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 Mouse Club team color they belonged to listed for each season): Notes: Tommy Cole and Dennis Day were originally Blue Team members, but were drafted to the Red Team later in the first season. Dallas Johann, Paul Petersen, Tim Rooney, and Mickey Rooney, Jr. were all fired early in the first season. Dallas' brother John Lee replaced him, while Dickie Dodd and Ronnie Steiner were hired as replacements for the Rooney brothers. For the show's fourth season, only a small amount of new footage was filmed, and was intermixed with material from previous seasons. It is believed that only six of the