Word: funicello
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DIED Although she didn't receive as much fan mail as the famed Annette Funicello, Cheryl Holdridge had an angelic and charismatic smile that made her one of the most popular Mouseketeers on the 1950s TV show The Mickey Mouse Club...
...1950s, Mickey had theme park, a newspaper comic strip, and The Mickey Mouse Club, the hit television variety show that has launched the careers of teen stars from Annette Funicello to Justin Timberlake. But soon Disney feature films like Bambi and Sleeping Beauty began to rake in the accolades - and box office receipts - the mouse faded into the background. Between his last 1953 cartoon short, The Simple Things, and the 1983 Christmas special Mickey's Christmas Carol, the mouse that built the house of Disney would remain out of work for 30 years...
...orchestral swells far more than beats, and his subjects range from an indictment of rap fantasies ("Now come on everybody, let's make cocaine cool/ We need a few more half-naked women up in the pool") to a gentle skateboard romance as innocent and sincere as Annette Funicello...
More surprising, The Real Cancun also succeeds as a teen comedy. "We grew up seeing the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies, and that would seem so corny now," says producer Murray. "There are moments in this movie that if they were scripted, they would feel corny, but when they're real, they don't." If Alan, the teetotaler virgin who is transformed by a few shots of tequila into the nerd king of Cancun, were a written character, he would be a lame archetype. Instead he is hilariously compelling. Sure, we know his newfound popularity is mostly owing...
...they looked small, sallow, extravagantly Vaselined, with poofter pompadours and funny shoes. The rest of the country had Elvis lookalikes; we had Frankie Avalon clones. Of course, the kids had to be dolled up - they were in show business! And they acquired something like the young luster of Annette Funicello on another ABC afternoon attraction, "The Mickey Mouse Club." (Annette would have an apt, attractive fit with the Philly paisans.) The featured dancers on "Bandstand" received more mail than most Hollywood stars: 45,000 letters a week. The dance contests - basically, popularity contests for the regulars - would bring...