It was just fun." Mark Voger can be reached HERE. Walt Disney fretted for naught when his protege Annette Funicello donned a bathing suit for the "beach party" movies co-starring Frankie Avalon.

LOS ANGELES — When she traded in her Mousketeer ears for a surfboard and a modest one-piece bathing suit, Annette Funicello helped create a world as fanciful as Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom.

BOSTON (CBS) - Annette Funicello died Monday ... was making the "beach party" movies clad mostly in a form-fitting bathing suit, she was a figure of some importance.

NEW YORK (AP) — Annette Funicello ... would wear a one-piece suit.' I did, and I never regretted it." The shift in teen tastes begun by the Beatles in 1964 and Funicello's first marriage ...

Annette Funicello, whose pubescent pulchritude made ... She complied in the first movie but would wear a two-piece fishnet suit in 1964's Muscle Beach Party and a blue-and-white bikini in 1964's ...

The suits envelop a small, apple-cheeked woman who is moving along with a cane and a fixed smile, completely unhurried by the tumult around her. This is Annette Funicello the original Mouseketeer ...

The shift in teen tastes begun by the Beatles in 1964 and Funicello's first marriage the following year pretty much killed off the genre. But she was somehow never forgotten though mostly out of ...