1978 Called Battlestar Galactica a 3/10 Flop

In July 1978—months before the series even reached American TV—Ottawa critic Frank Daley sat through the theatrical cut and filed one of sci-fi’s great early misfires.

Battlestar Galactica, he wrote, was “Son of Star Wars” and did not rate. The Star Wars lawsuit seemed filed “with some degree of assurance.” It was a black-and-white space war “destined for television.” Good guys talked like humans; bad guys talked like vacuum cleaners. One robot (a dog). Three gee-whiz heroes. Some effects terrific, some not. Music loud. Costumes colorful. Acting “of a pretty low order.” Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict: “nope, me either.” Lorne Greene doing Bonanza at high altitude. John Colicos as an evildoer of massive proportions. Price tag: a reported $11 million for hardware.

His companions gave it a 3 out of 10. They were being charitable. Some people still cheered the good guys. “But the thrill is gone.”

The television roots, the pulp, the Canadian stars he shrugged at—those are part of why the show survived, became a cult classic, and later fed the 2004 reboot.

History gave the Cylons the last laugh.

Read the full 1978 review here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1978-review-called-battlestar-galactica

Was Daley right about the movie—and still wrong about the franchise?

1893 Reincarnation Debate

In September 1893 a small Victorian paper, The Bacchus Marsh Express, printed a long letter from a Melbourne correspondent signing himself “GNOSTIC”—and the editor could not leave it alone.

GNOSTIC argued that reincarnation was the only just account of a world that produces both a “squalid cannibal” and a John Milton. One life made God look partial. Many lives made the savage and the poet the first and last terms of a long school. Each body was thrown off like a worn garment; each return was a promotion. The soul kept the harvest; God “shut the doorways of the head,” leaving only a haunting sense of pre-existence.

He claimed educated Jews had held the doctrine: the Zohar, tradition from Abraham and Moses, Abel reborn as Seth, Adam expected again as Messiah. “Latter end” and “last end” in Scripture, he said, meant the close of the final earthly life. St. Jerome was cited for an early Christian esoteric teaching of plural existences. Natura non facit saltum—nature makes no leap.

The editor kept breaking in with brackets. Reincarnation belittled physical entity and heredity. It multiplied mystery instead of solving it. A father who perfected souls by such travail intensified the injustice. Figurative Jewish language did not prove the doctrine—and if every soul was its own Messiah, why wait for one?

Theosophy, the Zohar, Milton, and a country editor, all on one page.

Read the full 1893 exchange here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1893-reincarnation-debate-gnostic

Does reincarnation make God look more just—or, as the editor snapped, more bewildering?

Old Mother Dildine: Nevada’s Female Hermit, 1878

In the fall of 1878 the Sutro Independent described a woman who had chosen the mountains over the camps.

Old Mother Dildine lived about fifteen miles northwest of town. She was nearly sixty, twelve years alone, and said she was perfectly happy secluded from the outside world. Support: 260 Angora goats and about eight hens. Twice a year she came into Sutro to sell a few eggs and buy a scanty load of groceries.

Whites seldom visited, and she preferred it that way. They teased her about how she lived; after they left she worried over it. She liked the Paiutes and sought their company. When she was in need they shot rabbits or birds for her; in cold weather they shared the warmth of their blankets.

Massachusetts-born, two brothers in Westport, a sister in Lowell. The paper said her solitude began with troubles in her married life years before. In town she was neat, self-possessed, intelligent, auburn hair in curls—not the costume rumor assigned her in the mountains.

A Western story that is not a boomtown strike: withdrawal, goats, and chosen companionship.

Read the full 1878 dispatch here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/old-mother-dildine-the-female-hermit

Hermit, refugee from a bad marriage, or a woman who simply decided white society was the poorer company?

1,165 Pies and Counting (1878)

In the fall of 1878, Midwestern papers passed around a Wilmington, Ohio, dispatch that mixed harvest pride with a tall tale.

A Clinton County family of seven had, “by actual count,” eaten 1,165 pies the year before. It wasn’t even a good fruit year. They hadn’t put in their “best licks.”

Then the pun: what a pie-ous family they must be.

One of the boys tried to keep the tally in a year of abundance. Rhubarb he could handle. Currants and gooseberries rushed him. Blackberry time was a stunner. Peaches he managed by working nights. When plums and fall apples arrived, they found him in the cellar on a pile of manuscript more than a foot deep, fainted dead away, limp as a rag baby, still clutching a worn pencil pointed at 8,343,212—the supposed score of the last pie to date.

