Time Bandits (1981)

Terry Gilliam was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1940 and went to the Occidental College in Los Angeles where he got a degree in political science, but spent most of his time writing and making illustrations for campus magazines. His early inspirations included Mad magazine, which at the time was edited by a man named Harvey Kurtzmann; in fact, one of his early after-college jobs was for Kurtzmann's new humor magazine Help!, where it was during a photographic comic strip shoot that he met and first worked with famous British comedian John Cleese. Then in the late sixties, he and his family moved to England and took British citizenship, and through Cleese's connections he got a job at the BBC, as an animator on the subversive children's series Do Not Adjust Your Set.

After Do Not Adjust Your Set ended, Gilliam and three of the show's cast members collaborated with Cleese and one of his comic cohorts to produce an adult sketch comedy series.

And thus was born:

Gilliam is best known as the off-camera member of the Monty Python troupe. His main contribution to the Flying Circus was more behind-the-scenes - he made the little cut-out animations that linked the live-action sketches together. As the series went on, he eventually started appearing more and more on stage and started moving away from making cartoons, and by the time he made his directorial debut alongside Terry Jones with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he had caught the directing bug. His first solo gig as director was the 1977 cult movie Jabberwocky, which wasn't very well received by critics and audiences but was the first of a number of movies that would go on to achieve cult status.

For the next few updates we will look at a specific trifecta in his filmography unofficially refereed to as

Nice, huh? Made it myself.

Three Terry Gilliam movies made throughout the 1980s that examine the world of imagination through the eyes of three different people.

TIME BANDITS
through the eyes of a child.

BRAZIL
through the eyes of a white-collar worker.

And
THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
through the eyes of an old man.

Come with me now to a three-ring circus of fantasy, escapism, and eye-popping cinematography. Plus, if you're all real good, I'll give you a treat when we're done.

---

All the dreams you've ever had...and not just the good ones...

The 1980s were a golden age for sci-fi/fantasy movies. Before hobbits, teenage wizards and CG effects dominated the market, you had movies like Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, Tron, The Neverending Story, Gremlins, Ghostbusters one AND two, the original Indiana Jones and Conan the Barbarian movies, two of the first three Star Wars films, Blade Runner--groundbreaking films that set benchmarks for the genre and have withstood the tests of time, harsh critics and varying degrees of success at the box office to become the cult classics we know and obsess over on the Internet today.

And who better to get a piece of the action than Monty Python's in-house animator?

Produced by ex-Beatle George Harrison's movie company Handmade Films, the people who brought you Life of Brian, Nuns on the Run and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Gilliam's third ever film Time Bandits was his attempt to make a whimsical, family-friendly fantasy movie in hopes of persuading the people at Handmade to get a little film he had written titled Brazil made. He hadn't done a film in two years when shooting began, and the only studio that would distribute it was a mid-major that hadn't had a hit in a long time, so he wasn't certain it'd sell twell, but it went on to become his most successful film in America and went on to set the tone for his future films.

The film stars a young child named Kevin (young Craig Warnock), a very imaginative boy who is very fascinated with history, who lives with his parents who are more obsessed with sitting on their plastic-wrapped furniture watching corny prime time game shows, talking about fancy high-tech appliances and yelling at Kevin for making too much noise.

That night after he goes to sleep, a white knight on horseback crashes through his closet door and runs through a sylvan glen that used to be his bedroom wall.

It turns out he dreamed this.

Not much comes from this scene, as it is never brought up again for the rest of the movie.

The next night, armed with a camera, a satchel and a flashlight, Kevin goes to bed awaiting the next strange thing coming through his bedroom.

And something does.

It turns out to be six small men carrying a strange map and looking for a way out of his bedroom.

These small men are revealed to be former employees for the Supreme Being (or God or whoever you want) hired to help keep Creation running. Feeling unappreciated, they decided to steal a map of the time-space continuum and use it to travel through time holes, burgling people along the way. I can't really tell who's who amongst our merry men, but I CAN tell you that their self-appointed leader is played by notable midget actor David Rappaport, one of them is Kenny Baker, who is best known to us all as the lovable R2-D2, and another of them is Jack Purvis, of whom we'll be seeing quite a bit throughout this trilogy.

Their first stop is the Battle of Castiglione in 1796, where we meet the great French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte (Ian Holm), who is, true to the stereotype, short, but not only does he not feel insecure about it, but he's also obsessed with them. Especially when they're hitting each other with things. Naturally, he likes the bandits so much he makes them all generals.

Ehh, those other two guys are probably just compensating for something.

Next they travel to medieval England, where they meet Robin Hood and his band of--

Wait...isn't Robin Hood a fictional character?

Ehh, he's played by John Cleese, so who cares.

(Speaking of fellow Pythons, look for co-screenwriter Michael Palin appearing with Shelley Duvall a couple of times as an ill-fated couple the bandits keep running into.)

"You call me 'Little John', I'll smash yer face in."

Throughout all this, they are constantly monitored by a being known only as Evil (played by David Warner, whom you may remember was all three baddies from Tron) and his cadre of plastic-wrapped minions. Evil has harsh criticisms for the Supreme Being's designs for the universe ("Forty-three species of parrot! NIPPLES FOR MEN! SLUGS!!") and feels he would run things much better if he and his more technologically-minded...mind were put in charge. So he tricks one of the bandits to suggest they travel to his lair at the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness within the Time of Legends, where the Most Fabulous Object in the World exists, so he can steal the map and rewrite the universe to his whims.

Yeah. Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Nothing can happen to them there, right? And hey, the Most Fabulous Object in the World. I'd say that's worth a trip.

"Wait till they get a load of ME."

Kevin gets separated from his companions and visits ancient Greece, coincidentally his favorite period in history. He arrives in time to save the life of King Agamemnon (played by Connery...Sean Connery) and the two of them hit it off really well. The king even decides to adopt him and throws a huge party to celebrate...which the bandits crash to rob him and take Kevin back with them.

