Yes, I did it. For no good reason except that today is Wednesday, and thus ‘anything can happen day’, I buckled down and watched some Mickey Mouse Club videos. An underage Annette Funicello, this weeks omni-focus, appears in the roll call in–get this–a 1920s vamp outfit, make-up and all. It’s so inappropriate given her age–she’s like 14 maybe?–that I actually hesitated posting it. But it serves to reinforce the uncomfortable impression I’m getting of Walt Disney’s conflicted attitude toward her; on the one hand he wanted her to stay ever an adolescent and resisted letting her out of her contract to do the Beach Party movies. On the other hand, he pushed her into wearing adult women’s clothes at too young an age (and not just any clothes–‘wicked city woman’ clothes) thereby getting a glimpse of what the young woman might look like in the future (assuming a time machine magically appeared and took her back thirty years). Much else is weird in this opening number but I’ll let it speak for itself. One of the YouTube commenters referred to it as ‘Anything Can Happen Salvador Dali Day’. Enough said…
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