The Monkees In A Ghost Town

Written by Robert Schlitt & Peter Meyerson

Directed by James Frawley

Produced by Robert Rafelson & Bert Schneider

Songs: “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day” by Tommy Boyce&

Steve Venet “Papa Gene’s Blues” by

Michael Nesmith

Guest Appearances

George                        Len Lesser

Lenny                         Lon Chaney

The Big Man                Rose Marie

1st Cop                   Hollis Morrison

Premiered on October 24, 1966

Summary

This episode begins with the Monkees driving in their Monkeemobile out of Clarksville for an out of town gig.  After driving for what seems to be endless in a desert, Micky mentions that they should’ve turned left about 150 miles back.  They soon run out of gas and are stranded in the middle of a ghost town so they decide to split up in pairs to find some gas.  Davy and Mike do a western fantasy sequence with Mike as both Black Blart and Slade doing a showdown and Davy as Kincaid who ends up shot by Black Bart.  Meanwhile, Micky and Peter find an old triangle used to call cowboys and Peter starts jamming on it with a hammer since he used to play a triangle in high school which is overheard by two thugs George and Lenny in the town’s jail who decide to investigate.

The crooks find Mike and Davy and Lenny takes them to the jail at gunpoint and locks them up while George searches for the others but Micky and Peter are hiding in the next door stall.  Back at the jail, George and Lenny discuss their plans to get their cut and run as soon as their boss, the Big Man arrives and mentions they never met their boss which is overheard by Micky and a lightbulb(literally thanks to Peter) goes up over his head.  Dressed as gangsters, Micky arrives pretending to be the Big Man doing his James Cagney impersonation with Peter as his sidekick Spider.  But the two crooks soon see through them when they stumble and they end up locked in the jail too.  George warns them not to escape since there is nothing but desert around and they have a fantasy sequence of themselves dressed as foreign legionnairs and in bathing suits romping around the desert and by the beach to the song “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day”.  Micky comes up with another idea to escape by digging a tunnel.  Then they trick Lenny into giving them a shovel and ball claiming they’re going to play baseball for fun.  To to distract the crooks from hearing them digging, they play the song “Papa’s Gene’s Blues” as they dig out only to find people surfing, arabs on horseback, a herd of cattle, an Egyptian pyramid, the themselves on camels, a baseball field and Peter winding up in the cell next door.

Then the real Big Man arrives who turns out be the Big Woman, the Big Man’s wife who took over since her husband got too big.  She orders the Monkees killed but is impressed when she learns that there are singers since she was once in show biz claiming that Bessie Kowalski once won the hearts of millions(Bessie who?).  Despite this, Bessie still orders the Monkees to be taken out and shot but Mike stalls time by asking for a last request to sing one last song and for Bessie to join them.  Soon with Mike on the piano, Bessie starts singing “Everybody Loves My Baby” and “Hi Neighbor” off key as Mike sends Davy to call for help on the phone.  Davy manages to contact a primitive Indian chief at his tent only to be put on hold then by a southerner from another town who offers to contact Bob Dylan since he can write a song about his problem.  Mike tries to stall some more by having all of them sing the “Monkees theme song” and they asks George and Lenny to join in which Lenny ends up giving Davy his gun.  Soon a shootout breaks out with the group behind the bar and Bessie still singing the theme song with the piano now playing by itself.  Then the gun Davy has appears to run out of bullets so he throws it away only to have a bullet discharge knocking George’s gun out of his hand and the crooks surrender.

Later, the police arrive arresting the three criminals and Bessie announces that she and the guys are going to work up with a new act while in prison called Bessie and the Bullets.  One of the cops gives them a ticket for the reward for capturing the three and tell the guys to go the police station for the money but as soon as they reach their car, the cop starts writing up tickets for traffic violations and singing in a cabaret without a license (in a ghost town!) and they end up giving him back the ticket to pay for everything.  “Well that’s show business” they all exclaim before driving off.

This episode ends with an interview of the guys fooling around with camera filters.  Click here____ for transcripts.

Trivia Notes

Actress Rose Marie(The Big Man) best known as Sally Rogers on

The Dick Van Dyke Show appears in another Monkees episode

“Monkee Mother”.

The late actor Lon Chaney Jr's(Lenny) character in this episode is a lampoon

of his character Lennie Small in the 1939 classic film "Of Mice and Men".  He also

followed in his father's footsteps as charcters in monster films including "The

Wolf Man"(1941), "The Mummy's Tomb"(1942), "The Mummy's Curse" and The

Mummy's Ghost both in 1944.

On the July 17, 1967 NBC re-run, the song “Tomorrow’s Gonna

Be Another Day” is replaced by a remade woodshedded  Boyce& Hart’s “Words”