Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 23, 2012

Classic movies you could dance to, sort of

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Last week two events occurred which made me think long and hard about the meaning of life. First, the Turner Classic Movie channel celebrated Spring Break week by playing several of the beach movies from the early ‘60s. And second, ageless teenager Dick Clark died of a massive heart attack. I don’t know if there was any connection between these events, but I’m sure greater minds than mine are pondering that possibility right now.

Let me clarify a very important point here. The Turner Classic Movie channel does not just play old classic movies like Casablanca and Citizen Kane. Many of their movies would be considered classics only by people who weep while watching Howard the Duck, and Godzilla vs. Mothra: The Battle for Earth. I like the classic movie channel, but sometimes I get the feeling that old Ted Turner has himself a snoot full of rum, dons his Captain Outrageous hat, staggers into the studio and says: “Hey, hey, hey guys, forget about Wuthering Heights, let’s give ‘em ... hey, hey, hey, pay attention ... let’s give ‘em Hercules Visits Walton’s Mountain tonight. URP.”

Which may explain how so many of those old beach movies have now magically become “classics.” Just like kids today, when I was a kid, teenagers liked movies about teenagers. Those movies weren’t sophisticated, but neither were we. We’d only just recently graduated from the Mickey Mouse Club to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand as afternoon TV fare. We weren’t ready for grim, thought-provoking, post-apocalyptic teenager movies like The Hunger Games back then. That was why we had the beach movies. We didn’t like to think, much, and those beach movies required little or no thought.

One popular beach movie was Gidget. Gidget was a small, underdeveloped teenager whose name was a meaningful beach name, apparently a contraction of “girl-midget.” The other characters in this movie also had meaningful beach names, like Waikiki, Stinky, Kahuna, and Moondoggie. The original Gidget movie starred Sandra Dee and James Darren, and contained meaningful beach dialogue like:


GIDGET: Oh Moondoggie, my bathing suit is crawling with sand fleas! What should I do?

TEENAGE BOYS IN AUDIENCE: TELL HER TO TAKE IT OFF!

MOONDOGGIE: Gosh, Gidge’, why don’t you go romp in the surf while I do what any red-blooded surfer boy would do in this situation–break into a sweet, heartwarming song about young love and long walks along the beach which can’t possibly lead to sex due to the Motion Picture Production Code? That’ll take your mind off those nasty sand fleas! [Music swells to a crescendo]

TEENAGE BOYS IN AUDIENCE: Awww, crap!


That first Gidget movie spawned several others, with names like Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Gidget Visits the Vatican, and Gidget vs. Mothra: The Battle for Laguna Beach. Each of the Gidget movies featured very realistic shots of various virginal Gidgets (Deborah Walley, Sally Field, Doris Day, etc.) standing on a Hollywood sound stage with their arms spread wide, pretending to surf. They were superimposed against a film of actual surfers balancing on their actual boards. The plots of all these movies were interchangeable, and nobody ever got lucky, so you could safely go to the concession stand at any point without missing much.

Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, also teamed up to give teenagers more sand in their trunks with “classic” beach movies like Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and Frankie and Annette vs. Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Laguna Beach II. These beach movies were significantly different from the Gidget series in that at critical points in the dialogue, both the hero and the heroine were apt so break into song for absolutely no reason at all.


ANNETTE: Oh gosh, Frankie, I believe my bathing suit is crawling with sand fleas! What should I do?

TEENAGE BOYS IN AUDIENCE: TELL HER, FOOL!

ANNETTE: Who said that?

FRANKIE: Said what?

ANNETTE: Oh, never mind. How about if instead of slipping out of my suit, I just break into a sweet, heartwarming song about young love and long walks along the beach which can’t possibly lead to sex due to the Motion Picture Production Code?
FRANKIE: Wait, I think it’s my turn to break into song! [Music swells to a crescendo]

TEENAGE BOYS IN AUDIENCE: Awww, crap! Where’s The Beach Boys when we need ‘em?


Other beach movies had titillating titles like The Girls on the Beach, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, etc.,which promised much but delivered little. Teenagers may have been unsophisticated back then, but we weren’t complete idiots. Most of us had been to some sort of a beach, if only at a lake somewhere, with some sort of a person of the opposite sex. And no one I knew of would ever have considered breaking into song right in the middle of meaningful beach dialogue, because we knew darned well it would result in gales of laughter and ruin any chance we might have had of ... well, even getting to “first base,” as we used to say.

And speaking of beach movies, when Marilyn and I were dating back in 1967, we went to the movies to see the Bruce Brown film The Endless Summer. It wasn’t your regular beach movie, and no, it had nothing to do with global warming. Nobody, not even singers like Lesley Gore or James Brown who were licensed to sing in beach movies, broke into song. There were no dancing girls in bikinis, no muscular guys playing beach volleyball, and no cameo appearances by the likes of Buster Keaton or Don Rickles. And Frankie and Annette were nowhere in sight.

The movie was a laid back documentary about a couple of California surfers who traveled around the world, following the summer season in search of the perfect wave. In the film they visited the shores of Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, and finally, due to a serious airlines mix-up, Kokomo, Indiana.

We left that Michigan theater convinced we should try surfing. We were advised that we’d have to travel to the West Coast to surf, but we weren’t fools. We knew that if Lake Huron on Michigan’s east coast had no surf to speak of, Lake Michigan on the west was not exactly surfers’ paradise, either.

I did try skateboarding once, but since concrete is much harder than surf, I gave it up.