Kevin's had so much fun in ancient Greece that the boat ride he and his friends have wound up on isn't doing much to lighten his now-sour mood.

Neither is the fact that the boat they're on turns out to be the Titanic.

"So, Kevin, where did you go over summer vacation?"

Right about now, Evil takes it upon himself to jump start the plot and send them through a hole straight to the Time of Legends.

From this point, things get kinda surreal.

*ahem*

They hijack a ship manned by Peter Vaughan dressed like an ogre and his wife from Who's The Boss, hitch a ride on a giant's head and break a giant pane of glass to reach the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, where Evil uses illusions of a brand-new kitchen set and Kevin's parents as his "Most Fabulous Object in the World" ploy to trap them and run off with the map. Kevin and company escape and steal the map back, one of the bandits gets turned into a pig, another one of them dies, and the other ones look for time holes and come back with a space rocket, a tank, some knights, some cowboys and some archers, none of which turn out to be very effective against Evil, but before HE can launch an attack of his own, he suddenly turns into stone and...explodes.

I don't think the description in the previous paragraph does that whole chain of events justice. You're gonna have to watch it for yourself to see how crazy it is.

"It's only a model."
"Shh!"

Then the Supreme Being shows up in the form of Ralph Richardson in a fancy suit. He recovers the map, changes everything back to normal, rehires the bandits and orders them to clean up the mess, particularly all the chunks of concentrated Evil lying around. They leave Kevin behind wondering why they're leaving him behind, with a smoldering chunk of David Warner they forgot to pick up .

Then Kevin wakes up in his bedroom to find it filled with smoke and some firemen (one of whom looks very much like Agamemnon) breaking his door down to rescue him. Seems his house caught on fire while he was asleep and his parents were too concerned with saving their appliances to see to the safety of their offspring.

Kevin finds out he still has the Polaroids from his adventures in ancient Greece, as well as the one with his midget friends holding up the map.

It turns out the source of the fire was a bit of concentrated Evil in their toaster oven. Despite Kevin's warning, his parents touch it and...explode.

Yes. This actually happens.

Then the firemen just...ride off.

And then...the credits roll.

There's your metaphor: finding a turd in your fancy-schmancy newfangled toaster oven.

Time Bandits has one of the most double-u-tee-eff endings I've ever seen in a movie. Kevin's parents are obviously an argument against modern materialism, and you could say they get what they deserve in a sense, but it kinda comes right out of nowhere, and with everything else that happens, it gets a tad confusing. It's sort of implied that Kevin could probably go looking for a time hole and have his own adventures, now that he doesn't have a materialistically-grounded Mom and Dad holding him back, but it's laid out so loosely that it's hard to understand what's going on if you're watching it for the first time.

That's really the only major complaint that I have, because other than that, the movie's pretty good. The dialogue is very witty, the visuals and special effects are breathtaking, and the characters are very energetic and rambunctious. Some of it might be a little scary for the more sheltered, impressionable kids, but everyone else should have a ball.

One down, two to go...

Hey, look..."Mini" Python's Flying Circus! Heh heh...sorry.

Return to Oz (1985)

I DO believe in spooks, I DO believe in spooks, I do I do I do I DO believe in spooks, I DO believe in spooks, I do I do I do I DO!!
--The Cowardly Lion

Oh, do we Kansans have a history with The Wizard of Oz.

We've heard all the jokes. "Hey, Dorothy, where's Toto?" "Say hi to the munchkins for me!"

We've seen the souvenirs in gift shops all over the state with these characters on them.

We've seen the original ruby slippers at the Smithsonian Museum.

It's been remade many times and parodied on dozens of TV shows and movies, putting it right up there with It's a Wonderful Life as one of the most commonly referenced movies EVER.

It is SO welded into the American psyche that it has become the number one thing that people think of when you bring up Kansas. Well, apart from wheat, flat land, college basketball and conservative Christian extremists.

So well known is it that some people just HAD to make a sequel to it. Some people from DISNEY, no less.

Return to Oz is an unofficial sequel to the Victor Fleming film, but to be fair it does borrow story elements from L. Frank Baum's follow-up books to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which the original was derived from--in particular, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, and Tik-Tok of Oz. Lucky for Disney, the books were all in the public domain and they already had the film rights anyway so they didn't have to pay anyone royalties, though they did have to pay MGM for use of the ruby slippers which weren't in the books.

Six months have passed since the events from the first film--funny, feels more like 46 years to us--and the Gale clan has hit hard times, in most part because winter is coming and they still haven't finished rebuilding the farmhouse from that tornado (How long did it take to build a house back then? It can't have been longer than six months. Didn't they have farmhands in the first film who could help them? How far out in the middle of nowhere ARE they?) Meanwhile, little Dorothy Gale, played by Fairuza Balk, who looks WAY younger here than Judy Garland did back in the day, is having trouble sleeping--she's still obsessed with her travels to Oz, now convinced that it is in danger and needs her help. A familiar looking key which falls from space in the middle of the night seems to confirm this.

Her Uncle Henry (Matt Walsh) and Auntie Em (Piper Laurie, who also played the more Kansas-appropriate religious fanatic mother from Carrie) naturally don't believe a word she says and decide to do the only thing you can do with a little girl whose imagination is too wild for her own good--take her to a mental hospital for some electroshock treatment to make all those dreams go away.

Incidentally, Toto will not be coming with Dorothy to Oz this time, as we see him chase the buggy as she and Auntie Em ride off. I'm guessing the Emerald City has leash laws now.

"Come play with me, Dorothy...forever...and ever...and ever."

