Flashback Friday — Teevee Time: The Monkees, feat. bespectacled Julie Newmar (a ghost post)

R.I.P., Davy Jones.

Davy Jones and Jul-Newms, The Monkees Get More Dirt Out.

This post originally appeared on April 5, 2010 at 2:59 pm.

Had a lot of dogs in the fire lately, Stanimal, but wanted to share these gorgeous caps of Jul-Newms in her guest appearance on The Monkees.

About a month ago, I thought I’d lost my specs and was going to have to get new ones and I was super-bummed, because I’ve gotten loads of compliments on my dorky, deliberately dowdy and thick black frames. I found them, but the brief transition back to my old, unobtrusive, lightweight and thin frames, and the corresponding dip in compliments and double-takes, hammered home to me how fun and harmlessly fetishistic a nice pair can be. Of glasses. Get your mind on track.

There’s a pervasive and misguided old saw that men aren’t attracted to a girl in glasses (I believe it runs, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and I’ve seen it attributed to patroness Dorothy Parker, but I am not so sure it was she), which I feel is unfortunately still believed to this day.

I have not found this to be true, and I think these stills dispell that ugly myth once and for all. As the countersaying goes, “Men do make passes at girls who wear glasses — it all depends on their frame.”

So leave ’em on, ladies!

All stills from “The Monkees Get More Dirt Out,” Season 2, Episode 29, The Monkees. (Original air date April 3, 1967.) Ms. Newmar plays April Conquest, who works at the local laundromat, and with whom each of the Monkees falls in love.

In polls, questions at conventions, and weight of fan mail, the episode has been voted the most popular and favorite of the series. Get it, girl!

Edit 3/1/2012: In memoriam, extra stills of Davy and the gents.

Flashback Friday — Teevee Time: The Monkees, feat. bespectacled Julie Newmar (a ghost post)

This post originally appeared on April 5, 2010 at 2:59 pm.

Had a lot of dogs in the fire lately, Stanimal, but wanted to share these gorgeous caps of Jul-Newms in her guest appearance on The Monkees.

About a month ago, I thought I’d lost my specs and was going to have to get new ones and I was super-bummed, because I’ve gotten loads of compliments on my dorky, deliberately dowdy and thick black frames. I found them, but the brief transition back to my old, unobtrusive, lightweight and thin frames, and the corresponding dip in compliments and double-takes, hammered home to me how fun and harmlessly fetishistic a nice pair can be. Of glasses. Get your mind on track.

There’s a pervasive and misguided old saw that men aren’t attracted to a girl in glasses (I believe it runs, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and I’ve seen it attributed to patroness Dorothy Parker, but I am not so sure it was she), which I feel is unfortunately still believed to this day.

I have not found this to be true, and I think these stills dispell that ugly myth once and for all. As the countersaying goes, “Men do make passes at girls who wear glasses — it all depends on their frame.”

So leave ’em on, ladies!

All stills from “The Monkees Get More Dirt Out,” Season 2, Episode 29, The Monkees. (Original air date April 3, 1967.) Ms. Newmar plays April Conquest, who works at the local laundromat, and with whom each of the Monkees falls in love.

In polls, questions at conventions, and weight of fan mail, the episode has been voted the most popular and favorite of the series. Get it, girl!

Daily Batman: Sleek Jul-Newms edition

Cats = Women, Exhibit xxx.

via batmania.

“Cats are sleek, cats are fast. Cats are … well — they aren’t mean; they’re just wiley. And they will grab your attention in the most seductive way.”

(Julie Newmar.)

Take it to the bank.

Daily Batman: Pussy cat, pussy cat

anonymous hottie dudded up like Jul-Newms via hyc on the tumblr

Pussy cat, pussy cat
Where have you been?
I’ve been to London
To look at the Queen.

Pussy cat, pussy cat
What did you there?
I frightened a little Mouse
Under her chair.

(Mother Goose)

Teevee Time: The Monkees, feat. bespectacled Julie Newmar

Had a lot of dogs in the fire lately, Stanimal, but wanted to share these gorgeous caps of Jul-Newms in her guest appearance on The Monkees.

About a month ago, I thought I’d lost my specs and was going to have to get new ones and I was super-bummed, because I’ve gotten loads of compliments on my dorky, deliberately dowdy and thick black frames. I found them, but the brief transition back to my old, unobtrusive, lightweight and thin frames, and the corresponding dip in compliments and double-takes, hammered home to me how fun and harmlessly fetishistic a nice pair can be. Of glasses. Get your mind on track.

