My
Life as a Mouse
by
Lonnie Burr
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© 1980,
2015 by
Lonnie Burr
It was published in a Los Angeles paper and another in Santa Barbara. I have updated it succinctly at the end.
Twenty-five years ago I was accidentally
thrust into the position of being a sort of hero of my life. As a child,
becoming part of a myth occasions awe and, after a long period as an adult
spent disdaining that awe, I have come to regard the status with awe once
again. |
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Like young Copperfield, I came to my heroism purely by chance. |
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I was one
of the four males, of thirty-nine Mouseketeers over the years we filmed,
to last the entirety of the original "Mickey Mouse Club" and to become, as
a result, a part of TV history.
As we passed the midpoint of the 20th Century, television and sundry
other factors had begun to change our myths and heroes to things smaller
than life as opposed to things larger than life. Uncle Milty supplanted
Clark Gable while Howdy Doody did in King Kong and King Lear. I was one
of these smaller than life heroes. Whether I someday scale the Matterhorn
or win my Pulitzer, I shall always be known as a Mouseketeer; that is the
way the obituary will begin. I have come to learn in my thirties
that that is not such a bad thing.
I did not
always feel this way.
The Mouseketeers
and the show they starred in was a phenomenon that astounded almost everyone,
including the canny creator Walter Elias Disney. Uncle Walt desperately
needed funds to finance his overextended pet project - a venture that seemed
dubious to most and was dubbed "Walt's Folly" - DISNEYLAND. In 1954
the DISNEYLAND television show premiered successfully on ABC and led to
the network and Disney entering into a contract of "mutual assistance",
meaning the needed completion money for the Park was forthcoming if there
was a daytime, five days a week, kids show for ABC.
"THE MICKEY
MOUSE CLUB" premiered on October 3, 1955 and was an instantaneous and startling
hit. Even though there are individuals at the Disney Studio who,
to this day, aver that the show never moved out of the red! Originally
broadcast for an hour a day a through 1957, the series was reduced to a
half-hour from 1957-59 before it was canceled. It returned in reruns, in
a half hour format twice: 1962-65 and 1975-77 [SEE ADDENDA].
The episodes,
all shot in black and white with a one camera set-up, cost approximately
$14 million (by Disney's estimate), were translated into 5
languages and played in 18 countries, including the longest run in Australia
for 12 years. At least one child (Annette Funicello) was canonized just
as Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple had been before her as "America's Sweetheart"
and the core group of nine that lasted the entire filming of the series
had been raised from the level of being child stars to being a part of
a recognizable pop culture entity. The names echo: Karen, Cubby,
Tommy, Darlene, Sharon, Bobby, Doreen, Lonnie and Annette.
This dated,
black and white show, airing again in the mid-70s, was immediately
accepted with enthusiasm despite the naive quality of the production elements
and the production itself. People vividly remembered the show when the
Mouseketeers joined Tom Snyder on "The Tomorrow Show". It was the most
highly rated hour for Tom and the rerun of the segment was the second highest
rated show.
This gave
rise to a second version. "The New Mickey Mouse Club" premiered Jan
17, 1977 but it had a short life. There were now African American
Mouseketeers,
as opposed to just guest stars, which was good, but the rock and disco music
thumping, color in a Fauvist brilliance and trick photography and gimmicks
seemed to detract from the original show's charm. The show absconded on
December 1, 1978. In all fairness, it must be noted that the first MMC
was not well received critically either, it merely was successful.
That is
the history of the two MMCs. But what I am addressing myself to here is
less concerned with the success or failure of a particular TV show
and its sequel and more concerned with what that original show was and
is, what it reflected and reflects. "The Mickey Mouse Club", like a Frank
Capra movie, manifested some simple, basic realities inherent in our society.
Coupled with the meteoric rise and proliferation of television, it was
almost sure to become revered.
The Looming Tube
Television was not an untested medium in 1955 but its overwhelming effects were still being discovered. It took the 1960 Presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon for us to comprehend that this thing, TV, was a force that went beyond our simple assessments. We began to realize the enormity of the medium, the depths and heights television is capable of, whether positively or negatively.
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The "Mice"
and their club came along at the right time. Children had been on TV since
the outset. I had a regular role on the 1949-50 "The Ruggles" show. There
were child actors around. Local shows offered kids an opportunity to be
seen in a more natural environment than afforded by playing a role in a
sitcom and, nationally, kids were being purely themselves in Howdy Doody's
"Peanut Gallery".
