No, I never got into Walt Disney. There has always been something horrific and swallowing at the Disney core, a black hole desire to claim and sign off on everybody else’s work, from the Bros Grimm to Ruddy Kipling.

Uncle Walt learned this game early, from the first days of signing his moniker over the work of the likes of Ub Iwerks and Floyd Gottfriedson. Was it too much thereafter to covet the world? 

The 1950s belonged to Uncle Walt. Everything he floated caught fire—Davy Crockett, Disneyland, Zorro, and, of course, the Mickey Mouse Club. 

Now if the 1950s were Uncle Walt’s to claim, the 1970s belonged to the 1950s. Perhaps for the first time, Americans were looking backward—the 360-degree view best associated with a broken neck. It all started, perhaps unsurprisingly, with George Lucas—Disney’s successor. American Graffiti pleased the oldsters and lured the kids in.  Fifties nostalgia was in. 

TV quickly cloned the notion, with much of the same cast showing up in the anthology Love American Style episode “Love and the Happy Day.” The interminable spin-off—Happy Days, which tortured us with a plasticene 1954 for nine years or something—was shot on nine-inch nails. Ron Howard was seventeen until he was forty-eight. Sick, man. 

The unwelcome inferno of the clean-behind-the-ears fifties nostalgia—imagine a Ked in your face forever—was completed by the return to television of the elderly Mickey Mouse Club. Bleh. 

A kid-centered variety show, MMC drummed up its opening with fascist fanfare reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl doing a Stuka two-step on Termite Terrace. The Disney cartoon “family” arose to proclaim loyalty and to testify to the almighty suzerainty of Mickey Rat. Mickey, with a decorously lunatic grin, looked on, clapping. Only Donald Duck,that peacock-winged Iblis, refused to bow. Awesome, Donald.

 Fred Mertz arrived in disguise as “Uncle Roy” (bad touch!) and speedily cartooned—Disney-assented images, no doubt off to the copyright office before the ink settled. Large-toothed Bobby danced, as he would continue forever after, from the Malebolge Loge of The Lawrence Welk Show. Annette Funicello, TV’s first ethnic, flashed her mousery mammaries like a teenaged Sharon Stone. 

If I were a Baby Boomer, this piece would quickly derail into chuckleheaded doodles about Funicello’s role in American male puberty, or how the television screens crack’d when Bobby closed the barn doors and gave Funi her first dental close-up. 

Whatever. Slacker, here. Represent. 

It was all tedious black & white, and I smelled Orwell in the perfect Boy and Girl emblems over the opening curtain. I didn’t go for all that tippie-tippie-tin dance crap, those sterile little life’s lessons, the ancient asthmatic cartoon. Spin & Marty had a certain homoerotic appeal, but only in the most closeted Cohn & Schine circumlocution. It was, after all, the 1950s.  

Almost everybody of my age was effing hypnotized by this crap. Hah, what this, with Zoom over on PBS? Sorry, you say Funicello, and I say Joey Schrand. But there they were, watching. Kolchak: The Night Stalker is on—Hey! The Rockford Files? Hello? Snap outta it! 

The biggest fan I knew was Huan Phan, a kid whose aunt had been an interpreter for the US Army. Airlifted out of Saigon, he was trying to make do in Mound City. He loved Mickey Mouse Club.  It was odd. I mean the way things worked out. 

“Ah, I love dis—Goofy!” 

“Goofy? Screw Goofy, Huan! Doncha wanna watch Speed Racer? That’s awesome! Mach Go-Go-Go!” 

“No, put it back on Goofy! It’s my TV!” 

“Awesome, look! Animal Treasure Island is on Sunday!” 

When I heard they were pulling this mummy of a TV show in 1976, I was ecstatic. But guess what? The NEW Mickey Mouse Club would take its place! 

Jaysus. 

I remember it was especially awful. It was extra cheesy, and on video tape. Plus, it’s the PC era now, so we have to replace that perfect blond boy and girl curtain with a bulky UN cast. And all that kind of obliging unconscious racism where the Asian Kid always knows kung fu, the Spanish Kid gets the inevitable Latin riff (fortunately not played off with “Lowrider,” TV’s “Mexican Theme”). Amazingly, there was a single black boy and a single black girl (hope that they would breed?). 

But the thing that was awful about NMMC? It had oodles of the girls who later showed up on The Facts of Life. Blair? Yeah. She was there. Giving orders. She was crazy, Man. Jesus. Do you know about Operation Mongoose? 

The first episode of Zoom, quite innocently in 1971 or so, shows a blond boy building a raft. He christens it with a beer. He finishes the beer off himself. Things change a lot, here, in five years, in Televisionville. Fannee Doolee loves Pee Cee, but not The Language Rule.  Jaysus.

 (Word up, Schrand. You were da bomb as The Mad Catter. )

Not long ago—how this whole business occurs to me, the Lady Teri sends me a link to old New Mickey Mouse Club footage, over on YouTube. Everything gets mercy over time. You forgive what was old hat, even when new to you. So it sucks? --It was part of your childhood, you jerk.

There’s the NMMC Latin kid, Angel, the eldest at fourteen. “I love to sing and dance more than anything!” AIDS would keep him from seeing thirty.

  Sigh. And I, so long immune to sentimentality. That too, comes with getting older.

The Wikipedia fact sheet changes everything for me as regards the New Mouseketeers. Their birthdays all fall between 1963 and 1967, mostly in 1965. Like me. Post-Kennedy, The Food Stamp Mulligans, The Baby Busters.  1965 was the first year of “Generation X.” The distance between me and the Skaters of Dogtown was a small one, but it’s been mythologized.

If you were in the Boom, you “changed the world.” If you followed after, lucky you remembered to change your shorts. 

In 1976, The Bad News Bears kids were eleven—like me—and born in ’65. They represent the new Can’t-Do Attitude of America. Your loser kids, ladies and gents. 

At that moment, though, we were The Children Who Are Tomorrow. We were the Hope. We were literally The Cool Kids, the Naturals, the Hands-On. Maybe we could change. We were lovable losers, right? 

The world of Tomorrowland promised to look so different in ’76. I am a Depressive sort, but the MMC duds now make me sad. They were cancelled, kissed off in a few weeks, more of a pissing contest between Disney and ABC than over ratings. ABC was selfish with the show, which had the rights to air the title from wayback, and they pulled the rug on Disney, for the new show. 

Emblematic of us all, really: The Generation That Never Arrived. That’s us in a mouseskin.  

In the 80s, Disney relaunched MMC again, on its sterile Disney Channel. Disney later got ABC up the ass, too, thug style, prison sex.  

So that’s what followed us: glitzy shallow Brittany Spears, Christina Aguiluera, Justin Timberlake. Y’know? Like, Y’know? 

Sometimes there are worse things than merely being ineffectual. 

Other than that, I have nothing more to say. 

Oh, and Goodnight, Kids.

Uncle Roy? Ditch that bottle.                                          

 -30-