There’s a pervasive and misguided old saw that men aren’t attracted to a girl in glasses (I believe it runs, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and I’ve seen it attributed to patroness Dorothy Parker, but I am not so sure it was she), which I feel is unfortunately still believed to this day.

I have not found this to be true, and I think these stills dispell that ugly myth once and for all. As the countersaying goes, “Men do make passes at girls who wear glasses — it all depends on their frame.”

So leave ’em on, ladies!

All stills from “The Monkees Get More Dirt Out,” Season 2, Episode 29, The Monkees. (Original air date April 3, 1967.) Ms. Newmar plays April Conquest, who works at the local laundromat, and with whom each of the Monkees falls in love.

In polls, questions at conventions, and weight of fan mail, the episode has been voted the most popular and favorite of the series. Get it, girl!

O frabjous day of twenty-two-ness: batshit-bananas numerology, and baseball spring fever

“O, frabjous day! Calloo, callay!” (Carroll, Jabberwocky.)

Computer is fixed!, day off with the littl’un!, Spring Training has begun! and it’s my favorite day of the year — 2/22! Historically, this is my lucky day. I’ve always liked this date best out of the rest of the calendar. Twenty-two is my lucky number from very, very far back, followed closely by two itself (twenty-two trumps just-two because what’s better than one two? two twos. three twos, as in two-hundred-twenty-two, are okay but still inferior because they are three and not two in number. do not attempt to unravel this logic) and this was also the birthday of my first friend, Alex; feeding ducks with her by the little pond at Noble Library in San Jose is one of my first memories of laughing just from being happy. I wish it stopped there with the whyness of twenty-two-ness, but I get kind of …. into numbers.

See also: my lucky time (10:22 PM, or 22:22); the pages of Treasure Island and Wuthering Heights on which I hide money (222 and 22, respectively); the exact uniform number of Robinson Cano and less auspiciously Roger Clemens.

Julie Newmar: “Batterrrr uuup!”

Ask me someday about my theory that he is two people, one the familiar Texan do-gooder and all-around nice fellow Roger Clemens we came to love, and the other an evil, lying, cauldron of seething rage named Rogero Clemenzetti. A wicked and long-dormant personality who will stop at nothing to satisfy his creepy id-like aims, Clemenzetti emerged after a rat bit Clemens in an otherwise empty subway car between Long Island and New York, and he has never been successfully suppressed ever since — it is a very sad case of Jekyll-and-Hyde and I’m surprised no one else has caught it.

Picture from Star Trek Movie Night at the Giants’ AT&T park via Trek Movie.com, taken 4/27/09. I did not attend, as I was at the zoo with my kidlet for her 5th birthday — but we went to the movie later that week and we both cried at the beginning; we are diehard fans of Treks TOSand TNG (not so much the soapier others), but we looooved the reboot and did not find it sacrilegious at all (hot boys don’t hurt neither, and it’s about time we got some girl fan service up in this piece!).

In other thrilling baseball connections, 22 is half of the jersey number of Hank Aaron and Reggie Jackson (4’s and 44 are goodish numbers because of their relationship with 2, being both the square of it and divisible by it, but 8, despite being not just a multiple but its cube is not as good, I feel less comfortable around 8 because it’s just getting too far from 2); 20 (an also-very-very good number because 2 + 0 = 2) less than the number of one of the sport’s greatest heroes, Jackie Robinson (being 42 which is a super-very good number because of DA); and, best of all, it is 20 + 2, 20 being Jorge Posada’s jersey number, though he wore 22 for a few weeks in 1997, before the re-acquisition of Mike Stanley (meh), when Posada switched to 20 so Stanley could once more wear 22 (again, MEH).

Gwen Stefani: “Batterrrr uuup!”

As you can see, 22 is the best number there is, 20 and 2 being close seconds, and therefore 2/22 is the best day of the year. Period. Also: baseball.

Baseball players always have bubble butts. I do not know what repetitive motion it is they do that gives them woman hips, but they’ve all got ’em, except for lanky pitchers, who just have bad knees.

Sorry for the long and pointless diversion but if nothing else, I hope this has proven to you the depths of my numerical mania, and the next time I scoff at the zodiac, feel free to remind me that I have insanely detailed schools of superstition of my own and would do well not to throw stones.

via Michael Leget on the photobucket.

If you think all that was bad, you should talk to my husband, who is medicated for obsessive compulsive disorder, some time about the Importance of Doing Things By Three. He will make a believer of you or die trying. It’s a passion that probably frightened away other, wiser girls, but actually endeared him to me.

