The Sudden Rise and Fall of Beach Movies

For about five years in the mid-1960s, beach movies flooded the market. This started as Hollywood discovered that teenagers will go to the movie theater, and that marketing directly to them will sell a lot of tickets. the first such movie was Beach Party in 1963. The film was a romance starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello that featured a lot of dancing, surfing, fighting, and cool teenagers thumbing their noses at adults. While critically panned, the film was a financial success for American International Pictures (AIP) and led to six sequels which more or less recycled the same plot. Other studios jumped on the beach movie bandwagon, and around 30 such films were produced in the next five years. The beach movie fell out of favor due to over-saturation, but it started Hollywood on a mission to capture the lucrative teen audience, which continues to this day. The video is only 8:06 long; the rest is an ad. -via Messy Nessy Chic


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