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 (TV series) to sustain ratings to survive the full season in its 9 p.m. Eastern time slot on Wednesdays. Its principal competition was another sitcom, "The Dick Van Dyke Show" on CBS. NBC ran television movies at the time. Due to low ratings, ABC was considering canceling "Mickey". The network was hesitant to cancel the series due to the popularity of Sammee Tong's character who had a solid fanbase thanks to his role in "Bachelor Father". In his 1991 autobiography, "Life Is Too Short", Mickey Rooney wrote that Tong was upset by the news that the series faced cancellation. Tong, who was