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 Bless Rhino for this near-perfect collection. I've always written off the first season of THE MONKEES as overly shrill, cutesy, and childish, the worst aspect being the standard laugh track, which tends to flatten some episodes outright. But, while the second season (and the feature film HEAD) are light years ahead of season one in terms of music, performance, and overall style, watching this set has allowed me an opportunity to re-appraise the earlier shows. While some are still pretty unpleasant, even the worst episodes have moments of surprising, almost experimental, quality. The pacing and editing of these shows alone stand out as being well ahead of their time, and, even from the very beginning, the show borders on Brechtian in all the many ways (albeit mostly minor) it attempted to break the fourth wall of televised artifice. I am convinced that anyone who wrote the show off as kid's stuff or criticized the Monkees themselves as being talentless or disposable Beatle rip-offs has simply been misguided. Much of what the Monkees did holds up better than any of the Beatles' film work, even from the very beginning.
The packaging for this six-disc set is outstanding. The box looks like a little record player and the discs are inside little cardboard sleeves that replicate actual Monkee 45s. Select episodes have audio commentary from various people connected with the Monkees, except for Micky Dolenz who is sorely missed. He was hilarious on the audio commentary for the "Daydream Believers" DVD and would have had some entertaining things to say about these episodes. Here's hoping he will be on the second series box set. The booklet that comes with the set is a bit lacking but the discs make up for this by including trivia on each episode from a well-known Monkee website. However, some trivia that has previously not been seen before would have been nice. When I reviewed Rhino's Monkees Volume One & Two on Amazon, I mentioned several things that I thought would make good extras when the entire Monkees series came out on DVD. Rhino has lived up to most of my expectations, including putting the alternate version of the pilot in the set and most of the Monkees TV commercials. That being said, most of the commercials are of poor quality and look like they were taken off of a bootleg tape called "Secret Video Files" that is in wide circulation among Monkee fans. I still appreciate them being included though. I was also a bit disappointed that the episodes did not feature the alternate music soundtracks from reruns and syndication. Despite these minor flaws, here's hoping the same creative people work on the release and packaging of the Monkees Season Two DVD set.
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Just to point out that the picture suffers from what (to me at least) is the worse kind of DVD picture defect. It's the kind where, in order to save space on the disc, stills are used as backgrounds giving the picture a wholly artificial look. For sure, a lot of people won't be bothered by any of these flaws. But it's clear how the picture has been taken apart and put together again by the way moving objects (e.g. someone walking across a room) look superimposed on the background. Objects with sharp edges look as though they've been 'cut & pasted' onto the picture, reminiscent of a bad computer game. Tell-tale 'difficult' shots, such as trees and ocean scenes, are particularly poorly handled.
This box set from Rhino has been worth the wait for Monkees fans. The audio and video are excellent for the most part, which make these first season episodes a pleasure to watch. The picture quality is so good that you will see things in the background that you have never noticed before, even if you've seen the episodes dozens of times.
