It may have been the assertive way she said her name: “Annette!”
Or that she was the tallest of the first batch of Mickey Mouse Club Mouskateers (certainly she was the first of them to mature). Something about the dark beauty Annette Funicello also made her seem like some kind of personification of the very mouse for whom she was an enthusiastic club member.
If Minnie Mouse were human, she’d look like Annette. And that brunette hair, the way it was teased, almost looked like mini mouse ears when she became the only teen beauty in bikini films wearing a one-piece (from an agreement with Walt Disney who possibly may have also owned her soul).
For whatever reason, Annette was the first and best young talent from the show to turn into a real live pop star, singing songs that were by and large novelties, or at least written that way, with titles like “Tall Paul,” “Pineapple Princess” and “Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy.” But she sang them with a forthrightness that indicated she was giving her all. Annette was irony free.
And when she joined the Beach Boys on “The Monkey’s Uncle,” for the 1965 movie of the same name, well, that was about the pinnacle of her artistry. As yet another novelty song, it rocked. And that was Brian Wilson and the boys backing her in the opening credits:
Her beach movies with Frankie Avalon deserve deep study, but most of the time they’re just fun, corny and spackled with good music. The fact the co-stars never really got too far romantically was reassuring to those of us who weren’t very successful in those fields either. And the fact they showed up as a now middle aged couple looking about the same as they did decades earlier on the “Pee-Wee Herman Christmas Special” cemented their forever status in kitsch cool, a place they staked out long before Pee-Wee created his winking version of it.
But she was gracious enough to ride on that wave with their own modest comeback in the 1987 movie “Back to the Beach,” which featured Pee-Wee as a guest star and included musical contircutions from Dick Dale, Fishbone, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Aimee Mann. And in the cast were all kinds of nostalgic names including Connie Stevens, Don Adams, Bob Denver, Jerry Mathers, Tony Dow, Barbara Billingsly and O.J. Simpson (someone dig out this movie now!).
Every part of Funicello’s life was exemplary, we read, particularly the way she handled her own malady of muscular sclerosis until she died Monday at 70. She won’t be forgotten.