Daily Batman: Enter the Bookworm and Up With Love plus Surprise Connections and Zodiac-quackery

Roddy McDowall and Francine York, Batman, “The Bookworm Turns,” Season 1, Episode 29. Original airdate April 20, 1966. Well, that’s inauspicious. Shit.

I hate to come off as a down-at-the-mouth grump on the topic of love. I am a romantic. Here is the Bookworm and his lady, the lovely librarian Miss Lydia Limpet, and may I add that I rooted like gangbusters for this pair to win?

via Batman villains database — I love clunky contraptions on men’s heads. I find it so fucking cute. I really do.

In fact, I remember pretty strongly wanting him for myself (girls like a boy who reads!), but I rightly understood Miss Limpet having him was almost the same thing. Later, when I figured out he was in Planet of the Apes, I was even more impressed, but, being a fickle little girl, I soon made way for other crushes, like Matthew Broderick and the Great Mouse Detective — shut up, because that could work — to the point that, when I stayed at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona several years back and was given the “Roddy McDowall room,” I merely remarked that I’d “once thought he was cute,” and meant nothing more by it.

Interestingly, after his role as the Bookworm in the live-action television series, McDowall continued to wreak villainy in the DC world. He voiced Jarvis Tetch/the Mad Hatter for both Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures, as well as performing him in a brief cameo for the late ’90s animated Superman.

In the original television series, the Mad Hatter was played by David Wayne. More on the Mad Hatter another day cause he was really depressed as a character and had some killer-great deadpan lines, even though no one matches King Tut in my estimation for the male villains’ comedic value. But back to love, because that is what I’m trying to prove is probably more important than trivial details of cartoons and old lunchbox-selling serials.

No, I can’t stop talking about it. Okay, because I’m looking at his page on the imdb to make sure I had the dates and titles right and it ends up Roddy McDowall was also the Breadmaster on Edlund’s masterwork The Tick, which is of grave emotional significance to me, and, moreover, had cameos on Darkwing Duck, Quantum Leap, and mother-effing Gargoyles. Also, he was monumentally in to photography and experimental camerawork. So, holy hell, I was smart to have a crush on him as a kid and now I’m going to have to get back to Roddy McDowall another day; he’s obviously been far more of an important thread in my life than I ever could have possibly understood … y’all please excuse me because Roddy McDowall has just now blown my mind.

Finally, according to authorities on these matters, the Catwoman outfit regularly worn by Julie Newmar appears to have been “upcycled” and worn by Francine York (who played librarian Miss Limpet on Batman) for the Lost In Space episode “The Colonists.” Also, in looking for pictures of her, I stumbled across a page where a woman had collected a bunch of pictures of famous Virgo women and though I always claim to put almost zero stock in that stuff, I have to say that they/we all have the faces of birdlike closet freaks who are too shy to smile with our lips parted but rock straight-up crazy do-me eyes despite our distrust of other people — to say nothing of the number of patron saints in her gallery of too-close-to-home horror. Good thing I think that’s largely bunk, or the unnerving similarities might have me concerned that my chakras weren’t aligned with the downward dog position of my chi and I’d have to bury a peeled potato under a full moon or some shit.

Truly the end of this post. Moving on for my own sake.

Movie Moment: “Inspiration Station,” Blade Runner and influenced detritus edition

Thinking about Daryl Hannah got me thinking about how I keep seeing stuff here and there in the last few years — yes, years, a) the older I get the faster the time goes, and b) that is how long it takes me to accept a pattern and my feelings about it — that reminds me of Blade Runner.

Pris in all her glory. Screencap from the movie via Napalm Jelly on the livejournal.

In case you are like me and consider super-famous-intellectual things that everyone recommends a pretentious, potentially boring burden to actually go look up (nothing raises my hackles like being told by someone I scarcely know that I “should” read or watch something: fuck you, my time is my own) and pursue viewing on your own, I will fill you in a tiny bit, cause this is one that I’m pleased to report I found for me was actually worth chasing down. The 1982 science-fiction/detective noir film is directed by Ridley Scott, and in it the excellent Daryl Hannah debuts in her first screen role as Pris, the acrobatically gifted/full-set-of-clothes-on-both-boobs-and-bajango-challenged Pleasure Replicant (happens to sexbots all the time — the poor girls got no clue how to simultaneously cover the upstairs and the downstairs).

Pris and another Pleasure Replicant. Workin’ it.

