Annette Funicello, the dark-haired darling of TV's “The Mickey Mouse Club” in the 1950s who further cemented her status as a pop-culture icon in the '60s by teaming with Frankie Avalon in a popular series of “beach” movies, died Monday. She was 70.
Funicello, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1987 and became a spokeswoman for treatment of the chronic, often-debilitating disease of the central nervous system, died at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfield, Walt Disney Co. spokesman Howard Green said.
Funicello and her husband, Glen Holt, had moved from the Los Angeles area after a 2011 fire gutted their home in Encino.
Oh, yeah...She was my girlfriend before any of you other guys. I used to run RUN!! to get my paper route done in time to see the opening of the Micky Mouse Show.
May Annette RIP. She gave many a young boy to want to leap through puberty.
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edgarblythe
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Mon 8 Apr, 2013 03:02 pm
I think people felt she was much younger because she played a teen for at least twenty years, seems like.
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firefly
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Mon 8 Apr, 2013 07:02 pm
@Setanta,
Quote:
Wow, that's too much. She must have been really, really young. I mean, she wasn't that much older than me, and i'm not old.
Want to feel really old? She had 4 great-grandchildren.
This is from her obit in the NY Times
Quote:
On Jan. 9, 1965, Ms. Funicello married her agent, Jack Gilardi. Charles M. Schulz, in his “Peanuts” comic strip, showed Linus reading a paper, clutching his security blanket and wailing: “I can’t stand it! This is terrible! How depressing. ... ANNETTE FUNICELLO HAS GROWN UP!”
I am apparently just under the bar. I missed or sneered at the Mickey Mouse Club. And I'm one year older than she was. It was like rewatching Howdy Doody for me (at the time).
However, she seems a brave woman past all that.
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Lustig Andrei
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Tue 9 Apr, 2013 01:57 pm
It came as a shock to me me to see the headline. I mean, I can't imagine her as being any older than maybe, oh, thirty-something. She was the only one of the Mouseketeers who added something like a pubescent aura to the whole undertaking and made the Mickey Mouse Club interesting to us older kids who were just into puberty ourselves. RIP, Annette.
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edgarblythe
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Tue 9 Apr, 2013 02:16 pm
Paul Anka wrote Puppy Love and Put Your Head on My Shoulder for Annette. He was her boyfriend at the time. She rejected his offer of marriage.
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glitterbag
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Tue 9 Apr, 2013 06:08 pm
I remember the Micky Mouse club. Disneyland was my idea of paradise, although we never traveled there for vacation. I didn't have a paper route, but I always made sure I caught the MM Club every day.
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