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Gidget Grows Up(1969)

posted 13 years ago by rudeboy8080
3 replies | jump to latest

I watched Gidget Grows Up(1969) on You Tube. It was never released on DVD. I felt sad while watching it. There was too much drama, only one beach scene, and almost no comedy! Gidget Goes Hawaiian(1961) feels like a day at Universal Studios Hollywood or attending a cool party or barbecue!

Gidget Goes to Rome(1963) was weak, but it was breezy! Still, cute-sexy-talented Karen Valentine deserves praise for sincerely playing Gidget.
Gidget Grows Up is a decent TV movie, but it's a bad place to start if you know nothing about Gidget.

[–] rudeboy8080 13 years ago

Another problem with Gidget Grows Up is that it was made in 1969. Liberals were protesting against the Vietnam War and Gidget and Moondoggie were still apart of the "neat elite" and the status quo! In the TV movie, Moondoggie/Jeff is a soldier.

[–] rudeboy8080 13 years ago

To quote Eddie Horner from Gidget Goes Hawaiian, "That's a rotten sense of timing!"

[–] skiddoo 7 years ago

You gave this movie a lot of thought, posting three days in a row. That's more interest than most Gidget movies could create.

It was hard for adults to make movies or sitcoms for young people in that era that weren't torture for them to watch. This was an attempt to be true to the Gidget series while not ignoring the world outside the theater. What happens when the surfing crowd decides there is more to life than going to school and taking vacations? Nobody wanted to watch Gidget Gets Tear Gassed, set at UC Berkeley, with Jeff agonizing over his duty to the Natl Guard or his girlfriend. Or Gidget and Jeff doing drugs in a commune in Gidget and the Hippies. But Gidget at the UN and Jeff in a military venue as far from Vietnam or demonstrations at home as possible, obliquely speaks to those issues of war/peace and brotherhood/sisterhood without turning the Gidget franchise into a forced march with full pack. Nobody went to see a Gidget movie to deal with heavy issues but the young people of that era wanted at least SOME reality to slip in or they would think it was "irrelevant," the ultimate insult. It was possible to make a Depression era movie with no reference at all to the Depression, or a WWII movie with no reference at all to the war, but many managed to bring in a small measure of reality without destroying the frothy bubble of momentary forgetfulness of what they had to face when they went home from the theater. (I saw one that kept the froth intact by putting a disclaimer at the beginning that this was set in a fantasy land with no rationing.) :) I think that's the balance that this movie and others of difficult decades tried to maintain. Whether they managed to make their audiences then happy, whether they managed to make their audiences today happy, is up for debate.