The Monkey's Uncle

The Monkey's Uncle (1965)

More fun than a barrel of teenagers!

College whiz-kid Merlin Jones concocts a method for teaching advanced information to a chimpanzee, then creates a flying machine of his own design, ultimately raising havoc on the campus.

Date of release
1965-08-18
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (30)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Family, Comedy, Science Fiction
Director
Robert Stevenson

Casting

Interesting facts

The Monkey's Uncle is a 1965 American comedy film starring Tommy Kirk as genius college student Merlin Jones and Annette Funicello as his girlfriend, Jennifer. The title plays on the idiom "monkey's uncle" and refers to a chimpanzee named Stanley, Merlin's legal "nephew" who otherwise has little relevance to the plot. Jones invents a man-powered airplane and a sleep-learning system. The film is a sequel to 1964's The Misadventures of Merlin Jones.

Production notes

The Misadventures of Merlin Jones had been a surprise hit, earning over $4 million in rentals for Disney and prompting a sequel. The film was announced in March 1964.

This production marks both Tommy Kirk's and Annette Funicello's last film for the studio. Mark Goddard, who plays Haywood and is best known as Major Don West on television's Lost in Space, made his feature film debut in this film.

Kirk had been fired from Disney due to his homosexuality and by this stage had a drug problem. "Speed, uppers, diet pills — and I got thin as a rake, and I was high all the time," he recalled. "It was a terrible period in my life. So I can understand the: studio letting me go." The studio recalled him to make The Monkey's Uncle. He said "On both of the Merlin Jones things, I was very high on pills.

The screen credit for writing reads, "Screenplay by Tom and Helen August", which were pseudonyms used by Alfred Lewis Levitt and Helen Levitt, two writers who were blacklisted. The home-video release of the film restored the Levitts' credits.

Funicello (billed as "Annette") performs the title track with The Beach Boys over the opening credits. The song was written by the Disney song writing duo, Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman. Funicello recalled: "They were just beginning. They were wonderful guys and I feel fortunate that I was kind of in on the ground floor. We even worked together performing at Disneyland.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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