Mickey Mouse vs. Captain Kangaroo
On October 3, 1955, two very different children’s programs made their television debuts. One was an extravaganza from an entertainment giant, the other a low-key affair dreamed up by a former television clown. Both were TV trendsetters, and both would be loved by successive generations of children.
The Mickey Mouse Club wasn’t the first children’s TV telecast, or even the first Disney one. Walt Disney himself had already been the host of Disneyland on ABC in July 1955, when the network had broadcast the opening of his revolutionary amusement park in a special cohosted by Ronald Reagan. That program had featured 24 young performers, the oldest of them 14. They had been introduced as the Mouseketeers, the stars of an upcoming children’s television show.
The idea of the Mickey Mouse Club went back to the 1930s, when organizations bearing that name had flourished across America as official Disney fan clubs. They had met Saturdays at noon at movie houses where the young club members would pay to see the latest Disney animated shorts. Decades later, when Walt Disney was readying his amusement park in Anaheim, California, he sensed that he needed a vehicle to promote it. So he resurrected the club concept, but now as a five-times-a-week TV show with singing and dancing youngsters, cartoons, instructional films, and celebrity guest stars from live-action Disney films. The young performers, all talented unknowns found in casting calls, wore sweaters emblazoned with their names and hats with Mickey Mouse ears. The adult cast members included the Disney songwriter Jimmie Dodd, who wrote the show’s famous theme song (“Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!”), and Roy Williams, a longtime artist and gag-writer from Disney’s animation department.
The show was a hit from the start, with Nielsen ratings for its time slot greater than all the rival networks combined. But some observers, including Jack Gould of The New York Times, denounced its enormous number of commercials—20, by Gould’s count—and its constant promotion of Disney product. The promotion certainly worked. Kids bought Mouseketeer hats by the millions, and all the other officially licensed Mickey Mouse Club wares too—games, night-lights, even furniture. The teenage Mouseketeer Annette Funicello became a bona fide celebrity. After the original show’s run ended, in 1959, she went on to star in Disney films, such as 1959’s The Shaggy Dog, and numerous non-Disney movies, including 1965’s Beach Blanket Bingo, with the teen heartthrob Frankie Avalon.
The Mickey Mouse Club was such a hit that Disney brought the show back twice with new casts—once for a brief run in 1977 and again in 1989, in a very successful run on its cable network, the Disney Channel. The latter version had Mouseketeers who later became superstars, including Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake.
On the same day that the high-energy and advertising-heavy Mickey Mouse Club first appeared, a very different sort of show aired over on CBS. Captain Kangaroo was co-created by Bob Keeshan. Like Disney, he was no stranger to children’s entertainment. He had started his television career on the pioneering kids’ series The Howdy Doody Show, where he played Buffalo Bob’s sidekick Clarabelle the Clown. In the early 1950s he had begun hosting his own shows, including the short-lived Tinker’s Workshop, in which, at 27, he played a kindly old toy maker.
CBS was seeking innovative children’s programming, and Keeshan and his friend Jack Miller submitted their Captain Kangaroo concept. It was innovative indeed. The show had no studio audience, a novelty for children’s television, and no child actors. Keeshan, playing yet another kindly older host, named Captain Kangaroo for the large pockets on his jacket, addressed his television audience by speaking directly into the camera. Unlike The Mickey Mouse Club, Keeshan’s show had no big production numbers, instead embracing the idea of teaching children by placidly exposing them to the arts. His sidekick Mr. Green Jeans, played by an actor named Hugh Brannum, brought along domestic animals to share with the audience watching at home; the character Grandfather Clock created poetry; Dancing Bear added music to the proceedings. The show’s low-key educational bent clearly influenced later children’s shows such as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street.
Keeshan not only was the major creative force behind the show; he also exerted unprecedented control over the advertising it featured. He allowed commercials for creative products such as Etch-A-Sketch and Play-Doh while vetoing ones for toys associated with violence. He also championed the use of “bumpers”—messages that made clear the separation between the show and its advertising. Bumpers would later become standard for commercial children’s television, and they’re still used today.
By the time Captain Kangaroo finally went off the air, in 1984, it had become the longest-running children’s TV program of all time, a title it would hold until 1999, when it was surpassed by Sesame Street. It remains the longest-lived kids’ show on a commercial network.
Today the variety of children’s TV programs seems limitless, with entire cable networks, including the Viacom-owned Nickelodeon, running them 24 hours a day. But for everything that has changed, and all the programming that sprang up in the wake of The Mickey Mouse Club and Captain Kangaroo, one element of it all has remained controversial—the children-targeted advertising that was exploited so effectively by Disney and tempered by Keeshan. In 1999 Viacom launched the cable network Noggin, featuring 24-hour programming for preschoolers, and gave it a key selling point: no commercials at all.