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The series was
innocuous but it was not merely entertainment. It foreshadowed the didacticism
of "Sesame Street" and shows of that kidney. The MMC was not comprised
of just cartoons, the Mouseketeers singing and dancing and spooning out
homilies with Jimmy and the ingenuous soap operas for kids like "Spin and Marty",
"Annette" and the puerile sleuthing of "The Hardy Boys".
No. The
show also had newsreels and mini-documentaries, albeit somewhat primitive,
that were geared to the young. These showed and explained Christmas in
Japan, early and current [1950s] Native Americans, the customs of children growing
up in Siam and various forms of wildlife in nature. Who from this era does not recall
learning how to spell ENCYCLOPEDIA from Jiminy Cricket?
The show,
thus, was rounded in a way that other kid's series were not. The material mirrored the middle-class
values the majority of Americans believed in during the Fifties. BUT there
werre black kids, Jewish kids, Hispanic kids which no other show had done before
us. There
were critics of the MMC; they found it maudlin. These critics were not
children. The creators of "Sesame Street" have said that our
show, particularly the didactic, teaching segments, influenced them
greatly.
But, can
anyone ever take a sort of daily marathon of "Omnibus" or later
"Sunday Morning"?
Much of
television then and now is pap. I agree that "Omnibus" was a wonderful
show from which I still recall ideas and images that will never leave me.
But I could no longer watch that excellent show every day than I could
read Joyce every day or go to a football game every day. Not everything
on television need be, nor can be, "Omnibus".
Even with
the flaws of "The Mickey Mouse Club", it was an efficacious, innovative,
entertaining and learning experience that struck a common chord, which made it easy to be assimilated into our
culture and Walt invited EVERYONE to be a Mouseketeer and, if you watched and
sang along, YOU WERE. Perhaps the
late 70s rehashed MMC
had to do with changes in the format or the slickness of the new kids. Perhaps,
though, it had to do with our own loss of innocence as a people and as
a nation. Maybe our ethos had changed so that we could no longer capture
the imagination of succeeding generations.
What, after
all, does being a Mouseketeer mean?
Growing Young
I recently had an epiphany,
quite by chance, on what I believe to be the essence of being a Mouseketeer.
For the first time, the whole concept became comprehensible. I had tried
analyzing it for years, posing thesis and antithesis, but, in the end,
it was only synthesis that worked.
Being a
Mouseketeer, or identifying with being a Mouseketeer, has to do with recapturing
elements of our social structure that are rapidly disappearing or
have become only vestiges, memories. These elements are: connection,
belonging, family.
As a youngster,
I was a rebel sometimes with and sometimes without a cause. I followed
my star (James Dean) assured that truth, ideals and insight would prevail.
When I found that truth, ideals and insight are frequently like Plato's
shadows on the wall and that they do not necessarily prevail, I was shaken
and became cynical. I found the show I was a part of childish. After all,
I turned twelve in 1955, had been dating for four years and kissed and
went steady with Annette our first season! My precocity had caught
up to my pubescence and I would no longer allow myself to be a child in
the inevitable furor of rushing to adulthood. It took some later lucidity,
thought and maturation in order for me to allow myself to regain my childhood.
Before this inference I would have also been a naysayer about the MMC.
But I was
wrong.
I had had
conflicting ideas about my experiences on the Disney series for all the
years subsequent to my involvement. My youthful progression from
cynicism to nihilism left me with some harsh emotions about the show, even
though this has always been a minority viewpoint.
The catalyst
for my epiphany, my realization of how I had blocked things that the fans
could see, was a live show at Disneyland in 1980. Cubby, Sharon,
Tommy and I joined Mickey and other characters and some kids from the 70s
MMC to perform on the Tomorrow Land Stage. The coalescence of we four disparate
adults is one part of the meaning of "The Mickey Mouse Club" and
the Mouseketeers.
Having gone
our own ways with only some social contact for twenty-five years, we seemed,
Tommy, Cubby, Sharon and I, part of a closely knit family, in some
ways closer than many families. It would seem that not all of Tolstoy's
happy families are alike; ours is, indeed, unique.
The melding of the four of us was intuitive and overwhelming in its ease.
The comment was heard that we worked as a unit onstage, which was not
the case with the younger kids who had come from working together for over two
years. It was inexplicable, almost archetypal, like formally realizing
your were a part of some mystical gestalt or a mini unconscious collective.
