Walt Disney Treasures - The Mickey Mouse Club Featuring the Hardy Boys
September 24, 2008
THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB’S magical mix of entertainment was so captivating to television’s first generation of children, watching it became a daily ritual. And so the first day of the show’s second season, millions thrilled to the debut of a new adventure series, THE HARDY BOYS: THE MYSTERY OF THE APPLEGATE Treasure. All the cliff-hanging suspense unfolds right here, including the entire MICKEY MOUSE CLUB episode that introduced the series. Plus, you’ll get clued in to the truth behind the novels’ author Franklin W. Dixon, and you’ll witness the reunion of Tim Considine (Frank Hardy) and Tommy Kirk (Joe Hardy) at the scene of the crime — Stage 2 at the Disney Studio.
Customer Review: My Favorite of the MMC Serials
Disney’s “The Hardy Boys”: “The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure” (1956) is based on Franklin W. Dixon’s (aka Edward Stratemeyer) “The Tower Treasure”- the first of many “Hardy Boys” books. It was the first of two “Hardy Boy” serials produced by Disney for its “Mickey Mouse Club” show; which was broadcast from 5PM-6PM each weekday. The one-hour show was broken into four segments with this sort of serial taking up one of these 15-minute segments. The “Spin and Marty” serials were also used for this purpose.
As in the books, Frank (Tim Considine) and Joe (Tommy Kirk) are the teenage sons of Fenton Hardy (Russ Conway), a private detective. Following in their father’s footsteps the two boys are looking for a pirate’s treasure supposedly hidden in the Applegate Mansion in their neighborhood. The series has a cool theme song (see below). Despite the song there are no pieces of eight. They were one ounce Spanish silver coins, worth 8 reales, or half of a gold dubloon.
Frank and Joe are assisted by Joe’s girlfriend Iola (Carole Ann Campbell) and hindered by their Aunt Gertrude who is looking after them while their father is out of town.
The Applegate mansion is a spooky looking house and when the boys finally meet the owner he confirms that there really is a treasure, given to his grandfather by LaFitte the pirate as repayment for when he burned the Applegate plantation. His grandfather hid the treasure and no one has been able to find it since.
The story has gold doubloons and crooks, and Iola gets a lot of scream queen moments. “Applegate’s Treasure” was my personal favorite of all the MMC serials. The only drawback is that it was a rather complex mystery with a lot of misdirection, and having to watch it in a cliffhanger serial format was extremely frustrating. No sooner had they cleared up the suspense from the last episode than something would happen and they would break off- telling you tune in for the next episode. But we were hooked and faithfully tuned in day after day. A lot of family plans were altered during this time so as to not interfere with daily viewing.
Watching it now I was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the performances by the child actors; especially Campbell and Sands. The serial is definitely several notches above “Spin & Marty” in what was demanded of the cast, and for the most part they come through.
The DVD has some nice special features including a 2006 interview with Considine and Sands in the Disney Studio where the serial was filmed. Also included is the entire (hour-long) MMC episode in which it premiered. It was a Monday, which was “Fun With Music Day”, and Darlene does a lengthy song and dance number with Bobby.
Then again, what do I know? I’m only a child.
“Gold dubloons and pieces of eight, handed down to Applegate? From buccaneers who fought for years for good dubloons and pieces of eight. Handed down in a pirate chest, the gold they sailed for east and west. The treasure bright that made men fight, till none were left to bury the chest. So now the gold and pieces of eight all belong to Applegate. The chest is here but wait…now where are those gold dubloons and pieces of eight?”
Customer Review: The Original MTV!
MOUSE TV! That was great stuff!
I want to say up front that these five stars are for BABY BOOMERS ONLY! And I have a lugubrious, tiresome story to tell in relation to this product so don’t bother reading this review unless you have absolutely nothing to do for awhile and love wasting your time. If you want the answers about the product that you’re buying, scroll down to the last few paragraphs where your product questions will be answered in as much detail as I could garner.