At the clinic which is pretty much the biggest house in the state compared to the rest of the scenery, Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson) explains the process to Em and Dorothy--they shoot an electrical current through the brain which will zap all those bad dreams right out of her head. No mention of any harmful side effects or what ELSE might be zapped out of her head by accident, however, so his methods are suspect.

Auntie Em leaves Dorothy in the capable hands of Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh), who takes away her lunch pail and locks her in a dreary-looking room.

Throughout all this Dorothy notices a blonde girl about her age appearing in the windows and mirrors of the clinic, and she even visits her in her room with the curious gift of a jack-o'-lantern.

Nurse Wilson returns rather nonchalantly with some men and a gurney, and Dorothy is strapped in and wheeled to the operating room where she is hooked up to the electroshock thingy. Dr. Worley is just about to pull the switch when a freak lightning strike cuts the power throughout the building. All the doctors leave Dorothy momentarily unattended while they see to getting the electricity back on.

So, to recap, Dorothy is in a cold dark room strapped to a gurney, moments away from having several hundred volts course through her brain, with a violent thunderstorm raging outside which does nothing to drown out the distant screaming coming from the patients locked in the good doctor's basement.

This is a kids' movie.

And to think in about a hundred years they'll have a pill for this.

While the doctors are gone, the blonde girl comes back, frees Dorothy, and the two of them escape the hospital with Nurse Wilson in pursuit. The chase ends at a river, where both girls fall in and are washed away while grabbing onto a crate for dear life. The blonde girl disappears, but Dorothy continues to float downstream into a vast ocean (yes, Kansas has an ocean now) and finally washes ashore in the Marvelous Land of Oz.

Oh yeah, and her favorite chicken Bellina is there, too. And she can talk now.

Here we get to see some areas of the Land of Oz that you never saw in the first movie, like the "Deadly Desert", where anything living who touches the sand turns INTO sand. Also there's the "Lunch Pail Tree", which is...a tree...with lunch pails growing on it. Oh, and if you follow this overgrown brick path, you'll come across the ruins of some ancient city with statues all around it, including ones of the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.

Oh, hang on. That's the Emerald City.

Oz just hasn't been the same since the Lollipop Guild disbanded.

And it looks like 46 years six months of neglect have taken its toll--the place is ashambles and all of its inhabitants have turned to stone. As a further degradation, some of the lady statues have their heads missing.

While all this is going on, some Claymation® rock faces report to someone off-camera that Dorothy has returned to Oz, and she's brought a chicken with her. Whoever he is talking to seems more concerned about the chicken.

Some friendly graffiti written on one of the crumbling walls reads BEWARE THE WHEELERS. No sooner do Dorothy and Bellina question what a Wheeler is when some fancy-dressed psychos with wheels for hands and feet show up and start chasing them around, laughing maniacally and accusing her of grand theft lunch pail and illegal possession of a chicken.

This is a kids' movie.

Looks like the flying monkeys have evolved.

Using the aforementioned key in an otherwise random hole in the wall, the two of them escape into a secret room where they discover a mechanical man named Tik-Tok, who serves as the entire Royal Army of Oz, who was stowed away to wait for Dorothy and managed to avoid being turned to stone himself since he is, as constantly pointed out during the film, not alive. (Wait...technically, the Tin Man isn't alive either, but he was turned to stone? How is that possible?) Tik-Tok fights off the Wheelers and interrogates one of them, who between Jim Carrey impressions kindly fills us in on the plot: apparently someone called the Nome King kidnapped the Scarecrow, who became ruler of Oz in her absence, stole all the emeralds in the city and turned everyone into stone. He name-drops a Princess Mombi as the only one who knows where the Scarecrow is.

I have to admit at this stage that Tik-Tok for this scene alone would have to be my favorite character in this film. There are Wheelers all around him and he stands perfectly still as his midsection spins around and his arms swing freely and smack all of them down, and then he picks one of them up by his shoulder, and shakes him up until he talks, letting him know that his being a machine makes him impervious to his threats. That's bad-ass right there. Tik-Tok is bad-ass.

BAD. ASS.

A visit to Mombi reveals that she looks just like the nurse from the hospital in a fancy cape and has a chamber full of heads that she wears like a closet full of shoes. A question about the Scarecrow goes ignored as Mombi is more interested in Dorothy's young head--so interested that she plans to lock her in the tower until she's old enough for her head to join her collection.

While trapped in the tower, Dorothy recognizes the Nome King's mountain from the view in the window, even though she hadn't even heard of the Nome King before she came here, and then meets a new friend--Jack Pumpkinhead, a rickety man made of sticks with a jack-o'-lantern for a head whose voice is despite the rumors the only major contribution of Muppet man Jim Henson's son Brian to the entire film. In HIS moment of exposition, he mentions that Mombi has an powder of life, so Dorothy makes off with the key to one of her head cabinets and steals it while the others put together some kind of flying machine made of couches, palm fronds and a moose's head. A sprinkle of the powder, a recitation of some magic words, and Dorothy and company are flying off to the Nome King's lair.

Dorothy wakes up the next morning just in time for their flying machine to come apart and send them crash land right at their destination.

"I'll get you my pretty, and your little chi---okay, chicken? Seriously? Didn't you have a dog with you last time? What the hell?"

Upon arrival, the Nome King pleads his case for stealing the emeralds while dropping Dorothy through a very pretty crevice. Apparently the emeralds were mined from his mountain first, so the King believes himself justified to have taken them back because they belonged to him in the first place. Dorothy argues that he had no right to kidnap the Scarecrow, since they were there when he took power. The Nome King offers Dorothy and her friends a game - he has turned the Scarecrow into one of the ornaments in a very fancy room in his underground palace, and each contestant has three tries to guess which ornament is him.

Of course he leaves out the part where anyone who guesses wrong three times is turned into an ornament himself until AFTER the moose-head, who went in first, flunks the test.