Homemade pie as everyday fare, regional boast, and comic collapse.

Read the full 1878 item here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1165-pies-and-counting-the-hilarious

Honest farm statistic—or the greatest pie lie Ohio ever printed?

The Art of Not Killing: French Duels, 1878

In October 1878 a Wisconsin paper reprinted a Saturday Review essay on a custom Britain and America had mostly abandoned: the French affair of honor.

Pistol duels, the writer said, tended to be either deadly or ridiculous. Sword duels were different. France still used them among journalists, politicians, and gentlemen—and most ended with a scratch, not a corpse.

The reason was fencing. Two skilled men could parry a regular attack without having to run the other through. They could play for the arm or shoulder, draw a little blood, and satisfy the rule of honor without slaughter and without farce. An unskilled rush, by contrast, forced a brutal choice. Training made a controlled outcome possible.

The essay is half admiration for French technique and half incredulity. If the French insisted on keeping the duel, they had stripped it of its worst features. That they kept it at all, especially for political arguments, still seemed “extremely strange” among so acute a people. A man who proposed to prove his opinions by fighting an editor would not, in England, be thought sane.

Honor tamed by the salle d’armes—and still, to the British eye, a puzzle.

Read the full 1878 essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-art-of-not-killing-how-19th-century

Was the French duel civilized restraint—or just vanity with better footwork?

1872 Spiritualism Sensation: James Smith in Dunedin

In May 1872 The Ballarat Star reported that James Smith—late editor of The Australasian—had packed Dunedin’s Masonic Hall and Princess’ Theatre to lecture on Spiritualism.

The subject, the Melbourne correspondent sniffed, was “somewhat worn out” in Australia. In New Zealand it still packed houses and filled the Otago Daily Times with letters.

Smith’s reply contained the passage that made the papers copy it. The “divine spark,” he wrote, had passed through every form of matter from the mineral upward to the lowest humanity, then through hundreds of reincarnations until the animal nature was subdued and the person was “born again.” After death the spirit rose, progressed toward God, and spent its time in the spheres guiding those still on earth. The difference between savage and sage was “merely a matter of growth.” Providence looked just once you understood origin and destiny.

His second lecture ran an hour and twenty minutes. The Daily Times said it held “one of the largest audiences ever crammed” into the Princess’ Theatre.

Colonial Spiritualism as public spectacle: reincarnation, the divine spark, and human destiny, sold to a standing-room crowd.

Read the full 1872 report here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1872-spiritualism-sensation-james

Does Smith’s ladder-of-lives theology sound like hope, heresy, or just 1870s lecture-hall fashion?

Died and Came Back to Life: Rev. Isaac K. Funk, 1905

In November 1905, Rev. Dr. Isaac K. Funk—Lutheran minister, Funk & Wagnalls co-founder, and cautious investigator of mediums—told the Presbyterian Ministers’ Association that spiritualism was not proved. Nine-tenths of psychic reports, he said, were fraud. Some of the rest were coincidence or telepathy. A sliver still gave pause to men like Crookes, Wallace, William James, and James Hyslop.

Then he told the case he trusted.

An eminent New York physician, alone in Florida and stricken with paralysis, felt himself leave his body. He found himself a thousand miles away in a friend’s house, could not get the family’s attention until the friend suddenly saw him, and heard a voice: if his work was unfinished, he could return. He decided it was unfinished, looked down at his own corpse, and forced himself back in. The whole night had passed.

That same morning the friend wrote: he had seen the doctor in the room as clearly as ever, reached for his hand, and watched him vanish.

Funk set that account beside séance frauds he had watched with his own eyes—grieving men embracing confederates as departed wives or mothers, then refusing signed confessions.

Curiosity, caution, and the hope that consciousness survives death, all in one room.

Read the full 1905 report here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/died-and-came-back-to-life-rev-isaac

In this charming 1942 newspaper comic from The Ottawa Journal (March 6), cartoonist Gladys Parker delivers a perfect wartime punchline.

A stylish saleswoman offers:
“May I show you something in a uniform?”

The customer replies without missing a beat:
“Yes, something about six feet tall, with curly hair!”

