Le Club Mickey

This was the high point of many of my days back in the mid-50's. I thought Jimmy Dodd was a little flakey, but the kids were who I wanted to see anyway so I put up with him and Roy the big mousketeer. Little did I dream that Paul Peterson, Bobby Burgess, and Johnny Crawford would go on to such superstardom. Not to mention Annette's brilliance in all those epic beach films. This was a nice program to come home to after school every day, especially friday because that was western day.

When our first TV arrived in March, 1959, this was the show which materialised out of the ether. 6.05 PM on a Tuesday night, if my memory serves me correctly. And thus began a decade-long love affair with the lovely Annette Funicello - only she didn't know it! A wonderful team of young performers who could do just about anything, a cartoon or two, a guest star and the serial which probably starred Tim Considine. Was it 'The Hardy Boys'? I watched every episode and it was a sad day when due to changing times, the MMC left our screens.

When several members toured Australia (Jimmy, Darlene and possibly Karen or Annette) they were mobbed by thousands. I wasn't one of them as we didn't have a car and I had no easy way of reaching Mascot Airport. It would be years before I came across the souvenir brochure, my one small memento of those great times ...

For the five years of the run of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club it was the most exclusive club in the world for the cool kids. So what if you had to wear those dorky ears and in front of millions of viewers to be a member. You got to wear those cool cowboy clothes at the end of the week on Talent Roundup Day. And wouldn't you like to leave the world you knew behind just to hang out with everyone from Annette and Bobby to the little ones Karen and Cubby.

Kids who grew up watching this show faithfully when they learned the world according to Disney wasn't exactly the truth were the ones that tuned in, turned on and dropped out in the next decade. I wasn't one of them, but I sure knew where they were coming from.

These kids in the Disney movies, in the serials on the Mickey Mouse Club and in their singing and dancing and all around talent were the role models of a generation. It seemed like if you put on those Mousekeears you could dance like Bobby Burgess, sing like Darlene Gillespie, or even play the drums like Cubby O'Brien. Millions like me wished they were good enough to join.

The show had two big Mooseketeers as they were called, Disney cartoonist Roy Williams who should have gotten a lot more money for looking so ridiculous and singer/actor Jimmy Dodd.

In fact Dodd I believe was a big part of the reason for the show's success. As an adult he looked right at home with the kids and I'm not talking about Michael Jackson kind of at home. Dodd had a middling career as a journeyman character actor, mostly in western roles. Mainstream movie fans might remember him for his small bit in Yankee Doodle Dandy calling young George M. Cohan out to greet his public, the public being a group of tough kids who took literally his boast to lick any kid in town in Peck's Bad Boy.

Dodd reached real stardom in the Mickey Mouse Club. He set a respectful tone to the show, told the kids at home to mind their parents and lead an upright life. Dodd according to contemporaries was a religious man, but never overtly proselytized. According to many of the now grownup Mouseketeers Jimmy Dodd was the real deal, exactly as you saw him on television

In the hour you saw Disney cartoons, true life adventure films, good kid's serials like Spin and Marty and Corky and the White Shadow and the singing and dancing of the coolest kids on the planet. Those good enough to be members of the Mickey Mouse Club.

To create a show or movie with an animal character, such as Lassie, Benji, Charlotte or the Black Stallion is reasonable enough, especially for children. A show based on the worship of an animal character, in this case a mouse, seems a little ridiculous. Yet the whole Mickey Mouse Club idea has to be very American. Entertainment industries have constantly capitalized on icons produced for movies and television and exploited them to the hilt for profit. The studio corporations know that when Americans fall in love with characters and worlds from the movies and television, part of the spectator public wants to connect with it on a deeper level. The Mickey Mouse Club allowed younger viewers enthralled with the Disney universe to experience their favorite mouse on television once a week instead of only when mom and dad would take them to the cinema.

Simultaneously, all things considered, The Mickey Mouse Club was a good children's show with merit. The original show incorporated games, educational segments, sing-a-longs, and even some dramatic episodes. It seems to me I remember the Hardy Boys, but I am not sure. In short, the Mickey Mouse Club encouraged children to be children. And hey, the young Annette Funicello was worth the price of admission. She will probably be best remembered for this show rather than her silly beach movies 10 years later.

Today most children's programming via the networks is about pure entertainment, barring PBS, and a lot of it seems grossly inappropriate for underage viewers who are not yet pre-adolescents. Propagating that 8-to-10-year-olds should have boyfriends and girlfriends, i.e. behave like adults or even adolescents, is I think harmful misinformation. Children are still learning what is appropriate and inappropriate except for what they see modeled in front of them, which is often on television. If the Mickey Mouse Club had a clear message, it was that childhood should be enjoyed for what it is, and there is a magical wonder about childhood that should not be missed.

Still, it raises my eyebrow that the show's participants would not only sing hymns to a fictional mouse but don mouse-inspired attire. Even as a kid, I thought the mouse ears were ridiculous, especially on the adults! But given the low-quality of material being presented to children today, maybe the mouse ears are a small price to pay. Afterall, donning the mouse ears represents "make believe", the essence of childhood.

I was a charter member of The Mickey Mouse Club. On Oct. 3, 1955, I had my ears and my membership card as I sat in front of the TV and watched this marvelous new show. It wasn't just a show, it was my show and my club.

Disney was a genius at reaching children. Everything he touched was sprinkled with the golden glitter of fairy dust. After 48 years, I can still see it's sparkle.