Walt Disney Treasures - The Mickey Mouse Club Featuring the Hardy Boys
by Charles F. Haas
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Florenz Ames, Russ Conway, Sarah Selby, Tim Considine, Tommy KirkDirector: Charles F. Haas
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
Cinematographer: Gordon Avil
Cinematographer: Walter Castle
Editor: Al Teeter
Editor: George Jay Nicholson
Editor: Joseph Dietrick
Producer: Bill Walsh
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 269 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-12-19
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Studio: Walt Disney Video
Product features:
- 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
Movie Reviews of Walt Disney Treasures - The Mickey Mouse Club Featuring the Hardy Boys
Movie Review: The Original MTV!
Summary: 5 Stars
MOUSE TV! That was great stuff!
I want to say up front that these five stars are for BABY BOOMERS ONLY!
Don't buy this DVD for your children and expect that they're going to love it just like you did as a kid -- you'd be fooling yourself. If your kids are 5 or older, where they're now socializing with peers, "The Hardy Boys" is probably 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.
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 fully-formed mini-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 will 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.
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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Summary of Walt Disney Treasures - The Mickey Mouse Club Featuring the Hardy Boys
MICKEY MOUSE CLUB FEATURING THE HARDY - DVD Movie