Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club debuted on TV in 1955 and was a mega-hit by 1956, airing on weekday afternoons. Remember?
I was only six or seven years old when I started watching this, and now I don’t know how I ever managed to sit through it. Really, all I wanted was the cartoons! Especially Donald Duck, or Goofy. If they played them at all, they played them near the end of the show so you had to watch all the singing and dancing. Those sequences seem just as long to me today as they seemed back then.
I wanted one of those Mouseketeer hats, but never got one–just a set of plastic slip-on Mickey Mouse ears. Why in the world did I watch this show? Beats me! Was it because mine was the first TV generation, and we all watched TV because that’s what you did? And whatever they put on the screen, you watched? Say it ain’t so, Joe.
I’ll never get back the time I spent watching this festival of nothing.
I escaped this one because my elder son was not born until 1957.
A bit Mickey Mouse, to be assured, but at least it was wholesome. Imagine what it would be like of produced today. 🙂
My neighborhood buddies and I watched it all the time – we all were in love with Annette. I remember the Spin & Marty segments, and Moochie playing on a baseball team. We all got Mickey Mouse hats when we went to Disneyland soon after it opened. I can still hear the “M-I-C- K-E-Y -M-O-U-S-E!
Moochie got to annoy me after a while. He and his friends always started out as klutzes, and then inevitably won a national championship.
But Spin and Marty were cool. “Way out there on the Triple-R, yippee-yo-oh, yippee-yay!” Remember that?