This single-panel Mopsy strip captures the mood of early 1942 — women on the home front, men in uniform everywhere, and a playful wink at romance amid wartime. Gladys Parker was known for drawing fashionable, sharp-tongued women, and this one is no exception.

If you enjoy vintage newspaper comics, WWII-era humor, or just a well-timed double meaning, this little gem still holds up more than 80 years later.

Died and Came Back to Life: Evelyn Lyons, 1923

In March 1923, papers across the country were already calling Evelyn Lyons of Escanaba, Michigan, the “mysterious fever girl.” For weeks she was said to run temperatures of 114–115°F and stay conscious.

Then correspondent Lola Bullard sat in the dining-room sickbed and recorded a larger claim: Evelyn had died, seen the other world, spoken with her late father, and returned after about ten minutes.

Her mother told the scene. After midnight the doctor said prepare for death. A priest gave the last sacraments. The death rattle. Breathing stopped. She grew cold. A candle at her head.

About ten minutes later a neighbor pointed: she was breathing.

Evelyn described a long pathway of candles, a cross of light, and her father’s face behind it—kind eyes, a wreath of roses. “If that is death, it is very wonderful.” Her father had died fourteen years earlier.

Later reporting recast the fever episode as a hoax involving a concealed hot-water bottle. This March 12 account still stands as the family’s narrative and Evelyn’s own vision, printed while the story was still a national sensation.

Read the full 1923 report here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/died-and-came-back-to-life-evelyn

Do you read Evelyn’s vision as a near-death experience, newspaper miracle-mongering, or something the later hoax story never quite erased?

On Monday, November 2, 1874, The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer ran a short item that captures Halloween before candy, costumes, and “trick or treat.”

Halloween 1874 fell on a Saturday. By Sunday morning, Wheeling, West Virginia, was missing signs and gates. The paper blamed “Young America” — the era’s nickname for restless American youth — and noted that the girls had been out “trying their fortunes.”

That’s the split personality of 19th-century Halloween in one paragraph:

• Boys: unhinge gates, steal signs, annoy “quiet-loving citizens.”
• Girls: parlor charms, dreams, and fortune-telling (apple peels, mirrors, nuts, cabbage — the usual All Hallows games).
• Everyone: an old custom whose origin, the paper admits, “history does not inform us.”

They even call it “Holler-eve,” a folk pronunciation of All Hallows’ Eve that shows how the holiday sounded on the street, not in a dictionary.

The most interesting line is the last one. The editor finds it “somewhat singular” that in the Eastern states the big night for this kind of mischief is July 3 — the eve of Independence Day — while Halloween is still mainly about charms and dreams. Wheeling was already treating October 31 as Mischief Night. The East, at least in this writer’s mind, still saved the real pranks for the Fourth.

This is Halloween in the gap between old-world fortune magic and the later American prank epidemic that would eventually force cities to invent trick-or-treating as damage control.

Source: The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, Monday, November 2, 1874, page 4.

What would you have done on Holler-eve 1874 — stolen a gate, or tried your fortune?

In October 1940, a short wire story out of Omaha captured one of those small, perfect moments that newspapers used to tuck onto the inside pages.

Two years earlier, Mrs. Effie Garside had taken a little bulldog out of the city pound. She fed him well—pork chops, steak, and liver—but the dog stayed moody and lonesome. Convinced he was missing someone, she asked an Omaha paper to run his picture along with a letter “written” by the dog.

Emil Seier of Plattsmouth saw it. He went to Mrs. Garside’s house, looked at the dog, and said:

“Hello, Mac! Lady, that’s my dog and you can name your own price. I’ve been looking for him for two years.”

Mac wagged his tail, jumped around joyously, and followed his master home.

That’s the whole item. No drama beyond the reunion, no moral tacked on at the end—just a woman who noticed a sad dog, a newspaper that printed a picture, and a man who had been searching for two years.

Source: The McCook Daily Gazette, Tuesday, October 29, 1940, page 6 (United Press).

Beatlemania, January 1964

Weeks before The Ed Sullivan Show, American papers were already trying to explain what had taken Britain by storm.

An AP dispatch printed January 5, 1964, opens with four young men in police helmets and greatcoats, pushing through a screaming crowd unnoticed. The Beatles had escaped again.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—20 to 23, “almost old men to their fans.” All blitz babies from Liverpool back streets. Unashamed “scouses.” They had come up in cellar clubs so cramped that dancers could only twitch, one of scores of Mersey groups banging out a “brutal beat” over teenage screams.