Mombi and the Wheelers, meanwhile, race to the Nome King's mountain to warn him about...the chicken. Oh, yes, Dorothy is the main character in this story, and yet everyone in Oz is worried about the chicken.

While the game continues, the Nome King, who's looking more and more like Dr. Worley by the cut scene, reveals to Dorothy that he stole the ruby slippers Dorothy left behind which made it easy to take back the emeralds and rule Oz, which sort of negates his justification for stealing the emeralds since the slippers didn't belong to him in the first place so his actions in the Emerald City were based on a double standard and I'm thinking too hard again.

The only way to fly.

Tik-Tok pretends to have wound down during his turn so that the Nome King can send Dorothy in to wind him up and make her guesses in the process, in hopes to give Dorothy some clue should his last guess be wrong...which it is...but he doesn't. After two wrong guesses, Dorothy resorts to closing her eyes and wandering around until she finds something, but the rule of threes prevails as Dorothy gets it right on her third guess when she touches a green shiny thing and the Scarecrow comes to life, and the two of them set about restoring her friends. Meanwhile, the Nome King is talking to Mombi when he sense the Scarecrow's presence, gets pissed off, imprisons Mombi in a cage for allowing Dorothy to escape, and turns into a big, giant scary rock monster who decides to devour Dorothy and her friends. When he tries to eat Pumpkinhead, Bellina, who had been hiding in the jack-o'-lantern head the whole time, gets so scared that she...lays an egg down his throat. Eggs are apparently poisonous to Nomes as it turns out (OHHHHHHHHH, so THAT'S why they don't like chickens...'kaaaaay) and the Nome King politely sets Jack and Bellina down before slowly disintegrating from too much cholesterol, I imagine. Dorothy finds the ruby slippers in the rubble, and as the Nome King's underground lair caves in around them, does some heel-clicking and pulls a major deus ex machina that returns everyone to the Emerald City and turns its residents back to normal.

"Admit it, girl, they look WAY better on me."

A big party is thrown in the newly-restored Emerald City where all the main characters are paraded around to cheers and applause, including Mombi (she's still in the cage, and Dorothy has also removed her powers--don't ask how, they don't explain it). Everyone is hoping Dorothy will stay and become the queen of Oz, but she doesn't want to. She yearns to go back to her half-finished farmhouse in the middle of the cultivatable desert of the Kansas prairie (which, ironically, is why Bellina decides to stay), but luckily the blonde girl in the mirror is willing to take the job--turns out her name is Ozma and she's the rightful heir to the throne, or was before all this stuff happened according to the exposition provided by the formerly headless women standing around Mombi's cage. After some tearful goodbyes, Dorothy clicks her ruby heels and is returned home to Kansas where Toto and Uncle Henry greet her warmly.

Auntie Em wraps things up by saying that Dr. Worley's laboratory was hit by lightning during the storm, and Dr. Worley himself was the only casualty of the resulting fire when he went back to try to save his machines, and Nurse Wilson is conveniently wheeled past us in a horse-drawn paddy wagon. And in the final scene we have Dorothy in her bedroom when who should appear in her mirror but Ozma and Bellina, who smile at them in a way that tells you that everywhere she goes, they will follow her to the ends of the earth for all the rest of her days, with nobody else seeing them.

This is a kids' movie.

And a VERY WEIRD kids' movie at that. Not as deranged as Raggedy Ann and Andy or Mexican Santa Claus, but it's pretty high up the list. It is WORLDS apart from the original movie in look and atmosphere--it does a more accurate job of capturing its late 19th-century setting, but that only make it a darker and more bizarre movie, as if the Wheelers, Nomes and disembodied heads weren't doing a good enough job of it. Much of the story you kinda have to read the books to understand, barring a plot hole or two, but worry not, as there is a ton of expository dialogue that fills in the blanks. The only problem with this is that there is TOO MUCH of it...and every character has at least one scene where they make these long speeches, some of which have nothing to do with the story. Just about the only thing they DON'T tell us in advance is why Nomes hate chickens.

I'm not sure I can recommend this to children, especially those who scare easily. I first saw the original Wizard of Oz as a kid, as I'm sure millions of us have, and I'm pretty sure any young viewer seeing Return to Oz would probably prefer the first one--not because of the obvious discrepancies between the two films like the age difference between both Dorothys, the similar-looking sidekicks (Pumpkinhead = Scarecrow, Tik-Tok = Tin Man), and the lack of songs, but rather the presence of giant rock monsters and homicidal maniacs rolling around on all fours.

"See you when you're asleep...and while you're getting dressed...and when you have boys over!"

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee (1969)

We have the knowledge—evil though it be—
To twist the mind to any lunacy
We wish. Through this Electro-Thought Machine,
I’ll demonstrate exactly what I mean.
We’ll take the means of mass communication,
Use them for commercial exploitation,
Create the new four-part phenomena:
Four simple minds with talent (little or none),
And through the latest fad of rock and roll,
Conduct experiments in mind control!
On an unsuspecting public they’ll be turned!
I’ll brainwash them, and they’ll brainwash...THE WORLD!!!

When we last left the blog, I had just reviewed the 1968 Monkees movie Head, a 98-minute stream-of-consciousness sketch film which contextually counter-argued accusations that the group was just four pretty faces with no musical talent while deconstructing their TV series and the Hollywood media machine.

I also mentioned that Head tanked in theaters, permanently severed ties between the band and the show’s production company, and signaled the beginning of the end for the Monkees.

Well, between Head and the group finally calling it quits in 1970, they had one last fling as a foursome on the idiot box.

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was meant to be one of three Monkees specials to be broadcast on NBC in 1969. With Bob Rafelson and Bert Schnieder no longer around, the band instead were left in the (questionably) capable hands of producer Jack Good, creator of the ABC show Shindig!, one of many mid-60s musical variety shows known for not lasting anywhere near as long as Soul Train or American Bandstand.

