Background
Robert Wilkie Burgess was born in Long Beach, California, to a family with no prior show business connection. Bobby has one older brother, and two younger sisters. According to various Disney sources, he was a long-time veteran of amateur contests, but hadn't worked professionally. However, according to Andrea Darvi, Bobby did toothpaste commercials before auditioning for The Mickey Mouse Club, while Paul Petersen in his 1977 book says that Bobby had done an episode of The Ozzie and Harriet Show.
Bobby had started dance lessons at four, and was versed in tap and ballet. His first audition for the Disney Studio, though, was for an acting job on the Spin & Marty serial. He didn't get the part, but while there he heard about the Mouseketeer auditions. It took four callbacks, but he got the job doing a barefoot dance to Rock Around the Clock.
Performance
Bobby was one of the two best male dancers on the show during its three year run, and consequently took part in just about every musical number. He did miss a few in the first season (Friendly Farmers, The British Grenadier), usually involving mainly Blue Team members, but in the later seasons he was ubiquitous. Bobby was one of the oldest kids, and by Mouseketeer standards, a giant (he's just shy of six feet). For that reason, and because he was willing to try anything, the directors tended to give him more physical challenges. In the first season number Cooking with Minnie Mouse he had to dance and roll backwards across a table; in the second season, he was casually told he'd be juggling while riding a unicycle, neither of which he'd ever done before. It took him a few weeks, but he learned to do it.
Though he was popular with the directors and fans, his fellow Mouseketeers had mixed feelings about him. Some were put off by his wide grin and positive outlook, which they felt must be phony. He drew more than his share of snipes from fellow mice, some long after the show ended. One first season dance partner even spit on him when he lifted her overhead during a dance number. Though he didn't get the
Spin and Marty job, Bobby did some voice-dubbing work for the Danish-made serial
Boys of the Western Sea in the second season.
As he grew, many viewers wrote to ask if Bobby was related to
Jimmie Dodd. There was a faint resemblance, at least on monochrome TV screens. They even did a song and dance number together as a father-son routine. Bobby was slated to play the Scarecrow in the projected Disney film
The Rainbow Road to Oz, and did a
Disneyland episode in which he and
Doreen Tracey danced to some of the music written for the film.
Aftermath
Like all the Mouseketeers except Annette Funicello, Bobby was suddenly thrown out of work when it was decided the show's fourth season would consist of reruns. Bobby was one of the Mouseketeers chosen to go with Jimmie Dodd to Australia for promotional tours in May 1959 and again in 1960. He finished high school, went on to college, and then, in 1959, created his own job on The Lawrence Welk Show by convincing the tight-fisted maestro he needed a dancing couple.
Bobby stayed with the show, doing his own choreography, until it's end in 1982. In 1970, he married Kristi Floren, with whom he has had four children. Bobby runs his own dance studio in Los Angeles, and has taken part in every Mouseketeer Reunion show, including the 50th Anniversary, where he danced with Sharon Baird.
