Tommy Kirk

Thomas Lee "Tommy" Kirk, an original Disney Mouseketeer, American actor, and businessman.

He was cast as a clean-cut teenager Joe Hardy, opposite Tim Considine as his older brother Frank Hardy, in the original The Hardy Boys serial feature called The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure based on the book The Tower Treasure which was aired in the Mickey Mouse Club television show in 1956 and 1957 - twenty years before David Cassidy & Parker Stevenson donned the roles for ABC.

Following this, Walt Disney used Tommy and fellow Mouseketeer Judy Harriet to cover the 1956 Democratic and Republican conventions for the Mickey Mouse Club show in an attempt by Disney to get children involved in the American political process. Around this time Tommy announced that he would appear as Young Davy Crockett, but this does not seem to have eventuated.

Kirk's career received its biggest break yet when Disney cast him as Travis Coates in Old Yeller (1957), an adventure story about a boy and his heroic dog. He had the lead role in the film, which was enormously successful, and he became Disney's first choice whenever they needed someone to play an all-American teenager. Kevin Corcoran played his younger brother and they would often be teamed. Both of them were announced in the cast of Rainbow Road to Oz, based on the stories of L. Frank Baum, but this film never resulted.

Kirk appeared in another Hardy brothers installment, the original story The Mystery of Ghost Farm (September 13 - December 20, 1957). He then starred in The Shaggy Dog (1959), a comedy about a boy inventor, Wilby Daniels, who is repeatedly transformed into an Old English Sheepdog under the influence of a magic ring. This teamed him with Corcoran and two other Disney stars with whom he would regularly work, Fred MacMurray and Annette Funicello. He went over to Universal-International to do some voice work for the animated film, The Snow Queen (1959), originally in Russian but adapted for US release.

Kirk said at this stage Disney told him they did not have any projects for him and he was being dropped. "I was thin and gangly and looked a mess... I thought the whole world had fallen to pieces," he said. However, the studio soon contacted him offering him another long-term contract and a role as Ernst Robinson in another adventure film, Swiss Family Robinson (1960). This was another box office hit, as were three comedies where he supported MacMurray: The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), Bon Voyage! (1962), and Son of Flubber (1963). He also played Grumio in the fairy tale fantasy Babes in Toyland, had a small role in Moon Pilot (1962) and teamed with Funicello for two stories shot overseas, The Horsemasters (1961) and Escapade in Florence (1962). Newspaper columns occasionally linked his and Funicello's names romantically.

MacMurray once reportedly gave Kirk "the biggest dressing-down of my life" during the filming of Bon Voyage!, one that he says he deserved. But he maintained good relationships with his fellow actors.

"Tommy played my brother in a lot of films and put up with a lot of things that I did to him over the years," Corcoran says in a commentary on the DVD release of Old Yeller. "He must be a great person not to hate me." Considine calls him "a monster talent."

Kirk was given the lead in Savage Sam (1963), a sequel to Old Yeller which did not do as well at the box office. However, when he played "scrambled egghead" student inventor Merlin Jones in The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964), it resulted in one of the biggest hits of the year.

Despite his success and making the Disney enormously wealthy, Disney chose not to renew Kirk's contract upon discovering Tommy's homosexuality. Walt Disney personally fired him after receiving a complaint from the homophobic mother of the other young man that he was intimate with. Yet in a bow to audience wishes, greed for the all mighty dollar, and an astounding act of soul-destroying hypocrisy, the Walt Disney Studios temporarily put their bigotry on hold and rehired him for the sequel to the popular Merlin Jones movie co-staring Annette Funicello.

Kirk described the situation himself: "Even more than MGM, Disney was the most conservative studio in town...the studio executives were beginning to suspect my homosexuality. Certain people were growing less and less friendly. In 1963, Disney let me go. But Walt asked me to return for the final Merlin Jones movie, The Monkey's Uncle, because the Jones films had been moneymakers for the studio."

Immediately after Kirk's departure from Disney he kept busy by appearing in several of the 1960s beach party films and teen movie films, notably in American International Pictures' Pajama Party, taking Frankie Avalon's usual lead role opposite Funicello while Avalon himself only appears in cameo, as well as The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini with Deborah Walley, and later in the independent film It's a Bikini World paired again with Deborah Walley.

Eventually the Walt Disney Company learned the error of its ways when the LGBT Community created Gay Day in the Park, every first Saturday of June (in an anniversary memorium of the famous Stonewall Riots), and descended en-mass on the Magic Kingdom wearing red shirts to both protest the poor treatment of LGBT employees and guests, and to show the Disney Company just how much money the Community spends on the Company. The Company did a virtual 180 on its relations with the Gay Community, and Tommy Kirk was officially inducted as a Disney Legend in the Disney Legends Hall of Fame on October 9th 2006, alongside his old co-stars Considine and Corcoran. His heterosexual co-stars had already been inducted DECADES before - Fred MacMurray in 1987 and Annette Funicello in 1992. Also in 2006, the first of Tommy's Hardy Boys serials was finally issued on DVD in the fifth "wave" of the Walt Disney Treasures series.