NBC was so displeased with the final cut of the special that they chose to air it on April 14, 1969…against ABC’s broadcast of the 41st Annual Academy Awards. On top of that, it was accidentally shown out of order thanks to an engineer who mixed up the tapes. Suffice to say, the ratings were not good.

The Monkees themselves had, and possibly still have, their own issues with the special.

They weren’t happy with Good and director Art Fisher’s sloppy script.

Micky Dolenz, in a commentary track on Rhino’s DVD version, stated that he has mixed feelings over the final product.

Peter Tork called it “the TV version of Head.”

Davy Jones thought it gave the guest stars too much screen time.

Also suffice to say, this special has not been rebroadcast since it premiered as far as I know, which makes it more obscure when combined with the fact that I only know the names of some of these people from Wikipedia and have not heard of a third of the special guests on it. I’m flying into this just as blindly as you are.

So the special opens up with—

Hoo boy.

“WHO ARE YOU?” bellows the disembodied mouth in the poorly chroma-keyed necklace. Pan up to Julie Driscoll’s head.

“IIIII-IIIIIIIII-IIIIIIIIIII AMMMMMMMMMMMMMM WOMAN!!!” she roars in a voice too big to ignore, and then she takes a very loud bite of an apple and hands it to Brian Auger.

Auger, sitting at an organ on a forklift driven by a man in an ape costume, describes in iambic pentameter to the audience his plan to create a manufactured pop music sensation and use whatever musical talents they have to control the minds of the unsuspecting public through their music. He conjures the Monkees, encases them in long glass tubes, saps them of their identities and with a bite of the apple, is…then not seen for a while.

As the boys pound on their little glass prisons, Julie Driscoll suggests that they use their minds to escape through their own worlds of fantasy. And the boys do just that.

Micky Dolenz duets with Driscoll on a soul music rendition of that old Monkees staple “I’m a Believer”.

Peter Tork dons Eastern attire and sits amongst Indian dancers and a fog machine to perform “I Prithee (Do Not Ask For Love)”.

Michael Nesmith duets with himself as a cowboy on acoustic guitar in “Naked Persimmon (The Only Thing I Believe is True”. (Why he says “rubulator” midway through I can’t honestly say.)

The perpetually typecast Davy Jones dresses as a schoolboy, dances with dollies and sings about dating storybook characters in “Goldilocks Sometime”.

Auger returns during Davy’s bit and announces that the psychoanalysis of his musical soldiers is complete.

Still not as animatronic as N'Sync.

In the next bit, all four Monkees sing “Wind Up Man” while walking around like robots with their batteries running out. This displeases Auger, so he decides to teach them a new song and starts playing a little rhythm on a piano. The camera zooms out to reveal that Auger is standing on another piano being played by the Jerry Lee Lewis…who is standing on another piano being played by the Little Richard…who is standing on yet another piano being played by the Fats Domino.

You still with us?

Suddenly Charles Darwin interrupts the proceedings and suggests that Auger go back to the very beginning, which serves as a segue to—

To answer the question you’ve just now asked yourself, that would be Paul Arnold and the Moon Express’ performance of “Only the Fittest Shall Survive”. I don’t understand it either, nor do I understand why they’ve painted what look like penises on the men’s unitards and vaginas on the women’s unitards.

Next the Monkees are back on stage dressed as monkeys (spelled with a Y here to avoid confusion) and perform Neil Sadaka’s “I Go Ape” while they and their backup dancers run around doing stuff and the film plays back and forth.

At least they’re not masturbating to Diahann Carroll.

Darwin then throws a net over the Monkees and turns it back over to Auger and Driscoll, who perform a cover of the Young Rascals’ “Come On Up” with their band the Trinity before introducing their new “idolized, plasticized, psychoanalyzed and sterilized” Monkees at the Paramount Theater on December 7, 1956 (which looks exactly like the set used at the beginning of the special) which sets off a medley of 1950s rock music. Jerry, Richard and Fats return, and most of the rest of the special’s musical guest list are there as well for what amounts to an at least ten minutes of 50s rock, dancing and stock footage, for much of which the Monkees themselves don’t even appear. Doesn’t it sort of take the focus off of your new manufactured pop group by throwing guest star after guest star in their debut concert?

Objects on screen use more hair gel than it appears.

Well, anyway, the medley goes on for so long that the special loses track of time completely and starts wrapping things up as Auger and Driscoll break their characters (and accents) and say that the whole brainwashing thing has gotten entirely out of hand and what we really want is complete and total freedom.

So that’s the whole mind control plot resolved, basically. It doesn’t really end, it just…stops.

We end at a junkyard, where Davy sings “String For My Kite”, Peter plays Bach’s Solfeggietto on the organ, and then Mike and Micky appear and they all perform “Listen to the Band” as all the guest stars come back and the set fills with hippies. This concert eventually descends into frantic chaos, flagrant video effects and cacophonous noise before they finally quite literally close the book on the whole thing.

(Note the title on the book’s cover – “The Beginning of the End”. How accurate it was—right after production wrapped on this special, Peter Tork, who ironically was the only Monkee to turn up on the first day of shooting Head after the band learned they wouldn’t get writing credits, bought out his contract and left the group for reasons of exhaustion. As a matter of fact, the closing number would be the last time the Monkees were shown as a quartet until the reunion in 1986. Must have been a book of prophesy or something.)

Then Peter sings about California getting nuked during the end credits as we cut back to the interpretive dancers.

"So yeah, we've suddenly decided that brainwashing sucks and we're not going to do it anymore.
Sorry about trying to take over the world and everything."

Those of you who thought that Head didn’t make sense...well, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee makes even less than that.

