Upon their late-1960s arrival on TV screens, the Monkees were almost immediately compared — both favorably and unfavorably — with the Beatles. Micky Dolenz has spent more of the next five decades explaining why the comparison simply doesn’t work.
First, he notes, they weren’t cast in Mop Top roles. Secondly, the Monkees’ fictional story arc took an entirely different tack.
“Before they even began casting for the show,” Micky Dolenz tells Life After 50, “the producers had in their heads what they wanted. “The show was kind of based on the Marx Brothers more than the Beatles. Even before they cast us, in the pilot script, they had one Jerry Lewis-type wacky guy, one more serious guy with dry, Will Rogers sort of humor and so on. They wanted very distinct characters to play off one another, so the comedy would work. Then, when they began casting, they were looking for four guys that jumped out of the screen with that indefinable thing that every casting director looks for when they cast a role.”
From there, Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork and the late Davy Jones began a series of mishap-dotted adventures — and, there too, the differences between the Monkees and the Beatles are striking.
“It was a sitcom about a band who was not successful,” Micky Dolenz notes. “It was a very different kettle of fish from A Hard Day’s Night or Help! In those films, the Beatles played themselves — and, like in real life, they were a huge success and had fans chasing them all over. In our show, we were a struggling band who wanted to be like the Beatles. … I think kids could relate to that more so than they could to the Beatles, who were these mega-stars.”
That the misconception continues remains a head-scratching experience for Dolenz. “I’m always amazed that people, even real fans of the show, missed that dynamic — that, within the context of the show, the Monkees as a band were famous or even successful.”
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