Adventures Of Spin & Marty, The Mickey Mouse Club

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Tim Considine, who played Spin Evans in the popular "Spin and Marty" television series, hit it right on the head. In a "Return to the Triple R" bonus feature where he reminisces with David Stollery, the actor who played Marty Markham, Considine concludes that the show's popularity had nothing to do with their acting abilities. "Spin and Marty" was huge back in 1955 when it aired in 10-minute installments on "The Mickey Mouse Club" mostly because it was the only show for kids about kids at a time when the only other options were puppets or cartoons. It was every kid's "pure fantasy," he recalls. Who wouldn't want to spend an entire summer at a ranch, riding horses far away from parents and those house rules?

On the other main bonus feature, Harry Carey, Jr., who played horse (and boy) wrangler Bill Burnett, is shown on-camera talking with the ubiquitous Leonard Maltin. He says that Walt Disney told him, "I've gotten more mail for 'Spin and Marty' than we got for 'Davy Crockett.'" Parents and kids wanted to know if they could come to the ranch.

That's how idyllic it seemed to young baby boomers, and while the onscreen kids are so wholesome that they must seem positively alien to today's young viewers—"Ah, you!" is the harshest epithet that comes out of their little mouths—that ranch and those kids and their "Yippee-yay, yippee-yi, yippee-oh" songs around the campfire still have an appeal. Since we've gotten this first season on the new "Walt Disney Treasures: Spin and Marty" two-disc boxed tin set, my eight-year-old boy has wanted to catch it every night. My daughter also watches with interest, though she keeps asking "Where are the girls?" and probably won't be truly happy until Disney comes out with season three of the show, which featured teens from a nearby summer camp (including Mouseketeers Annette and Darlene). Though season one of "Spin and Marty" is presented in the original black-and-white, which is always a negative by my kids' standards, it's turned out to be a great family film for us.

It's a classic rich kid/poor kid tale about a benign rivalry between a spoiled, orphaned rich kid who shows up on Day One at the ranch in his grandma's chauffeured limousine with a butler in tow, and the most popular and athletic boy in camp who's had to work each year to afford to attend. Master Martin Markham manages to offend all the campers by calling their beloved Triple-R Ranch "a smelly old farm," and gets picked on because of it. There are the usual practical jokes you'd expect from a summer camp movie, along with lessons in horseback riding and such rodeo events as roping and bulldogging. But the real lessons are life lessons about conquering your feers, acceptance, and getting along. For the most part, the Placerita Canyon footage is appealing and natural-looking—especially in an early scene where a wild, white stallion visibly kicks at a rider on a horse with his hind legs. The "effects" scenes that don't quite cut it are limited to just one, where the boys chase a woodchuck on horseback and the thing looks like a furball with tail being pulled by an invisible string. But hey, at least the string is invisible.

Considine and Stollery are both convincing in their roles, though for me it was interesting to see, in retrospect, just how nice of a kid that Spin really was—even during his pranks. They square off in the boxing ring, sure, but you won't find a pleasanter rivalry than the one between Spin and Marty. And the supporting cast of boys were just as nice. Carey, Jr. tells how the show was filmed during the summers so the young actors wouldn't miss school or need a tutor, so it was just like a summer camp for them—only they worked and got paid for their time. And, he says, there was "not one spoiled brat in the bunch." The gang includes Marty's lone friend for a while, whom he dubs "Ambitious" (B.G. Norman), budding naturalist Speckle (Tim Hartnagel), pint-sized Louie (Brad Morrow), and wise-cracking Russell the Muscle (Dee Aaker).

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