Main Ingredients:

1 Mancunian Candidate
1 Crooning "Circus Boy"
1 Wool-Hatted, Six-Stringin' Texan
1 Greenwich Village Proto-Hippie

Additional Ingredients:

A tablespoonful of far-sighted creators
A cupful of far-out comedy writers
A good sifting of eclectic guest stars
A "bam!" full of super songwriters and sessioners
One healthy dash of "Running, Jumping, Standing Still" New Wave film technique
One healthy dash of classic vaudevillean / "Road" picture verbal and physical shenanigans
Sneaky dashes of counterculture psychedelia
A few healthy jiggers of corporate greed

Instructions: Add all ingredients into Pop Culture Pressure Cooker. Cook for forty years or more, but skim portion of corporate greed after one year of slow boiling. Yields 58 episodes and plenty of tasty leftovers. Serves millions, millions, and more millions over a period of forty years...and more.

Main Ingredients good for many more recipes. One of 'em may be comin' to your town or a repeat episode of a new classic television show. No fooling. It'll make you shout "Kretch!"

Here they come, walkin' down the street. The Gang Of Four Long-Haired Weirdos. When you're a Monkee you're one all the way, from your first romping punk 'till your dyin' day. Catch 'em if you can.

Davy, Micky, Mike, Peter. Four entertainers whose real names were used but whose lives were changed on the small screen to protect the innocent. Four individuals fictionalized as psychedelectrified folkies for your entertainment.

Before America was punk'd - we were Monk'd. And loving every minute of it.

Forever the Young Generation - behold the far-out fashions! Forever outwitting The Man and His Establishment - behold the power of the romp as the uptight and down-and-dirty fall to pieces! Forever the Four Mod Magi with an off-beat, inexplicable Midas touch - behold the slick red customized muscle car and groovy Malibu beach pad without the benefit of regular jobs or even regular gigs!

I can't remember when I didn't know "The Monkees", both television show and the act that eventually developed from the Pop Culture Pressure Cooker that created the television show. I can't recall a time when I wasn't a fan. To me, they represented a breed of brash and brazen big brothers we in the younger set would've adored having in our midst; to the older boys, they represented a rebellion couched in humor; to the older girls...well, who doesn't know about that?

The former members of "The Monkees" to this day declare they don't savvy what all the screaming hoopla from the females was all about. But as always, the little girls understand, and the teen magazines understood enough to know that feeding the need was a mutually beneficial relationship between the publishers and the fans. Almost every issue of these teenybop mags of the swingin' sixties era all over the world touted photos and revealing articles on the first corporate boy-band.

Worldwide nubie adulation of the television stars-cum-pop band was lost on the cynical wags of the "real" rock music world who dubbed the quartet "The Pre-Fab Four" and heaped them with abuse due to their promotion and eventual presentation as a real live working band without the popular backstory of requisite hip artistic suffering by them as a long-struggling group entity.

The irony of pop purists constructing a box of criteria into which they could stuff artists during an experimental era as effectively as the Monkee Corporate Masters they decried would've made a pretty good episode had "The Monkees" survived as a show into the twenty-first century.

The concept: Four seasoned entertainers and former bandmates getting together to champion individualism. The antagonists: Artistic elitists, business greedheads and the demon of Nostalgia Merchandising. ("Each time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in," says Micky Corleone, whose Pacino would sound strangely like Cagney.)

It would make as entertaining a serving of reductio ad absurdum as any of the classic Monkees episodes while perhaps even getting closer to the truth of the whole phenomenon by reaching beyond the realm of "The Monkees" as Unreality T.V. Heck, it would be more honest than what passes for Reality T.V. these days.

Alas, this may only be possible in the realm of my whimsy, since time and tide await no man nor Monkee. And the gentlemen who fronted the phenomenon known as "The Monkees" seem happy enough doing their own thing these days - which, thankfully, includes entertaining their fans. Yet with the release of biographies, detailed info books, fan links galore, and the entire series on DVD, forty years worth of fans - young then and young now - can be transported back in time to the exploits of television's most magic boys in the wackiest offering of the counterculture sixties: the live-action cosmic trip comic strip starring those clown princes of pop..."THE MONKEES"!

So mod, so madcap, so magic...you WILL believe a struggling and starving wannabe pop band of the 1960s can afford an awesome signature auto and rent a far-out Malibu beachhouse!