The
audience observed this phenomenon and seemed mesmerized. The kids reacted,
naturally, at first to Mickey and friends in character costumes and the
kids who had been on the tube more recently, but as time passed, they came
our way.
What was
astounding to me was the enthusiastic reaction of the older spectators,
the ones who had been there in the 50s while growing up, the ones who
now may have used their children as an excuse to recall their youth
without embarrassment. Let's face it. No one over the age of 16 wants to
admit that they are excited about seeing the Mouseketeers, now do they?
It would
seem they do.
These people
in their 30s and 40s, some 50s and 60s, remembering the show as a "babysitter",
would begin unfazed, aloof , but long before the singing of the Alma Mater
- "M-I-C, see you real soon, K-E-Y, Why? Because we LIKE you!" - they were
enveloped, some to tears.
It occurred
to me that somehow the Mouseketeers, all of us in our 30s, all more capable
of what we had done twenty-five years ago, somehow communicated to these other
adults that aging is not the disgusting, moribund, dismal thing that we
are all taught it is by ad agencies and their accomplices, the young.
I also believe
that the adult audience sensed a feeling of wholesomeness, of innocence
that was Rousseauistic and yet innately American. In a jaded age following
Nam and Watergate, they had been jolted into remembering the American
Dream, or at least an aspect of it. That dream may have
its faults as all dreams have lapses in logic, jumps of reality, but it
is still a dream, a leap of faith and that in itself is no small accomplishment
in 1980.
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We may have passed the age of dreaming, the age of the American Dream -
whether the apparently guileless, unworkable dream that we were taught
in school texts in the 50s and had not all its bases in fact, nor the
sneering, satirical dream of Albee's one act play - but we have not passed
the age of needing dreams. We need them more than ever now.
1957 - Left to right - Preparing for a road trip to the Oregon Rose Parade appearance: Bobby, Sharon, Cheryl, Jimmie, Annette and me. (Even though no longer an "item", I usually managed to stay close to Annie.) |
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In these hurly-burly times of supra-sophistication, in these times chockablock
with decadence, confusion and anomie, in these certainly not the best of
times, innocence in any form takes on a meaning it never had for us as
a people before.
ADDENDA 2015
After rerunning in the '60s and '70's, in 1983 The Disney Channel came online and reran our original black and white films for six years. We were replaced in 1989 with the third version of the MMC after the 2nd short lived version in the '70s, and this "EARLESS" version lasted until 1995. That same year our original black & white films started up again on "Vault Disney". That run concluded, under some fan protest, on September 9, 2002. The MMC has now run in six decades and two centuries! Previously we ran in 25+ countries and were translated into 5 languages. A fan informed me that we ran in RUSSIA in the 1980s and 1990s! Our longest runs were in Australia for 12 years, Russia for 10+ and France for 7, all of them longer than our original 3 seasons and a 4th of reruns in the U.S. in the '50s. In Russia our English remained but the subtitles were in Cyrillic and that helped teach a lot of Russian kids how to speak our language. The 40th & 50th Anniversaries of our series on October 3rd was celebrated with our live show, autographs, a parade and other events at our old stomping grounds: DISNEYLAND and we also did a show at WDW for our 40th. At Disneyland's opening in July, 1955 we appeared in a parade and performed a song and dance, including roll call - the ONLY one in which ALL the Mouseketeers participated as opposed to just the 'A' team on TV. We did our number live in front of the the Mickey Mouse Club Theatre in Fantasyland, now known as the Fantasyland Theatre. Our October, 1955 premiere was the same day as Captain Kangaroo, and was an hour long with four segments, becoming a half hour with two segments a day for the third year of production and the fourth year of reruns. All the reruns have been just thirty minutes. Ten video cassettes of the original shows were released in the early 90s. In December 2004, as part of the Disney Treasures series, a two disc DVD was released containing the entire first week, minus commercials, of The Mickey Mouse Club (the five one hour shows that ran from October 3-8, 1955), a color version of our first TV appearance at Disneyland before our series debuted, and Leonard Maltin's introductions and interviews with me and five other Mice from the first day of the MMC, filmed outside on the Disney Studios studio lot and inside Stage 1, NOW the Annette Funicello Stage, where we shot most of the segments of the show; behind us was the original curtain we used in 1955. There is a smashing tribute to Jimmie on the first disc. In mid-2005 some of the video cassettes released in the early '90s were re-released as DVDs. Spin & Marty and The Annette Series are now on DVD, too.
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