Sean Young is also featured in the film. You may remember her as that hot crazy chick who tried way too hard to get Tim Burton to let her play Catwoman in Batman Returns (psh, what kind of silly vintage-loving brunette gets obsessed by Catwoman; what a madcap and unheard of nutball). Now she is on reality tv shows, one was for being a country and western star and I think the other was to cope with her “alcoholism” or some shit — she seemed like fun to me when she was chugging that wine on the first show so whatever. Miss Young, who can scootch on down to my place any ol’ time for Funyuns, chardonnay, and old Julie Newmar episodes of Batman, plays the lead character’s love interest, Rachael in Blade Runner.

Screencap from the movie via Napalm Jelly on the livejournal.

Anyway, turns out the wheels of what I’d been seeing and the echoes I found in them of Blade Runner, which I haven’t seen in many years, may have been turning too slowly for me to notice until recently, but I was subconsciously smart enough to right-click and save a few of the things I saw. For examples:

Supermodel, “it” girl, and Panda Eraser’s second most-fave platinum blonde Agyness Deyn in Stockholm, Sweden, September 21, 2008.

Screencap from game via Julia Segal on the tumblr, around six or eight months ago.

The only “lovely” for now — she knows what she has to do to be billed as “talented” too — Miz Kat Dennings, rather clearly done up like Rachael the Replicant.

“Blast Off” by Peter Christian. Pleasure Replicant styling influence, I think.

… and one more of Kat Dennings from that same photoshoot cause ever since the Cappy brought her to my attention, she is up and coming on my list (don’t pretend like you don’t have a list).

Via No Smoking in the Skull Cave.

I’m not going to tell you that you “should” see Blade Runner. I will only say that I resisted, mainly because I was being stubborn and prejudiced, and when I finally gave in it turned out to be freaking sweet. I’d love for that to happen to someone else, because it’s a good feeling and it opened up my mind to not being such a reverse-discriminatory bitch about people’s “hipster” recommendations of popular esoteric things: turns out sometimes a thing has cool cult popularity because it deserves it, and I don’t need to disdain its countercultural cache. It’s okay to be on the bandwagon from time to time, even the small ones that scarcely anyone knows about and you suspect will be snobby. It’s a convoluted lesson, really, now that I look at it … sorry.

Daily Batman: Eartha Kitt Catwoman, as promised

This hurts. It’s fun and it’s harmless … but it hurts my soul a little. I am sorry, Julie Newmar. I really hope we are still cool. I plan to make it up to you.

Eartha Kitt as Catwoman in the “Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill” episode of the Batman television series.

The Catwoman targets the fashion industry by first terrorizing a banquet honoring Batgirl and then attacking a fashion show. During the attack on the fashion show, Catwoman captures Batgirl and takes her back to her hideout where she threatens to kill her with a pattern cutter. She then tells Batman that if he attempts to rescue her that it will leave the visiting Queen Bess of Belgravia vulnerable for attack. Now the Caped Crusader must find a way to save Batgirl and prevent any harm to Queen Bess. — Written by Brian Washington {Sargebri@att.net}

I have to confess, as much as I wanted to resist looking for video of this, everything about that description is ten thousand percent RIGHT and is ringing a whole lot of ekitty bells over here. Menacing that little purple-sporting, do-goody, Robin-humping moron with the threat of slicing her face with a freaking pattern cutter? Mmm, mmm. That … that is right. That is just exactly what. Everything is right about that. I will look in to this further.

Daily Batman: String Theory

Playing with balls is good for relieving stress.

Been a scarcity of Julie Newmar round these parts lately. I aim to change that this week. Beginning with rope play, it seems, because why not. Why … not?

Daily Batman: The Bat and The Cat, “Shocking!” edition

The Bat and the Cat, they do get up to some games. Who would have predicted that two grown people who wear leather animal costumes and beat people up for a secret living would take things off-Broadway in the bedroom. The heck you say!

This shot is from a collection compiled by Adam West from the scrapbook he kept during the shooting of the 1966 film adapation of Batman. Yes, you read that right: Adam West is a scrapbooker from Way Back. Ain’t no shame in a name, buddy. Own your pleasures!

Catwoman was played in the film by your 1955 Miss America, Lee Meriwether, because Julie Newmar was unavailable due to scheduling conflicts and outside projects, plus she was washing her hair (in other words, she read the script, and, seeing that the opening scenes had an exploding shark, correctly deduced it would fail miserably and distanced herself from the project).

Daily Batman: Enter Catwoman

“An hour and forty-five minutes for a pizza? What the fuck are you doing, curing the pepperoni yourselves?!”

(E kitty + Julie Newmar = ❤ 4everrrrr)