The Monkees And Their Classic Car, The Monkeemobile

The Monkees Classic Car

Thinking about memorable classic cars, my first memory of music, was The Monkees. Being slightly too young to remember them first time round, I inherited a prize load of 7 inch singles from my older sister, which I meticulously played, marking the tunes I liked with a small yellow price label.

The Monkees stood out, and so did their wacky TV series which ran and ran. It was like a bus - wherever, whatever, you could just hop on and catch the ride as it sped circles round and round.

Amazingly, the car still only has around 8,000 miles on the clock. Insuring this classic vehicle will need a classic insurance specialist like Performance Direct.

One thing confused me though, my friend who had all the best Corgi toy classic cars, had a Monkeemobile – but the series was mainly studio shot & I don't recall seeing it – so what was this strange looking car?

Replica Classic Cars For The Monkees

In fact, the car did (& does) exist outside of Corgi minds. The vehicle is a modified V8 Pontiac GTO which was designed by the ubiquitous Dean Jeffries

Two vehicles were commissioned, one to be used specifically for promotional purposes. After the series finished, the car used in the NBC TV series went on tour with The Monkees, & finally came to rest in Australia around 1968.

The promotional car became the possession of George Barris, who had assisted Jeffries on the original builds, he also built a third classic Monkeemobile.

Barris' third version of this classic auto' was actually built by Jeffries' colleague, Dick Dean sometime in the 1990's from a Pontiac Le Mans, rather than a GTO like the original two were.

While various replica vehicles have been lovingly crafted, the Rock 'n' Roll Roadster project caught my eye. More kit-car than a custom build, 4,000 US dollars will get you a fibreglass shell that will fit over your vehicle's existing body panels from batrodz.com.

The company, based in Long Island, New York, offer various replica body kits, most notably a couple of the many designs of Batmobile that have been created over the years – all you need is the right vintage car as donor.

Since the sad death of Davy Jones, George Barris has been bombarded with calls about the Monkeemobile. But George no longer has the car, having sold it at auction in 2008 for $360,000 to Mel Guthrie in Michigan.

The car now sports Davy Jones' signature on the underside of the bonnet after Mel had the vehicle trucked to a Jones concert in 2010.

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Classic Monkees

The design of this forty-something year old classic car is pretty radical, while the front is easily recognisable as a Pontiac GTO, the rear changes were more drastic. Jeffries added a third row of seats, a split windscreen, convertible top and a 6-71 supercharger on the exposed engine among many other alterations. The producers wanted a flamboyant car, and that is most certainly what they got.

Though there was a chance this eye-catching car may not have made the TV series. Pontiac boss, John Delorean was rumoured to be not overly enamoured with the final result. To their credit, the cars were begrudgingly embraced and a promotional tie-in with Kellogs Rice Krispies and Raisin Bran smoothed things over. The winner of the promotion received a brand new 1968 Pontiac GTO Convertible & a guest slot on The Monkees TV show.

Jim Wanger worked for Pontiac's advertising agency, and said of the hugely successful Kellogs campaign: “..the cars were not at all what we wanted, but fortunately they weren’t part of the promotion.”

But if you're thinking of dusting off your <title="classic car insurance">classic car insurance and heading off to auction, hold your horses - Guthrie, who met Jones again in February just weeks before his death, has said that he has no intention of selling his prized vintage automobile. Sadly, many have said that the loser out of all of this might be seen to be Jeffries himself, who was allegedly offered the Monkeemobiles for $1,000 each when the TV series finished, but declined saying that it would be cheaper to build new vehicles.

Still, it's only money, and money doesn't buy the memories, and as Davy Jones asks in Daydream Believer, how much do we really need to be content and happy anyway?