4 Monkees Drive Away in 1967 GTO And Create TV History

Dean Jeffries built two Monkeemobiles from Pontiac GTO convertibles in four weeks flat, and only one of them was ever meant to matter. The second car spent years overseas as a hotel courtesy vehicle before it was recovered and restored. In January 2008 it crossed the Barrett-Jackson block in Scottsdale for $360,000. Read on for how a promotional prop became one of the most valuable television cars ever sold.

Back in the TV days of yesteryear a 1967 GTO was called upon to transport a group of Monkees and be the spokes car for a wacky group known as The Monkees.
Still popular today, The band and the car have an almost cult like following.
The Monkeemobile is a modified Pontiac GTO that was designed and built by designer Dean Jeffries for The Monkees, a pop-rock band and television program. The car features a tilted forward split two-piece windshield, a touring car convertible top, modified rear quarter panels and front fenders, exaggerated tail lamps, set of four bucket seats and an extra third row bench where there was originally a trunk, a rear-mounted parachute and a GTO emblem on the front grille.[wiki]
Two cars were contracted, one for the television program and the other as a promotional car, for touring car shows around the United States. Both cars would be built in the span of four weeks. The first version originally featured a 6-71 supercharged engine, a solid mounted rear axle (no springs) and extra rear end weight. This was to enable the car to “pop wheelies.” Because the car had too much power and was difficult to drive, the original blower set up was removed and a dummy blower was fitted. The second car was used as a touring car for auto shows and promotional events. Before its transformation into the Monkeemobile, the second car was first seen on TV as Major Nelson’s GTO in “I Dream of Jeannie”. Both were used on The Monkees TV series, one during the first season and both throughout the second season.[wiki]
In related news: SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – January 22, 2008,The iconic “Monkeemobile†incited a bidding frenzy and sold for $360,000
Looks like the buyer went”bananas” for the Monkeemobile

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Two nearly identical cars were built in four weeks flat, and only one of them was ever supposed to matter. The other was meant to be a rolling billboard, parked outside shopping-center promotions and waved at from behind a rope, then quietly retired once the television series that created it went off the air. Instead that second car disappeared overseas, spent years hauling hotel guests around a resort property, and eventually crossed an auction block for a number that would have seemed absurd to anyone watching it get cut apart in a Hollywood shop. The strange part is not that it survived. The strange part is what it was before the customizer got his hands on it.

The Customizer Who Had Four Weeks

The man responsible was Dean Jeffries, a Southern California customizer and pinstriper whose shop on Cahuenga Boulevard sat close enough to George Barris to make the two of them permanent rivals in the eyes of car magazines. Jeffries had already built the Mantaray show car, and he would later be responsible for the Black Beauty from The Green Hornet and the Landmaster from Damnation Alley. The Monkees production gave him a brutally short window to deliver, and the surviving accounts put the entire build, from bare donor car to camera-ready prop, at roughly four weeks for both vehicles. That is not a restoration timeline. That is a fabrication sprint.

What Was Under All That Fiberglass

Underneath the theatrics sat a Pontiac GTO convertible, and that matters more than the fiberglass does. The mid-sixties GTO was Pontiac’s intermediate performance car, powered by a 389-cubic-inch V8 rated at 335 horsepower with a single four-barrel or 360 horsepower with the three two-barrel Tri-Power setup. Both donor cars were 1966 GTO convertibles, despite the 1967 label the car has picked up over the years, and 1966 was the nameplate’s high-water mark for sales with 96,946 built, which meant Pontiac had plenty of inventory and every reason to want its name attached to a network television show aimed squarely at teenagers. Jeffries kept the GTO’s basic architecture and rebuilt everything the camera would see.

The Blower That Worked Too Well

The modifications were aggressive even by custom-car standards. The windshield was split into a forward-tilted two-piece unit, the front fenders and rear quarters were reshaped, the tail lamps were exaggerated well past anything Pontiac would have signed off on, and a touring-car convertible top replaced the factory folding roof. Four bucket seats went in, and a third-row bench occupied what used to be the trunk. A parachute pack hung off the back. The first car got a 6-71 supercharger, a solid-mounted rear axle with no springs, and deliberate rear weight bias, all so it could pop wheelies on cue. It worked too well. The car proved genuinely difficult to drive, the real blower came out, and a dummy unit went on in its place.

Two Cars, Two Very Different Fates

From there the two cars led completely different lives. The television car stayed close to production and appeared throughout the series, including the opening sequence that most people actually remember. The second car was built as the touring unit, sent around the country for auto shows and promotional appearances. Before it became a Monkeemobile, that second GTO had already logged screen time as Major Nelson’s car on I Dream of Jeannie, which makes it one of the few props in television history to have had a respectable acting career before its makeover.

The Second Car’s Strange Detour

The promotional car is the one with the odd biography. After the show ended, it was sent abroad for a promotional tour and never came home on schedule. It eventually surfaced in Puerto Rico, where it spent a stretch of its life as a hotel courtesy vehicle, shuttling guests around a property with no particular regard for what it had been. Cars in that role tend to get used up. That this one was identified, recovered, and brought back to presentable condition is genuinely unusual, and it is the reason there is a second Monkeemobile in existence at all rather than a rumor about one.

Why $360,000 Was Not Crazy

Which brings up the number. In January 2008, at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction, a Monkeemobile sold for $360,000. Set against a well-documented numbers-matching 1966 GTO with Tri-Power, which trades in a far more modest range, that figure looks indefensible on paper. It is not a car valuation. It is a provenance valuation, the same logic that governs screen-used props and instruments played on famous recordings. Buyers in that market are not paying for the 389 under the hood. They are paying for the fact that this specific object appeared on national television every week during one of the strangest and most commercially successful pop-culture experiments of the 1960s.

What the GTO Was Before Hollywood Found It

What gets lost in the novelty is how good the raw material was. A GTO convertible with a 389 and Tri-Power was a legitimately quick car in its own right, capable of running with anything else Detroit was selling to teenagers that year, and Pontiac’s willingness to hand two of them to a customizer working a four-week deadline says something about how confident the division was in the model’s momentum. Product placement at that scale was still a relatively new idea in the mid-sixties. Pontiac was betting that a weekly network audience of young viewers would eventually turn into showroom traffic, and the GTO’s sales performance across the following two years suggests the bet was sound.

A Prop That Outlived the Show

The Monkeemobile has outlived the series that produced it, outlived nearly every other promotional car built alongside it in that period, and turned into a fixture at shows where much of the crowd has never heard the theme song. Both cars have now been restored, documented, and photographed to a standard far beyond anything Jeffries was working to when he had a month and a network deadline. That is the peculiar afterlife of a well-built prop. It ends up treated with a seriousness nobody applied when it was new, and its value comes to rest on precisely the details a set fabricator would have considered disposable, from the shape of the tail lamp housings to whether the blower sitting on the intake is the real one or the dummy that replaced it. The band was assembled for television. The car, at least, was real Detroit iron before anybody bolted a parachute to it.

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