The Short-Lived Genre of Beach Movies

For about five years in the mid-1960s, beach movies flooded the market. It started as Hollywood discovered that teenagers will go to the movie theater, and that marketing directly to them will sell a lot of tickets. It all started with Beach Party in 1963. The movie 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 o 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)