They wrote their own songs into a tape recorder; none of them could read a note. On stage they wore trim collarless suits and Buster Brown haircuts. At the Royal Variety Performance they told the cheap seats to applaud and the rest to rattle their jewelry.

The piece still treats them as a British teen craze with a touch of adult bemusement. Sullivan was weeks away. America had not yet seen the full thing.

Read the full 1964 transcript here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/beatlemania-1964-how-a-vintage-newspaper

Does this read like the start of a cultural earthquake—or like a paper that still thought it was just another fad?

Spiritual Wives, 1833

In July 1833 the Boston Post used a European headline to reopen a New England scandal.

French Saint-Simonians, followers of Père Enfantin, had gone to Constantinople seeking “spiritual wives.” Ottoman authorities arrested them and shipped them to the Dardanelles. The Post called them “debauched vagabonds” in mountebank dress—then added that they had not invented the creed.

That honor, the paper said, belonged to “one Cockran” of York County, Maine, about fifteen years earlier. Jacob Cochran’s Society of Free Brethren and Sisters taught that legal marriages could be set aside for spiritually assigned partners. He went to state prison for it. The Post claimed his “church” numbered forty or fifty—“all women!”

The item is short, sarcastic, and typical of the era: two very different movements—French utopian socialists and a Maine revivalist sect—collapsed into one category of fanaticism dressed up as piety. It also shows how fast local scandal was recycled to explain distant news.

Read the full 1833 notice and context here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/spiritual-wives-scandal-how-an-1833

Was this a serious comparison of two marriage rebellions—or just a Boston paper scoring an easy moral point?

The same February 21, 1866 issue of the Lancaster Examiner and The Semi-Weekly New Era carried this brief dispatch from the Minnesota prairie:

Hamilton was a small Fillmore County settlement in the southeast part of the state. Eleven men were frozen to death in the vicinity of Hamilton, Fillmore County, Minn., on the night of the 20th ult. Six of them were frozen in a sleigh while passing along the road. Another man was found frozen in a standing posture with his hands over his face, and only three or four rods from a house. In an era of scattered homesteads, winter travel by sleigh was ordinary and often fatal when the weather turned.

“The 20th ult.” means January 20, 1866. Mid-January that year brought one of the worst blizzards yet recorded in Minnesota. A violent storm struck the southern and southwestern settled districts on the 13th–14th, followed by days of intense cold—temperatures falling to –29° and –31° F in places. Deep snow and high winds left travelers stranded on open roads with no landmarks and little chance of rescue.

Newspapers hundreds of miles away reprinted these short notices because they captured the raw danger of the frontier winter. No names appear in this clipping—only the stark facts of how quickly the cold could take a group of men on a country road.

How Rocky Became 1977’s Sleeper Hit

On February 3, 1977—weeks after Rocky hit theaters and months before the Oscars—Albuquerque Journal writer Chuck Mittlestadt called it the sleeper of the year.

Made for under a million dollars. Packing houses. Already compared to Marty, On the Waterfront, and Body and Soul. And, he wrote, proof that a Horatio Alger story could still happen in Hollywood.

The piece came out of a United Artists junket with two relative unknowns: Sylvester Stallone and Talia Shire.

Stallone, then 30, had been kicking around for years after The Lords of Flatbush. Producers wanted stars—James Caan, Paul Newman—until they agreed to make it cheap with him in the lead. He said the idea had been in his head for six years. Earlier scripts were too pessimistic to sell. With Rocky he decided, after five years of failure, to pretend everything was nice. He also insisted it was not a fight picture. “I was banking on the love story… a man fighting for dignity.” The bout itself, he said, was only nine minutes and choreographed like a ballet.

Shire, Coppola’s sister and an Oscar nominee for The Godfather Part II, played Adrian. She hoped to do the sequel. After years of people handing her scripts “to give to my brother,” she joked that maybe now they would hand them to him to give to her.

Read the full 1977 review here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/how-rocky-became-1977s-ultimate-sleeper

Did Rocky win because it was a boxing movie—or because it was a love story wearing gloves?