The message is essentially the same, but the execution is nowhere near as fluid. We get that it’s supposed to be about the Monkees, but the producers choose instead to focus more on the musical guests. There are moments where the band aren’t even on screen for minutes at a time, Auger and Driscoll have the most prominent parts here, and the Paramount Theater concert gives too much attention to Jerry, Richard, Fats and the rest of its guest roster. In fact, the medley goes on for so long that it completely derails the plot. This feels less like the Monkees’ original vision as seen in Head and more like one of Jack Good’s music programs.

I’m also not certain why the scriptwriter thought turning the Monkees into archetypal 1950s rock singers was his idea of a manufactured music group. Maybe, again, it’s because of the guest stars, many of whom launched their careers in the 1950s, but it really could have been explained a little better. In my opinion, the Monkees’ performance of “Wind Up Man” better fits their message.

I will say this though: most of the music is pretty good, particularly the opening acts from the individual Monkees which gives us a hint as to each member’s musical influence. The end song wasn’t bad either, but I think they were trying too hard with the whole Sgt. Pepper’s-style big finish.

So in summary, come for the music and stay for the…err…well, come for the music.

As for the rest of it, I believe Julie Driscoll said it best—“utter bloody shambles.”

I heard this special was particularly unpopular in the state of Kansas. I can’t IMAGINE why...

Head (1968)

What is HEAD all about?
Only John Brockman's shrink knows for sure!

When England gave us the Beatles, NBC responded with a sitcom.

The Monkees made its TV debut in September of 1966 and introduced America to a Pre-Fab Four--Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork, four up-and-coming musicians who ran around everywhere and got into crazy 1960s sitcommy situations. It lasted two seasons and even picked up an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. My sisters and I loved the show as kids, and we even have select episodes on videotape in storage somewhere.

Outside of the boob tube, they were a real life honest-to-goodness band. They made albums, played concerts and attracted a large number of groupies, even after their TV show ended. They even got back together for a reunion in 1986, when reruns of their show brought on a whole new wave of Monkees fans. And a lot of their music is actually pretty good--"Pleasant Valley Sunday", "Last Train to Clarksville", "Daydream Believer"...that one song they play at the end of those Chase credit card commercials...

In short, the Monkees are the only manufactured pop group that I have respect for. And this is coming from someone who survived the darkest days of the turn-of-the-century boy band craze.

Partly because of their music, but also because they made this:

Conceived by the band on a tape recorder alongside director/producer/writer Bob Rafelson and co-writer Jack Nicholson (yes, that Jack Nicholson) during a trip to a resort in California--with a little help from their friend Mary Jane, if you know what I mean--Head is the antithesis of the Monkees' TV show, an unsubtle deconstruction of the vehicle which made them idols to millions of screaming teenyboppers, a middle finger to the mass media if you will.

Don't let its G-rating confuse you--there isn't any language or nudity or sex in it, but the movie is actually quite dark, darker than any episode of the TV series. There is a piece of footage of a Viet Cong operative getting shot point blank in the head on camera which is used at certain points throughout the film. The movie also begins with one of the Monkees jumping off a bridge...and then ends with all four Monkees jumping off the same bridge.

As a matter of fact, many theaters slapped the film with a "mature audiences only" label because of its psychedelic nature, which kept the band's underage fan base at a distance. This, along with a poor marketing campaign, production delays which saw the film come out two months after the TV show was canceled, and flat-out indifference from the hipper adult crowd it was aimed at, led to an abysmal performance at the box office. The accompanying soundtrack album also became the lowest peaking Monkees LP on the American charts.

Quite ironically, Head also marked the beginning of the end for the Monkees--having cut ties with Rafelson and executive producer Bert Schneider after they learned they wouldn't get writing credit for the film, Peter Tork left the group in 1969 out of exhaustion, and the band broke up completely in 1970. However, it did finally get critical respect in 1973 during a special screening with Raybert Production's other two films, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, and since then it has become a cult classic, either for its innovative surrealist approach to film-making or its slow descent into madness.

"BOB SENT ME TO TELL YOU YOU'RE WANTED ON SET."

Normally this would be the part of the review where I give an extensive and occasionally sarcastic review of the plot without giving too much of it away, but...this movie doesn't have one. No storyline, no continuity, nothing. Instead we are given a series of vignettes linked in stream-of-consciousness fashion with nothing whatsoever in common outside of a biting satirical undertone. The film doesn't even have any opening credits, choosing to drop us straight into the action right at the beginning.

Think of it as an extended episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus--only with more songs in it and nobody wearing a dress.

Well, okay, one guy in a dress.

As I've said before, the movie is the antithesis of the TV show. It references the tropes it established--Davy is the chick magnet, Peter is the dummy, Mike is the deadpan and Micky is the wild one--as well as their experiences during its production--many of the studio's veteran actors weren't pleased to see them and even walked out of the commissary whenever they came in. A recurring motif is the Monkees being ushered into a big black room with the door closed behind them, an allegory to the break room that the studio set up for them so they wouldn't wander around off-set. There is also the occasional jab at other topics such as commercialism, celebrity culture, the war in Vietnam, and the Hollywood movie machine. We see the Monkees sitting in a trench in the middle of a war scene as they fight to advance upon--the stage for their next concert, where after a performance of "Circle Sky", the mob of screaming teenagers charge upon them and literally tear them limb from limb (or their respectively dressed mannequins, anyway). During all this, Micky wails on a Coke machine in the middle of a desert and eventually blows it up with a tank, Peter punches a lunch lady in the face, and all four of them get sucked into a vacuum cleaner.

This moment brought to you by Pepsi-Cola.

The movie also sports a number of big name or soon-to-be big name guest stars: fellow musician Frank Zappa, former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, pro boxer Sonny Liston, veteran actor Victor Mature, more psychotic veteran actor Timothy Carey, the future Mrs. Fronk-en-steen Teri Garr, and uncredited cameo appearances by Nicholson and his future Easy Rider co-star Dennis Hopper.

