Mickey Rooney in the sequel "" in 2009, in a scene that was deleted from the final film. On May 26, 2007, he was grand marshal at the Garden Grove Strawberry Festival. Rooney made his British pantomime debut, playing Baron Hardup in Cinderella, at the Sunderland Empire Theatre over the 2007 Christmas period, a role he reprised at Bristol Hippodrome in 2008 and at the Milton Keynes theatre in 2009. In 2011, Rooney made a brief cameo appearance in "The Muppets" and in 2014, at age 93, he reprised his role as Gus in "", with the film being dedicated in the
Pantomime which grew in pomp and spectacle from the 15th to the 17th centuries. The development of English pantomime was also strongly influenced by the continental "commedia dell'arte", a form of popular theatre that arose in Italy in the Early Modern Period. This was a "comedy of professional artists" travelling from province to province in Italy and then France, who improvised and told comic stories that held lessons for the crowd, changing the main character depending on where they were performing. Each "scenario" used some of the same stock characters. These included the "innamorati" (young lovers); the "vecchi" (old men) such