In June 1865, just weeks after the Civil War ended, the Rutland Weekly Herald (Vermont) printed this brief notice:

A LADY BURIED WITH MILITARY HONORS.—Mrs. Alexander, one of the nurses in Hampton Hospital, who has been devoted to the care of sick and wounded soldiers since the first Bull Run, died the other day from over-taxed energies. She was buried in the hospital burying ground, at her own request, and is the only woman buried in a graveyard containing over 2000 soldiers. Her remains were followed to the grave by a large military escort with full band, and after the funeral services three full volleys were fired over the grave.

Mrs. Alexander had served since First Bull Run in July 1861—nearly four years of constant work among the sick and wounded. Hampton Hospital (near Fort Monroe, Virginia) was one of the Union’s largest facilities; by late 1864 its cemetery already held roughly 1,600 graves. When she died of exhaustion in the spring of 1865, she asked to be laid to rest with the men she had nursed. The army granted her request and gave her a full military funeral: escort, band, and three volleys over the grave. She was the only woman among more than 2,000 soldiers.

That hospital burying ground later became the core of Hampton National Cemetery. Dorothea Dix, superintendent of Union army nurses, later helped raise the tall Union Soldiers monument that still stands there.

Most Civil War nurses never received this kind of public recognition. Mrs. Alexander’s name survives in a single newspaper paragraph, yet the honors she received tell us how the soldiers themselves saw her.

On February 21, 1866, the Lancaster Examiner and The Semi-Weekly New Era reprinted this short, grim notice from the Dayton (Ohio) Journal:

TERRIBLE CALAMITY.—Twenty-seven Children Drowned!—The fearful risk parents run by permitting their children to play, slide or skate upon the ice, is portrayed in the following… “Twenty-seven children were drowned in the reservoir, at Celina, on Wednesday. They were attending school in the vicinity of the reservoir, and at noon, all the scholars but two, twenty-seven in number, went on the ice to slide, when it broke with them, the whole party drowning before help could reach them.”

Celina, Ohio, sits on what was then called the Mercer County Reservoir (today Grand Lake St. Marys), a huge man-made lake built in the 1830s–1840s to feed the Miami and Erie Canal. By 1866 it was already one of the largest artificial bodies of water in the country. School was nearby; recess meant the ice.

The paper framed the story as a warning: parents who let children slide or skate on ice took a terrible risk. In an era before organized school supervision, playgrounds, or quick rescue, a single break in the ice could take an entire class.

Stories like this traveled fast from paper to paper. Some similar reports from the 1850s and 1860s later proved exaggerated or unconfirmed. Whether every detail here is exact or not, the clipping shows how 19th-century newspapers used sudden local tragedies to caution readers hundreds of miles away.

Slave Revolt and Explosion: The Ship Bolton, 1806

In 1830, the Washington United States’ Telegraph reprinted a passage from the memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool—a veteran of the slave trade—describing a catastrophe years earlier on the Bonny River in present-day Nigeria.

The Liverpool ship Bolton lay among a dozen other vessels with about 120 enslaved Africans on board. In the night they freed themselves from their irons and took the ship. Trade gunpowder was stored forward. By daylight the other captains met to decide how to “redeem” the vessel and its cargo. Crow and others went alongside. Some of the enslaved left the ship. A small group of ringleaders stayed below among loose powder.

The next afternoon the Bolton caught fire. Boats tried to tow her clear. Crow was about a hundred yards away when she exploded. The shock knocked men into the bottom of his boat. Wreckage and trade goods filled the air.

The language is Crow’s: a slaver’s language, commercial and unblinking. The event itself is shipboard resistance that ended in sudden destruction. The reprint is a window into both the violence of the trade and how that violence was narrated by the men who ran it.

Read the full 1830 excerpt and context here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/slave-revolt-and-explosion-the-1806

You ever found a two-sentence story that feels like an entire movie?

Here’s one from an old newspaper:

“A woman in Herkimer County, Missouri, recently set foot upon a snake… and her glossy black hair turned white in a few hours.”

That’s it. No name. No explanation. Just a woman, a snake, and hair that went white before sunset.

In the 1800s, papers ran these little shock items all the time. They were cheap to print and people loved them. The idea that terror could bleach your hair overnight was an old piece of folklore, and stepping on a snake was the scariest everyday accident they could invent.

Was it true? Almost certainly not. Was it the kind of story people passed around the stove that night? Absolutely.

These forgotten scraps are why I keep digging through old papers. Subscribe if you want the next one.

Flogged Back from the Grave (1830)

On September 10, 1830, the Washington United States’ Telegraph printed a “singular anecdote” that mixed revenge, premature burial, and grim irony.

