I first discovered Annette as a middle-schooler, while watching Disney Channel reruns of the “Mickey Mouse Club”; as someone who was not wholesome, sweet or especially peppy, these were all qualities that resonated strongly with me. Although I had been raised on the “New Mickey Mouse Club” (the Britney-and-Christina version), the Disney Channel would occasionally air reruns of the original series. Upon first viewing, it was instantly apparent to me who the real star of the show was (and it sure as hell wasn’t Cubby, although I do recall deriving amusement from the fact that some 1940s housewife had burdened her child with such a ridiculous name).

Annette’s swarthy good looks stood in stark contrast to the light skin and blond hair of her other female co-stars, none of whom had names that ended in vowels. In fact, in an era when it was considered revolutionary to depict so-called ethnic characters on television, Annette was one of the few Italian-American personalities at the time (though apparently she was considered ambiguously “ethnic” enough to play a Mexican-American character on three episodes of “Zorro”). Her exoticism may have contributed to her immense popularity: When she suggested to her mentor, Walt Disney, that she change her last name to Turner to seem more “all-American,” Disney demurred, saying that once people learned how to pronounce it, they wouldn’t forget it (given Disney’s alleged anti-Semitism, one wonders whether he’d make the same concession if her last name had been Schwartz or Kleinberg).

When Annette was 21, American International Pictures approached her to star in a beach party movie with 1950s pop star Frankie Avalon. Disney agreed to loan her out, on the condition that she not show her navel in the films. Rather than tell him, “Screw you, old man, I’m 21 and I’ll flaunt my umbilicus if I damn well please,” Annette agreed to wear a one-piece in the first movie of the series, “Beach Party.” Yet in the succeeding films she shot with Avalon — including “Bikini Beach,” “Muscle Beach Party,” and “Beach Blanket Bingo” — the bottom half of her swimsuit creeps progressively lower and lower down her torso, to the point where her navel is fully visible. I like to imagine her surreptitiously adjusting her swimsuit bottoms in between takes, a small gesture of rebellion against ol’ Uncle Walt.

I rediscovered Annette through the first of her beach party movies, “Beach Party,” which I made a few college friends watch on Netflix my senior year as part of a movie musical marathon. Although they quickly tired of the paper-thin plots and confectionary dialogue, I found myself inexplicably drawn to these movies and watched all of them at once during finals week. As beach bunny Dee Dee, Annette was just as perkily sexless and sexlessly perky as she was during her “Mickey Mouse” years, but there was also something about her that was winking, subtly subversive, and — dare I say it? — even feminist.

Although the beach party films are replete with sexist and misogynistic imagery, including close-up shots of comely beachcombers’ breasts and rear ends, Annette was, for the most part, spared that kind of cheerful objectification. This was in part because she was always Frankie’s property, destined to be a wife and mother rather than some beach bum’s arm candy, but it was also because the feisty Dee Dee made it clear that she wouldn’t stand for that kind of behavior, telling leering surfing boys exactly where they could shove their come-ons and innuendo — unless she, too, was game for fooling around. In “Bikini Beach,” Dee Dee rebuffs Frankie when he won’t acquiesce to her demands for marriage by courting Potato Bug, a John Lennon-esque music superstar; in “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini,” she defies Frankie’s wishes to stay faithful while he’s stationed on a naval base (because, he explains to his Tahitian mistress, “that’s what girls do”), by cavorting with a sexy, Don Draper-esque advertising executive. “I won’t give up,” he tells her. “I’d hate you if you did,” she says, without batting an eyelash. By 1960s standards, this is the equivalent of sending someone a Snapchat of your genitals.

After the beach party pictures fell out of favor in the late 1960s, Annette started receiving offers to play edgier, more adult roles. She had absolutely no interest in doing this. “People are more interested in changing my image than I am,” she said in an interview. “I read the first 10 pages [of scripts] and I’m a prostitute or a doper, and I fold them up and send them back.” Part of me wishes she had taken some of these parts, just so we could’ve seen her evolve as an actress, but part of me is also glad that she had the confidence to stay true to herself, even when it was considered un-hip or unpopular.

At the same time that I was watching the beach party movies, I was also researching a 10-page story on the civil rights movement. “Bikini Beach” and “Beach Party” were filmed at a time when youth involvement in the movement was at its peak, when bright-eyed students like Frankie and Dee Dee were more likely to spend a summer working in the CORE mailroom or training with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee than Watusi’ing on Florida beaches. I found myself both repelled by and attracted to the movies’ cheery complacency, their willful ignorance of the fact that the ground was shifting beneath their bare feet. As the decade wore on and the counterculture’s goodwill deteriorated, in a way it seemed to display a strange sort of courage that Annette and Frankie would stick to what they did best — catching some rays, cutting some rugs — while the world fell apart around them. Staying true to your wholesome, sweet, peppy self as your body slowly starts to fail you, as Annette’s did, requires the same kind of courage.

A lot has changed since the 1960s. It’s no longer considered revolutionary to put a girl with olive skin and a vowel in her surname on national television; it’s no longer expected of women to remain chaste while their boyfriends screw everything that moves, because “that’s what girls do.” Without a doubt, the world is far better off that way. But it is worse off for no longer having Annette in it.