Also look for Green Bay linebacker Ray Nitschke as an American football player who constantly tackles Peter while chanting "We're number one, we're number one" before throwing him his helmet.

And of course, no movie starring a band would be complete without an original soundtrack. And the music here is a major departure from the pop rock as heard on the TV show--particularly Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "Porpoise Song" which bookends the movie, which has to be the most out there song they've ever done. Other musical highlights include Davy Jones singing Harry Nillson's "Daddy's Song" and dancing with choreographer Toni Basil as their costumes change colors, and also the aptly named "Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again" during a beautifully trippy dance montage at Mike's birthday party. The comparatively slower "As We Go Along" segment is pretty good, too, if you need a place to catch your breath between all the cutaways.

Micky may have been so fine he blew her mind, but who could attract the girls like Davy?

In closing, if you like psychedelic rock music, experimental cinema or just enjoy a good old fashioned mindscrew, I highly recommend this movie. Those who enjoy looking at movies from an analytical viewpoint will have a field day with it as well. Me? Well, I fall in all of these camps, so I friggin' love this movie. It isn't as linear as A Hard Day's Night or Help! or, hell, even the High School Musical movies, but it doesn't really need to be. Its sole purpose is to tear down the Monkees' image in the eyes of the media--and considering its take at the box office, it wound up succeeding beyond anyone's wildest imaginations.

My only qualm with it is that you kinda have to know a bit about the Monkees going into this film, since out of context I suppose it would be a little confusing. There is sort of an introductory segment of the film in which the band admits there really isn't a story and they "might tell you one thing, but [they'd] only take it back." Suffice to say it isn't for everybody, but for anyone who's eager, it's a pretty fun ride.

Between Head and the band going their separate ways, they had one last fling on the idiot box--the 1969 TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee.

You think this film was confusing...

Despite all their rage, they're still just rats in a cage.

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

For wherever one of the new Raggedy Ann dolls goes
there will go with it the love and happiness that you give to others.
--Raggedy Ann Stories

RAGGEDY ANN SCARES ME!
--The Nostalgia Critic

Raggedy Ann was originally created by early 20th century American writer Johnny Gruelle. Legend says that she was born when he took one of his young daughter Marcella's rag dolls, drew a face on it and made up a name for it from James Whitcomb Riley's poems "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphant Annie". She made her entrance into American pop culture with the book Raggedy Ann Stories in 1918, which was followed two years later by Raggedy Andy Stories, which introduced her brother Raggedy Andy.

Many people know the characters not so much for the books as for the dolls, which have been made since 1920 by many different companies, legally or otherwise, and are collected even today.

For everyone else, there's Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure, the characters' first and to date only feature film, directed (for the most part) by Richard Williams, the man who gave us two Pink Panther title sequences and exactly one-half of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Most of you may not remember this film in theaters – it was a critical and commercial bomb, plus a lot of us weren't born yet – but rather from repeated broadcasts on the Disney Channel in the late 80s and early 90s. It has never been released on home video outside of VHS, and if it's ever been aired on TV in recent years, then I wouldn't know about it. And yet if you asked someone about Raggedy Ann and Andy, I reckon a few of them would recall at least one scene from this movie. Believe me, it's kinda hard to forget it…especially when you were five years old when you saw it.

So the movie opens in live-action as we meet a young girl named Marcella (named after the original creator’s daughter – nice homage) as she comes home from school with her Raggedy Ann doll and heads upstairs into her playroom, where she drops it off with all her other playroom toys.

Then the opening credits start. Now here is where I have to give the film some merit: nowadays the Hollywood movie machine builds all the publicity for their animated films from the A-list and B-list celebrities they bring in to do the voices, as if star power comes before art. This movie, however, is different. Not a single voice actor is listed in the opening credits; rather, the animators get top billing. And they have quite an impressive roster, too: Disney animators, UPA animators, people who worked on Looney Tunes. And hey, music and lyrics by Joe Raposo from Sesame Street, that can't be bad either, right?

We come back to the playroom and transit to animation where we meet Raggedy Ann and her plaything compatriots: a windup fix-it man with six arms, a talking pin-cushion lady, a talking sock, a rugged old doll in a rocking chair, and—

We’re only 5½ minutes into the movie, people.

So after Raggedy Ann (voiced by Didi Conn, who would later play Frenchy in the Grease movies) sings about what she sees with Marcella in the outside world, we then get the plot rolling: today is Marcella’s seventh birthday, and she’s received a package which has been in the room the entire time and only now do people call attention to it. And only then do they also realize that Ann’s brother Andy has been squashed under it for exactly as long. It’s a birthday present from an anonymous sender from Paris, and during a brief live-action interlude Marcella opens it up to find a fancy-dressed thick-accented French doll named Babette. Once Marcella leaves the room (again), Babette comes to life and shows apprehension about her new surroundings with just a pinch of homesickness despite Annie’s attempts to persuade her that they mean her no harm…in song.

We also meet a pirate captain living on a ship in a snow globe with his obligatory parrot Queasy with the voice of Arnold Stang and a disturbingly prehensile handlebar mustache. One look at the new girl in town and he’s turned on faster than a Tea Partyer at a Sarah Palin lookalike contest. Raggedy Ann takes notice of this man’s sudden and not-at-all-suspicious desire to escape his little glass prison and with the help of the six-armed fix-it guy obligingly lets him out…which turns out to be a big mistake as the playroom floods with water, the ship suddenly grows in size, and the captain and the crew which he suddenly has abscond with Babette and row the ship up the wall and out of a second-story window to points unknown.

Raggedy Ann, feeling she is to blame for the whole thing, ignores the other toys’ warnings about leaving the playroom on their own and follows them out into the “deep deep woods” in hopes of rescuing Babette, while Andy tags along to protect his sister.

