The Mickey Rooney Show three stormy marriages by the early 1950s to actresses Ava Gardner, Martha Vickers, and Betty Jane Rase had marred his wholesome "Andy Hardy" image. (His fourth wife at the time, Elaine, was not an actress.) Although Rooney was thirty-four years old in 1954, his character Mickey Mulligan was only twenty-three. The series aired from August 28, 1954, to June 4, 1955 on Saturday evenings opposite the first half-hour of both CBS's "The Jackie Gleason Show" and ABC's "The Dotty Mack Show", a low-budget novelty program in which Dotty Mack lip-synced many of the works of other singers. Rooney's then-manager Maurice
Mickey McGuire (film series) program "Those Lovable Scallawags with their Gangs" also featured various Our Gang silents, as well as various rival series shorts (including Mickey McGuire). Sadly, the films were rarely shown on television, as opposed to the Our Gang shorts. Because of this, the series is hardly remembered today. The late 1980s brought the arrival of the Mickey McGuire shorts to home video for the first time. United American Video and Summit Media Co. released three volumes of the Columbia Mickey McGuire shorts. Mickey Rooney introduced each short. In 2001, ten of the sound shorts made their way to home video on