Now, if you think that you’re going to buy this DVD for your children and that they’re going to love it just like you did as a kid, then you’re fooling yourself and out-of-touch with reality. If your kids are 5 or older, where they’re now socializing with peers, “The Hardy Boys” is going to be laughable to them. You should go get them some “Spongebob Squarepants” cartoons if you really want them to be happy and entertained.
And on that note, here’s my story: When my pals and I were seniors at my small rural high school, during the Spring of 1971, we often looked forward to “fun days,” those days where we were given the privilege of goofing off in the name of some purported special activity. Our principal was good for this sort of stuff - he liked seniors a lot for some unknown reason and if he got to feeling magnanimous, he would send a few of us out on some dubious errand, (e.g., washing the driver’s ed car, sodding the football field, etc.), so that we would not have to spend a beautiful sunny afternoon sadly gazing out through a grungy window of some dreary classroom. A good guy, in other words, and a fellow whom we THOUGHT really had his finger on the pulse of our often dubious activities. He was a very solemn and quiet guy and it never occurred to any of us to interpret this to mean that he was either whacked out on Valium, or stupid, or both.
So, one beautifully sunny afternoon, this revered gentleman announced over the loudspeaker system that all students (about 300 of us, all total) would assemble on the bleachers in the gymnasium after lunch for “a very special treat”. I was sure that The Rolling Stones had found my high school and were about to regale us with a free concert! Or, at least maybe Bob Dylan. The world is small when one is young and everything seems possible. So, anyway, when the appointed time arrived, my pals and I grabbed seats right down at the front, on the floor level.
The old boy (no, out of respect for the dead, both then and now, I’m not going to relinquish my principal’s name) had a big smile on his face and you could just tell that he was really pleased with himself, big-time. He strode pompously and proudly to the podium, wiped some imaginary dust from his suit sleeve, and made some semi-humorous comments about recent school sports events and THEN he got down to the meat of it: “Today, I have a great surprise for you all. I’m giving you all the afternoon off so that we can have…. A SOCK HOP!!!”
The assemblage went completely silent for about 10 seconds as the resident school retard, at the behest of our principal, walked over to a cheesy home record player which was sitting on the stage and set the needle to the vinyl. It was worse than I ever could have imagined - The Mills Brothers…. “Glow Worm”.
But I was still befuddled, as were my peers - I turned to a young scoundrel beside me and queried, “What the hell is a [profane expletive deleted] sock hop?!?” He didn’t know either. None of us knew, but we could quickly discern that not one of us were going to like whatever it was so about six of us grabbed a couple of the class bad girls and covertly egressed out the back doors, leaped in to our cars and headed out for the local carry-out, and then for the nearest secluded hilltop to engage in grappling Hillbilly pseudo-love.
Now, I shared that grueling saga with you so, if you’re a Baby Boomer, (or even older), that you will understand why your kids (or grandkids) will probably disrespect you in some heinous manner if you try to force them to watch this great old B&W version of Disney’s Hardy Boys. So, if you want to remain in the high esteem of your spawn, just don’t do it!
Now, here’s what YOU will get out of it, Baby Boomers: This DVD is PURE 1956-57 NOSTALGIA. It’s clean and it’s moral, and cloying, and Eisenhowerish. In the introduction, one of The Hardy Boys even set our minds at ease by assuring us that there were NO MORE PIRATES to worry about - that they were all dead (which, like all the Eisenhower propaganda, was not at all true. Modern-day pirates were, and still are, even more vicious and ruthless than the original ones!). It’s all about as “true” as the name Franklin W. Dixon, the pseudonymish ghostwriters’ sobriquet of the original Hardy Boys series.