And here’s where the nightmare starts.

After a bit of wandering through this forest which has suddenly appeared in Marcella's backyard and singing about togetherness and not being afraid and crap like that, we meet our first weirdo: a beat-up stuffed camel with wrinkled knees whose lonely wanderings have led him to hallucinate about little pink camels roaming across the sky. I'm not kidding here: he literally blanks out and little pink camels start singing and calling out to him.

Apparently he’s been rummaging these woods because his former owner’s mother threw him out one day and he’s been looking for a new home ever since. (And yes, he sings about it. There’s like a couple of songs every ten minutes. I can verify this: the movie was split up into parts on YouTube.) After the Raggedys promise to take him home with them and let him travel with them, he starts hallucinating again which starts him running, taking Raggedy Ann and Andy along with him. Despite protests and desperate pleas from his new found friends, he races right off a cliff and all three of them plummet into…what I’m only assuming is a puddle of someone’s vomit.

I think this camel’s been smoking something…and I ain’t talking cigarettes.

But wait, it’s not a puddle of vomit (appearances to the contrary), it’s a giant pit of melty, gooey taffy.

Meet the Greedy, an amorphous blob who has collected every piece of junk food in the world, and he’s constantly eating them over and over again (so technically it could be a puddle of vomit). And he has a song, too, about his insatiable appetite and his desire for a “sweetheart”, and he’d prefer his new visitors stay to help him find it. (Well actually, he’s not looking for a significant other, as the song would have you believe, he’s looking for a heart which is quite literally sweet in flavor. It’s sort of a play on words, you see.) A very bizarre moment in the movie, even more so considering that the Greedy is never mentioned again after this. He tries to capture them, they get away, and that’s it. He’s there for one scene and then you never see him again. What was his point? What did he contribute to the plot?

I mean, apart from the need to poke my eyes out with a skewer.

Our heroes have only barely escaped from this giant puddle of vomit in the forest which has suddenly appeared in Marcella's backyard only to stumble onto—

A mugger? A serial killer? No, it’s Sir Leonard the Looney Knight, a lovable little psychotic with an affinity for practical jokes and the voice of former Laugh-In sportscaster Alan Sues.

Welcome to Loonyland, a kingdom of deranged psychopaths just past the giant puddle of vomit in the forest which has suddenly appeared in Marcella's backyard where all the practical jokes in the world come from. And Leonard wastes no time demonstrating a few on our newly arrived tourists. But it's okay, he's only doing it because he LOVES them...he even says so in a song.

Our heroes wisely run away from Leonard, but then run into what is best described as grade-A nightmare fuel.

Next we’re in the court of the King of the Loonies, King Koo Koo, as displayed on a 1:1 scale. He has a bit of a Napoleon complex, as he is no more than six inches tall and nobody takes him seriously (which I would blame more on the company he keeps – a menagerie of giggling fools of varying character designs) — and yes, he does sing about it. The only way he can grow big is by laughing at the expense of others, which causes him to inflate in a different part of his body (insert erection joke here — and no, we don't exactly see that bit grow, and not that we'd want to anyway). Koo Koo insists that the Raggedys and their camel stay to keep him laughing, and…then a pie fight breaks out.

During the mayhem, our heroes escape and finally catch up with Babette and the Captain — on his ship out in the middle of the ocean beyond the kingdom of deranged psychopaths and the giant puddle of vomit in the forest which has suddenly appeared in Marcella’s backyard. But when they come about:

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions regarding the whip.

Babette has inspired the Captain's crew to mutiny, taken over the ship and has set sail for Gay Paree, while her attacker is down below in irons. The new captain orders her would-be rescuers hung from the highest yardarm for some reason, but just then Koo Koo comes back with…what I can only describe as a bulbous manta ray with several protruding arms that looks like he came from Greedy’s giant puddle of vomit. Determined to have “the last laugh”, he orders whatever it is to start tickling everybody, which inflates him to a gargantuan size in easily the most child-scarring moment in the entire film…until Queasy is subliminally inspired to pop him.

The next morning, Marcella finds all of her toys mysteriously floating in a fish pond in her backyard…which looks totally normal despite having a deep dark forest, a giant puddle of vomit, a kingdom of deranged psychopaths and an entire ocean in it (which the fish pond is supposed to explain). No wonder the house sold cheap.

Anyway, everybody is welcomed back, Babette apologizes for being a stuck-up brat, she and the Captain arrange a date (despite her entire episode being grounds for a restraining order) and everyone lives happily ever af—oh wait, still one loose end to tie, the camel's still outside.

The camel is let in through the window and everyone welcomes him to the fold, one last song, Marcella comes back to put everyone away, movie’s over. Though the way that she looks at her new camel doll which has suddenly appeared in her room suggests that he may be seeing the inside of a garbage can in about a month or so.

Why are all the villains in this movie inflatable?

What is up with this movie? Granted the animation is pretty fluid at times and some of the songs are kinda cute, but good grief, was this really marketed to young children? As if the frightening imagery wasn't enough, there are too many songs in it. Nearly EVERY CHARACTER has at least one song, and I can think of a few of them that they could have afforded to cut out. The story didn't make a lot of sense either — there is a plot of course, but it's pushed to the wayside to focus more on this menagerie of freaks and monsters, while the title characters don't get a lot of development. Raggedy Ann is just gentle and innocent, while Raggedy Andy is just macho and masculine.

But perhaps the most bizarre thing about it is that it's a movie based on a concept about toys who come to life and go on adventures when the kids are out of the room, and was a box office failure, whereas eighteen years later, Disney would release a similar movie from then-unknown studio Pixar and build a franchise around it that's just gone into its second sequel.

Guess some movies have it, and some don't.

And yet Marcella emerges unscathed.