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
The Mickey Rooney Show a line from the pilot episode; the result of Rooney have been "too small to be a wrestler and too big to be a puppet," or perhaps too old for the studio page role. Co-producer Maurice Duke hired Van Alexander, then an arranger at Capitol Records to score the show with an orchestra of 12 musicians. Though he had never scored for film or television, Rooney enjoyed the score and hired Alexander to do his next feature film "The Atomic Kid" that reused "Hey Mulligan"'s director and writers. Alexander then scored seven more films for Rooney. In June 2007, Timeless