She was more than just one of the original Mouseketeers. From the time the Mickey Mouse Club debuted in 1955, with her as one of 24 perky club kids, the 12-year-old Annette Funicello was on her way to becoming, as she once called herself, the "queen of teen." But though her adolescence was cheerful, charming and squeaky clean, she couldn't help but become a key figure in the history of male sexual longing. To a generation of pubescent boys, long before the show was canceled in 1959, her mouse ears had started to seem like semiotic outposts of her emerging breasts....
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