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 Rooney the turn. Rooney did voice acting from time to time. He provided the voice of Santa Claus in four stop-motion animated Christmas TV specials: "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" (1970), "The Year Without a Santa Claus" (1974), "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July" (1979) and "A Miser Brothers' Christmas" (2008). In 1995, he appeared as himself on "The Simpsons" episode "Radioactive Man". After starring in one unsuccessful TV series and turning down an offer for a huge TV series, Rooney, now 70, starred in the Family Channel's "The Adventures of the Black Stallion", where he reprised his role as