Mickey Mouse Club

This was from the third year (1957) of the show,  confirming my memory of watching it in both our Edgehill (1st season)and our Duff (2nd & 3rd season) houses.  

Note Bonnie in the lower left.  The last new episode was broadcast in January 1958 although using reruns ABC kept the series in their lineup until June 1959.

Happy 60th Anniversary…Original Mouseketeers (back row from left) David Stollery from The Mickey Mouse Club’s Spin and Marty with Mouseketeer Bobby Burgess (middle row from left) Sherry Alberoni, Darlene Gillespie, Tommy Cole, Doreen Tracey, Tim Considine from The Mickey Mouse Club’s Spin and Marty (front row from left) Mouseketeers Karen Pendleton and Sharon Baird, celebrate the 60th Anniversary (October 3, 2015—Show debuted on October 3, 1955), at The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

Credit: Photo by Frank Anzalone, courtesy of The Walt Disney Family Museum.

When it came to the original Mickey Mouse Club cast,  other than Roy and Jimmy the boys barely registered on my radar and the girls in my class were far more fixated on the boys starring in the serials than those appearing as Mouseketeers.  So this discussion will be about the most notable female Mouseketeers and their impact on myself and my classmates.  Despite what a lot of people think,  most little boys do watch girls.  Thinking back to those days I am a little surprised at this myself.  I start with the disclaimer that episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club have been rerun,  which may have altered somewhat my memories of the show during its original broadcast,  which was from October 1955 (my kindergarten year) until all episodes had been made and broadcast in early 1959 (third grade).  But I will try to filter that out.

The Annette Funicello phenomenon has been discussed to death elsewhere so I will use her only as the standard by which other notable girls in the cast can be evaluated.   I account for much of the phenomenon by the luck of Annette hitting the show at a perfect age to be successfully marketed by Disney and then transitioned into a post-MMC career with the studio.   Unlike the ageless "Bobbsey Twins" the studio emphasized Annette's coming of age,  reasoning that maturity would capture an older audience while holding onto the young fans she had won over during the three years of the show.  It is easy to be dismissive of what Annette brought to the show as our memories of her are a bit distorted by her dowdy look in countless beach movies.  People forget the freshness she had in her days as a Mouseketeer.

Darlene was one of those kids who just didn't age well on the cuteness scale as she went into her teens,  her career stalled when surrounded by the cuteness of the rest of the cast,  coming across as somebody's bad-tempered older sister.  We kids had loved her as Corky but barely recognized her in her MMC outfits.   She did do a very flattering appearance with Annette on the third Spin and Marty serial where the Corky look was emphasized.  The studio was also trying to hype her as a singer but that is another story.

Like Annette, Cheryl Holdridge was pretty but accessible to kids. No question that Cheryl was higher voltage than Annette,  but she did not join the series until the second season,  after the stardom momentum had begun shifting from Darlene to Annette.   Plus she was almost two years younger than Annette and less likely to be successful in expanding the Disney's target audience to 15 and 16 year-olds.  

Cheryl definitely had that "It" factor working for her at this age.  Unfortunately like many girls who looked better when JV cheerleaders than a year later as a varsity cheerleaders, she lost whatever it was shortly after the series ended.  She did a lot of television work in the early to mid - 1960's but no longer had that effortless irresistibility. 

Bonnie Fields was the one that I had a thing for,  but as she joined the cast after the second season there was no chance that she was going to supplant Annette in viewers hearts.  Looking at this particular photo it is obvious that she was where my preferred look in girls originated.

Then there was Doreen Tracey,  the favorite of most of my friends at the time.  And I don't think this was an aberration,  as over the years whenever the topic has come up I have seen a lot of wistful looks on the faces of baby boomer males when her name is mentioned.  I suspect that she was more popular at the time than the Disney people realized,  so very little was done to hype her.  Doreen was kind of the George Harrison of the female cast members,  flying below the radar but with a huge base of fans.

Doreen was hot enough to make the teen fan magazines for several years after the MMC ended.   In this photo her resemblance to Shelley Fabares is quite pronounced,  enough so that at first I thought the photo was miscaptioned. 

Which provides a nice segue into who I personally consider the most desirable female of the 60's,  she was associated with the show although not actually a Mouseketeer.  But I need some excuse to shamelessly insert photos of Shelley into this section.

RIP

And roughly one month after writing this MMC section we have this news:

"Doreen Tracey, a former child star who played one of the original cute-as-a-button Mouseketeers on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s, died from pneumonia on Jan. 10, 2018, in Thousand Oaks, Calif., following a two-year battle with cancer. She was 74."