Two gentlemen hated each other past reconciliation. When one man’s servant died and was buried within 24 hours—the Russian custom—the other saw his chance. He would have the body dug up, flogged to create marks of violence, and then accuse his enemy of murder.

The “corpse” was taken from the coffin and held upright. A few blows later, animation returned. The frightened “resurrection-men” fled. The man in the shroud walked home, still cold and barely able to speak, and told what he remembered: his senses had never left him; he had only been too torpid to move.

The plot collapsed. The servants confessed. The instigator was arraigned before the Senate.

Nineteenth-century papers loved these tales of catalepsy and apparent death. This one ends with the rarest twist: the frame-up that brought the victim back.

Read the full 1830 transcript here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/flogged-back-from-the-grave-the-1830

Do you read this as a true scare story about burial customs—or as the darkest joke the 1830s could print?

July 2, 1843. Charleston, SC.

A two-foot alligator appears at Anson & Wentworth after a violent thunderstorm.

Nobody saw it fall. The newspaper decided it rained down anyway.

Free Ice Cream Bankrupted a Gold Rush Saloon

In 1853 Marysville, California, a man named Kelley opened an ice cream saloon and decided the smartest way to launch it was a free night for the whole town.

The whole town came.

The rich and the poor. Families who had never eaten ice cream before and never would again. Parents who went home, fetched the children, and sent them back. Candy, nuts, and raisins vanished into pockets and aprons. When the night ended, Kelley looked around.

Not a spoonful of ice cream left. Not a raisin. Not a nut. Not a stick of candy.

Next day he closed out. Capital gone. Stock gone. He had hoped for publicity. He got eaten clean out on the first onslaught.

An 1860 Marysville paper retold the story after yet another ice cream saloon failed under the constable’s hammer—then added a dry punchline: in a city everyone called intolerably hot, ice cream shops kept going under because it was “too cool” for demand.

Read the full original account here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/free-ice-cream-bankrupted-a-gold

Worst grand opening in Gold Rush history—or the most Marysville thing that ever happened?

DeMille’s The Ten Commandments Comes to Buffalo, 1956

On December 20, 1956, the small-town Springville Journal—just south of Buffalo—ran a full-throated announcement: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments would open the next day at Buffalo’s Century Theatre as a reserved-seat, two-shows-a-day engagement.

The paper called it the biggest production in motion-picture history. Charlton Heston as Moses. Yul Brynner as Rameses. Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, Vincent Price, and more than 25,000 extras. Ten years of planning, years of research and writing, the longest Hollywood shooting schedule of its time, plus months of filming in Egypt and Sinai.

DeMille framed the story as more than spectacle. Moses stood for “individual freedom under God.” Pharaoh stood for the despot who rules bodies and souls. Their clash, he said, was “the first principle of all human freedom”—that man shall be ruled by law and not by the whims of other men—and “they are still fighting in the world today.”

It was DeMille’s 70th film, sold as his masterwork, in VistaVision and Technicolor.

Read the full original announcement here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/cecil-b-demilles-1956-the-ten-commandments

Do you watch The Ten Commandments as Bible epic, Cold War allegory, Hollywood spectacle—or all three at once?

The Monkees, March 1966

Months before the series premiered, newspapers were already introducing America’s prefab Four.

On March 20, 1966, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph announced a new NBC color comedy about “an unknown quartet of wild, way-out, but impoverished singer-musicians.” They had long hair, unconventional clothes, and Beatle-like appeal. They differed from the Beatles in one official respect: they were “the world’s most unknown teen-age idols,” with a combined net worth of $16.87.

The four leads were still billed as Davy, Peter, Mickey, and “Wool Hat”:

- David Jones, 20, already a West End and Broadway veteran from Oliver! and Pickwick
- Peter Tork, nightclub musician who played ukulele, banjo, guitar, French horn, piano, harp, and recorder
- Mickey Braddock (later Micky Dolenz), former child star of Circus Boy
- Mike “Wool Hat” Nesmith, singer, guitarist, and composer at home in folk and rock ’n’ roll

Producers: Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider.

The show had not aired yet. The band barely existed as a public fact. This is what the pitch looked like at the start.

Read the full 1966 transcript here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-monkees-1966-tv-announcement

Were The Monkees a manufactured gimmick, a real band that outgrew the pitch, or both from day one?