But we still love our Hardy Boys. Here are examples of what you will see: ultra-clean streets with no cigarette butts or McDonald’s trash; white picket fences; Aunt Gertrude with an apron; lots of checkered shirts; china and silver table settings for breakfast, no Cheerios box on the table; a thug/scoundrel/bad guy with really nice teeth; “conformity wallpaper” that repeats itself every 3 inches to avoid waste; Fenton Hardy’s perfect gig line; and lots more Ozzie and Harrietish gooey parallels. What you won’t see is any black actors, typical of Disney. But that was true of a lot of period TV shows so I won’t beat him up for that anachronistic omission. But black people aren’t much going to watch this show as a result and I wouldn’t blame them a bit.
The story? There’s a rumor around the Hamlet of Bayport that Old Man Applegate’s family came into a big chest of pirate treasure (gold dubloons!) and that the curmudgeony old devil has it buried somewhere on his vast, spooky, and deteriorating estate. Several ne’er-do-wells are after the booty, including a thief, (a stereotyped IRISH one, of course!), The Hardy Boys, and their female friend, Iola Martin. The boys and Iola set out to unearth this very cozy mystery. Iola is a typical Disney pedaphile’s dream. She (played by Carol Ann Campbell) looks like a mini-fully formed woman, the height of a young girl and with a Munchkin voice. She has supple lips, big dark cow-eyes, long eyelashes, a perfect nose, and a slightly weak chin to emphasize her prospective submissiveness to Alpha-males. The Hardy Boys live with their dad, Fenton Hardy, (the younger Hardy Boy runs outside and actually HUGS his dad when he arrives home from work!) and with their Aunt Gertrude. Why no mom? Because the boys disobey her with some frequency and, in that era, encouraging youths to disobey their moms would not have gone over so good… but an AUNT can be disobeyed to a degree without much social consequence. Anyway, that’s pretty much the entire basis for the story.
There were ultimately only two Hardy Boys stories, parceled out in episodes, on The Mickey Mouse Club; this one and “The Mystery of the Ghost Farm,” which ran later. This entry, “The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure,” aired in 1956-57 over four weeks. There is an introduction plus 19 episodes (each is about 10 minutes). The particular Mickey Mouse Club episode which introduces this Hardy Boys story is included in its entirety, (we get to see Annette Funicello’s chubby little legs!), albeit, you have to bring it up via “features”. There is also a contemporary interview with Tim Considine (who was also in “Spin and Marty”) and Tommy Kirk about the series. Finally, this two-disc set additionally includes a “photo gallery” and some photos of Hardy Boys memorabilia. Disney has grossly over-packaged the DVDs in a regular plastic case which is housed within a metal, pop-apart case, making it inconvenient for storing on your DVD shelf. I recommend throwing away the tin case. This is a LIMITED EDITION (a nasty Disney marketing trick) and so 65,000 of these DVD packages are being issued for now. So if you MUST have one, you’d better go ahead and order it before the scalpers gain control of the pricing. The package also includes a cardboard mini-cover from a Dell Hardy Boys comic book and an informational booklet which mostly promotes other Disney DVDs.
The crystal clear black-and-white image is full-screen and all the opening sequences (episode openings) were snagged from the movie “Treasure Island”. Almost ALL of this series was shot inside of Disney’s Studio #2 at Burbank, California. This is affirmed when you see Fenton Hardy enter his home and his shadow is cast against the face of the house (away from the viewer) while the shadow from the picket fence is cast upon the sidewalk in front of the house, (toward the viewer) in the opposite direction! You’ll get pretty sick of hearing the “Gold Dubloons” introductory song, sung ad nauseum by the same guy who did the voice of Tony the Tiger. Each of the 19 episodes offers this introduction with full credits also being scrolled each time.
Yes, I’m poking a little fun here at Disney’s expense and someone is going to get mad at me and comment, “I showed this film to my kids and they LOVED it, you idiot!!!” Well, maybe, if you live in an Iowa farm hamlet where they still have a drug store on the town square that serves root beer floats and hot Dr. Pepper with a lemon slice *.* Anyway, once you get past the Disney packaging fluff, this is a very nice presentation that anyone who fervently watched this series when it originally aired will love. If you have any more questions about the product, just pose them in “comments” (below), and I’ll try to field your queries.
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