One Man’s Dream Is Our Reality

Mr. and Mrs. Hancock and Mr. and Mrs. Williams encouraged my participation in many structured activities such as Sunday school, Cub and Boy Scouts, baseball and basketball team sports and Demolay. But for me at age 6-8, the most exciting structured activity to belong to was The Mickey Mouse Club, a relationship carried out entirely between me and my television set. The Mickey Mouse Club had members, hierarchy, songs, creeds, moral lessons (a la Disney), boy-girl attractions and much other excitement—especially the Hardy Boys mystery serials which aired afternoons in 1956.

Though my parents had little knowledge or involvement in this club activity, they probably weren’t concerned. The great heyday of the Mickey Mouse Club was actually in the 1930s, when kids my parents’ age joined this bizarre animal cult at their local theatres. Toy companies were often sponsors of the Saturday club meetings. The 30s MMCs eventually had 150,000 - 200,000 kid members, equal to the U.S. memberships of the Boy and Girl Scouts at the time.

Mickey Mouse Club Creed
“I will be a square shooter in my home, in school, on the playground, wherever I may be. I will be truthful and honorable and strive always to make myself a better and more useful citizen. I will respect my elders and help the aged, the helpless and children smaller than myself. In short, I will be a good American.”

http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=7477&si=121

During the thirties, some Soviet thinkers saw Mickey as in the vanguard of proletariet heroes, but Disney cleansed his studios of left-leaners in the late forties. Some modern critics liken the 30s MMC to Hitler's Youth of Nazi Germany, but by the fifties MMC was a tame capitalist's pipedream.

Mickey Mouse moved into his new home at the Disneyland Theme Park in Anaheim in 1955, and my family had been continuously apprised of this fun vacation opportunity while watching the Wonderful World of Disney and “Davy Crockett” in the early fifties. Through the sixties, seventies and eighties, various Hancock families spent tens of thousands of dollars on fun pilgrimages to the Disney parks. [From The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard: "An evidence of how big the business can be is that the Davy Crockett craze of 1955, which gave birth to 300 Davy Crockett products, lured $300,000,000 from American pockets."]

While the Wednesday night Disneyland shows had been a phenomenon never before seen—some shows attracted 90 million viewers, virtually every TV household in the country--the after-school bunch got in on another television growth extravaganza with the beginning of The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955.

At age 7, I could hardly contain my excitement to rush home after school to watch “The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure” series.

I’m sure that our family also bought many products advertised, such as the Mattell burp gun, for which Mattel paid $500,000 for a season’s advertising and struck the jackpot with 1 million orders between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Mattel, #536, "Burp gun" Automatic cap gun. Safe 1 to 50 shots at trigger touch, noisy fire bursts, smoking barrel. All metal working parts. Perforated roll caps....1957.

The Hardy Boys series was kicked off with a preview promo in October, 1955. Click here to watch the promo.

Here are some other links about MMC and the 1956 Hardy Boys series.

http://www.tvdays.com/mattelstory3.htm

http://www.micechat.com/forums/index.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_anthology_series

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/hardys.html

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/10/07/hardy_boys/index.html

http://www3.sympatico.ca/farini/peacock/pages/Aexcerpts/FatherOfTheHardyBoys.html

http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0319288/

http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article130.html

http://imagineerebirth.blogspot.com/2006/03/restoring-walt-disneys-disneyland.html

http://hardyboys.bobfinnan.com/hb0.htm

http://www.fiftiesweb.com/annette.htm

http://www.youthspecialties.com/articles/topics/culture/walt.php

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874558,00.html

http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/9434_10529Chp1.pdf

Critique of the disneyization or disneyfication of the world is a burgeoning academic industry. The 1955-58 Mickey Mouse Club and Hardy Boys serials are a tiny and relatively uncontroversial part of the larger story. But it is a worthy subject to ponder: what unique effects did TV and Disney have on Reinhardt kids of that time period?