Day in 1968.)
I then stored all of the data to a Power Macintosh disk (courtesy of ClarisWorks v2.0) in a computer lab at my college, Isaac Delgado Community College. And, believe you me, folks, I was dead serious on putting it to a good use! In the many years since their big mid-1980s comeback, more focus has been on The Monkees' music than their filmed work; in print or on The Internet, no other fully detailed account of The Monkees' film & TV history existed...yet. I wasn't sure of what use to put it to until I saw Louis Colli's The Monkees Music Vault, a detailed account of The Monkees' music, and suddenly, it hit me: Why not create a Monkees Film & TV Vault?! It would, in a sense, be a counter to the Music Vault, except my "vault" concentrates on The Monkees film & TV work, past and present. So, having experimanted with a tryout page in a different server, GeoCities, under the title "The Monkees Film Vault," I signed up for a free account with Tripod, and breathed life into The Monkees Film & TV Vault, and turned the bulk of Monkees film & TV data I'd stored on disk into a web masterpiece. (Lou Colli has put up a link for me as the "sister" site!)
At first I tried uploading files into the server for my webpage. I figured that, since I had multitudes of data on The Monkees' film history, the easiest thing to do was to create separate files, add HTML doohickeys and simply upload 'em into Tripod & save me a lot of time and work. Big, bad mistake. I learned the hard way: you do not ever upload HTML files into Tripod. It will confuse the sever into thinking they are images, resulting in a picture with small unreadable pixels and worse! After this disastrous escapade, I grudgingly resorted to creating separate files for all the pages on my site. Then I copied the Monkees film & TV info data from my Claris Works files, pasted it into my server and added HTML symbols to the document. It's as simple as that...if you've got a Macintosh computer to do it on! However, lots has changed since then; HTML files can be uploaded into Tripod now. I do that right after I edit my pages on my harddrive.
The masthead you see at the top of this page, @ the front of this site, and as wallpaper throughout (the HEAD link being the lone exception) was done with the trusty aid of Ofoto, the Apple Color Scanner and Adobe Photoshop 4.0. Using Ofoto and the Apple One Color Scanner, I scanned the Monkees logo from the back of a Monkees book; using Adobe Photoshop 4.0, I typed "FILM & TV VAULT" in a Futura font at the bottom of the logo, and colored it with a nice red-to-purple gradience. After a while, I copied the masthead to a separate file, shrunk it, and lightened its tone to use as the body background wallpaper. (I did this when I inadvertently duped the "Monkees" guitar logo wallpaper from Brad Waddell's Monkees Home Page as wallpaper for my page...and he called me on it! He forgave me just the same, but I changed my background anyway...no harm done, Brad!) On June 15, 2001, I felt time for a change in format had come, so I embossed my background wallpaper and copied my masthead and added transparency to it, and my site underwent a major overhaul: changing the text color from red to black and making everything bold to make it more readable. Both the masthead and the BG image has since undergone further upgrades.
I started adding WAV files in February 1999. Having downloaded the Powermacintosh SoundEdit 16 sound editing program onto my optical disk, I took soundtracks of rare Monkees commercial appearances for Kellogg's, Kool-Aid and Yardley which I'd dubbed from my personal collection of public domain VHS videos of surviving NBC-TV network prints of The Monkees with original Kellogg's and Yardley commercials and a separate PD Monkees VHS tape featuring 7 Kool-Aid commercials (that's where they come from, people!), downloaded it into Sound Edit, converted them into WAV files, and uploaded them into my server. With them, I can make my site stand up and speak...or something like that! The MF&TVV Message Board (first hosted by Bravenet) was initiated on February 22, 2001; the annual The Halloween and Christmas pages debuted in October and December of that year, respectively. March 2002 saw the dawning of a new newsgroup based on The Monkees Film & TV Vault, originally powered by the now-defunct Yahoo! Groups, for fans to join and keep up-to-date with updates and weekly Monkees TV Almanacs; it has since moved HQ to groups.io, as of December 2019.
The Featured Monkees Episode Of The Week spotlight was first introduced to the site on April 25, 2004. I decided to feature a different episode of The Monkees television series each and every week, alternating between seasons, to keep things current and running here @ this site. In honour of series developer Paul Mazursky's birthday on April 25, the first episode to be featured on The Monkees Film & TV Vault was Episode No. 10, “Here Come The Monkees” (Original Pilot Film). Then, a year later, my hometown was inundated by an unwelcome guest: Hurricane Katrina. NOLA became flooded beyond recognition, and my family was forced to flee to a hurricane shelter in Opelousas, delaying updates for several weeks. But it bounced back that September, via a computer lab in the shelter, and updates have been constantly flowing ever since, come heck or high water. October 12, 2009 was a red-letter date for the site as it saw the ribbon-cutting of a new, easier-accessible Tripod link: https://monkeesfilmtv.tripod.com/, its URL to this very day. Plans were originally afoot to introduce the new link on The Monkees Film & TV Vault's 12th anniversary on October 24, 2009, but due to my HP laptop suffering a brainfart the preceding Thursday while I was restarting it intalling a Service Pack, forcing me to move up the event a week early. And on February 3, 2014, The Monkees Film & TV Vault had been bestowed upon with yet another new feature: This Week In Monkees Film & TV History. Copping a cue from the Classic Jonny Quest site, this site will display on the front page the titles of Monkees episodes whose original NBC airdates (from both seasons) coincide in the week of this site's update, a sort of an almanac-ish tactic, with movie or TV special dates worked in as well. It was enhanced with extra details (based on original posts in The MF&TVV Blog) as of June 14, 2021.
The Monkees Film & TV Vault has had many, many baptisms of fire in many TV-oriented books I have read/collected over the years (Jon Heitland's The MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. Book, Joel Eisner's The Official Batman Batbook, Allan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium, etc.). But the most obvious inspiration was a nicely-detailed 1992 Herbie J. Pilato-scribed account on another Screen Gems-produced sitcom: The Bewitched Book: The Cosmic Companion To TV's Most Magical Supernatural Situation Comedy (remade in 1996 as Bewitched Forever: The Immortal Companion To Television's Most Magical Supernatural Situation Comedy, which I have in my collection as well).
And so today we celebrate 26 online years of my award winning Monkees Film & TV Vault, the first in-depth look at The Monkees' filmed work, on television and the big screen, paying strict, specific attention to facts and figures of The Monkees' original unaired 1965 pilot episode, all 58 episodes of their 1966-68 NBC-TV series (right down to the original summer repeats!), their 1968 Columbia Picture HEAD, their 1969 NBC-TV special 33â…“ Revolutions Per Monkee, and their 1997 ABC-TV special, Hey, Hey It's The Monkees, and it includes a listing of all 4 seasons of The Monkees' repeats on CBS and ABC Saturday Afternoon from 1969-73, transcripts to original Monkees episode interview segments (which I liberated via cached copies from the late, unlamented Monkees Pad page off Internet Archives), transcripts and WAV soundfiles to The Monkees' commercial sponsor tags for Kellogg's, Yardley Of London and Kool-Aid, and a transcript of the 1995 Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza commercial with ex-Beatle Ringo Starr. The seeds of a fresh new Monkees fansite that were sown at Kinko's in Downtown New Orleans one late afternoon in 1997 has blossomed to well beyond full flower over the years. Again, as always, you surfers and fellow Monkeedevotees for your support and loyalty which has enabled this site to go, flow and grow, drive, thrive and survive during these past 26 years cannot be thanked enough!
Monkeemania forever!
Aaron Handy III,Pleasant Valley Tuesday, October 24, 2023
