- TV producer Hubbell Benson has invited many young groups, including The Four Martians, The Foreign Agents, and The Jolly Green Giants to audition for a new TV show, but not The Monkees. However, when he hears their music on a hired tape recorder, he sets out to find this mystery band, not knowing that the Monkees are having great difficulty getting into the auditions at the same time.—The TV Archaeologist
- Micky wakes up on his hammock to find four young men wearing bizarre, science-fiction-themed costumes standing over him. He panics but is calmed down when Davy, Mike, and Peter reassure him it's merely The Four Martians, another singing group. They ask to borrow a guitar string, which Mike provides, and they inform the boys that they got an invitation from TV producer Hubbell Benson for a series he's developing. Two other groups, notably green-colored youngsters known as The Jolly Green Giants, likewise traipse past The Monkees' beachhouse boasting of their invitations.
Depressed, the boys ponder what to do, when Davy remembers they recorded a demo on a borrowed tape recording machine for an occurrence like this, except Micky forgot to take the tape out when he returned the recorder - a fateful error as Hubbell Benson needs to record some information on a dictaphone but it has to be repaired so his secretary, Miss Chomsky, rented a tape recorder, which has The Monkees performing "Mary Mary" on it. Benson immediately falls in love with the singers on the tape, but Chomsky has no idea who the group is, and queries of radio stations and recording studios turns up nothing.
Making it worse, The Monkees have driven from their Malibu beachhouse to Hubbell Benson's office, located in the KNBC television studio building in Burbank. They start to his office, but Peter suddenly gets a bout of hiccups, just as Benson leaves the building searching for his mystery group, completely unaware they're looking for him. Peter's hiccups finally go away, but so has Benson.
The Monkees' attempts to see Hubbell Benson all fail - a phone audition is stopped by a burly man who must use the phone booth to transmute into a superhero; later the boys read a news account that Benson is searching for a mystery group, and their attempts to be that mystery group (amid the strains of Mike's country-rock classic "Papa Gene's Blues") go nowhere.
Seemingly defeated, Benson brings in the groups he sent out invitations to, but goes haywire when The Jolly Green Giants identify the tape as The Monkees. They all race to the boys' beachhouse, interrupting Davy's attempts at blowing a horn. The Monkees perform "Sweet Young Thing" and Benson is ready to sign them for his show - until Miss Chomsky sings the jingle and Benson decides SHE is the one for his show.
The boys try to take it in stride while driving down a two-lane freeway, but when Mike mentions how much money a successful entertainer can make, it drives Peter into depression enough that he disappears, and a report to a Missing Persons bureau degenerates into chaos.
Peter of course reappears, as the epilogue opens in a gymnasium locker room. Off-camera, producer Bob Rafelson asks the boys about how they react if passers by mock them for their hair styles, and also asks about recent skirmishes on Sunset Strip between police and rowdy youth which led to a fire at a popular nightclub. Peter and Micky were eyewitnesses to some of these skirmishes, and Micky politely disagrees with some of the phraseology used, saying the so-called riots were in fact much calmer demonstrations, a word the media of the time seems incapable of using (this theme of media misrepresentation will become a fateful reality as Micky, Mike, Peter, and Davy's careers become more and more successful); Mike explains the unrest is result of a city curfew for youth below the age of eighteen, and Micky adds that the Sheriff of Los Angeles (at the time Peter J. Pitchess) disagrees with the curfew (terming it "take the babysitting job out of the hands of the police and return to the hands of the parents") while Peter explains the instigation of clashes came not from youth under eighteen but from rowdies roughly nineteen and above years of age.
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