“But Annette, I want you to be different. “I see in here that all the other girls are going to be running around in bikinis, which is fine,” he told her. Though Avalon deemed the script “good clean fun,” Funicello recalled in her book, Disney feared the project would taint her image. Why do you want to change that?”įunicello received a big career boost when Disney agreed to loan her out to American International Pictures to make “Beach Party,” the song-filled, low-budget 1963 comedy, with Avalon. Going to see a psychologist would change that. I think your being a little bit shy is part of your appeal. “Annette,” she recalled Disney telling her, “you have a certain charisma that people respond to. Though painfully shy, Annette began taking dance lessons when she was in kindergarten.Ĭoncerned about her extreme shyness after she became a young star, she once asked Disney if she could see a psychologist. In 1946, her auto mechanic father sold his business and the family moved to the San Fernando Valley. 22, 1942, in Utica, N.Y., she was the first of three Funicello children. In fact, though, I lived it, and it wasn’t an act,” she wrote in her 1994 autobiography, “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes.”īorn Oct. “Nowadays when writers profile me for magazines, they write something to the effect that back in those days I ‘represented’ wholesomeness. The fan magazines chronicled her tooling around in her customized 1957 Thunderbird and featured stories on her romance with fellow teen idol Paul Anka, who, Funicello later said, composed “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” and other songs on the piano in the Funicello family’s living room in Encino.īut for all the Hollywood glitz and glamour, Funicello remained the same reserved and relatively sheltered young woman her friends called Annie, who continued living at home until she was married. Soon, people started copying ‘the Annette sound.’ ” But the echo chambers and double tracking gave me confidence and made my voice stronger. “I never liked singing,” she told the Chicago Tribune years later. It was followed by other singles such as “O Dio Mio” and “Pineapple Princess.” She also recorded more than a dozen albums.įunicello, who was the first to concede she was not much of a singer, credited producer Salvador “Tutti” Camarata and the songwriting Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, for coming up with the idea of double-tracking her voice and adding echo. It was the first of four Disney feature films she appeared in over the next six years, including “Babes in Toyland” and “The Misadventures of Merlin Jones.”įunicello launched her recording career in 1958 with a waltz-tempo ballad, “How Will I Know My Love?” In early 1959, her single “Tall Paul” became a top-10 hit. She made her feature-film debut in “The Shaggy Dog,” a 1959 comedy starring Fred MacMurray. In 1958, she was showcased in her own “Annette” serial.Īfter “The Mickey Mouse Club” ended production in 1958 and went into reruns, the 15-year-old Funicello was the only Mouseketeer to remain under exclusive contract to the Disney studio. And she was so pretty.”įunicello made her acting debut on “The Mickey Mouse Club” serial “Adventure in Dairyland.” Later she appeared with Tim Considine and David Stollery in the popular “Spin and Marty” serials about a Western dude ranch for boys. “Little kids always want to be big boys and girls. Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “It may have been partly that she was older, looked more mature, so the young audience that the club appealed to found that very engaging,” said Robert J. But there was something special about the Mouseketeer with the curly black hair who became the ensemble cast’s biggest star. Like the other female Mouseketeers, Funicello wore a blue pleated skirt, a white, short-sleeved turtleneck sweater with her name spelled out in block letters across her chest and a cap with mouse ears.
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