In “The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show” episode of the Simpsons, a panel of TV execs try to engineer the perfect character to appeal to kids. “He’s gotta be a surfer, gimme a nice schmear of surfer,” ends up being the solution. Since the ’60s, surfing has become a catch-all way to inject unearned cool points into fiction, usually to disastrous results. But how did the sport become a magnet for lazy attempts at appealing to youth?
To be clear, I don’t mean true surfing movies. The phenomena I’m talking about isn’t related to The Endless Summer, Morning of the Earth or Modern Collective. Nor am I talking about fiction that centers around surfing, like Blue Crush, Chasing Maverick’s, Point Break, or Big Wednesday. Specifically, I mean fictional characters who just end up surfing for no apparent reason.
A lot of this can be traced back to the aforementioned surfing boom of the 1960s. Gidget (somehow it always comes back to Gidget) introduced surfing to the mainstream in 1959, followed by a tide of copycat beach films that firmly placed the sport in the public consciousness, which is how we end up with a scene of Batman and Joker surfing in 1967.
This first boom in surf culture also bled into media other than film and TV. The year 1966 saw the introduction of the Silver Surfer in Marvel comics, an immortal herald for a planet-consuming god-analogue who…also happened to surf for some reason.
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Jack Kirby described the origins of the Silver Surfer in an interview with The Comics Journal, saying “He came in when everybody began surfing — I read about it in the paper.” He went on to explain, “The kids in California were beginning to surf. I couldn’t do an ordinary teenager surfing so I drew a surfboard with a man from outer space on it.”
Jack’s quote really gets to the heart of how this happens. Producers, writers and artists see a trend in youth culture, and then try to replicate it to grab their attention. However, since successful producers, writers and artists are often not that young themselves, they generally don’t understand the trend in a holistic way, and kind of just stick in the signifiers hoping that it works. While it really took off in the ’60s, the ’70s weren’t immune to the siren song of adding surf into an otherwise unrelated movie. For instance, when Charlie didn’t surf in 1979’s Apocalypse Now.
While it had been going on for decades at this point, the phenomena then became amplified by the neon-soaked obsession with extreme sports in the ’80s and ’90s. The difference this time was surf apparel. Brands like Ocean Pacific expanded their market to include not only surfers, but people who wanted to look like surfers. In a 1987 New York Times article, Michael Gross writes “Retail sales of surfing goods, which grew slowly to $70 million in 1960 to $200 million in 1970, jumped to $1billion by 1980.” By the time the article was published, that number had already skyrocketed to $1.5 billion, but Gross goes on to explain that “only a quarter of that money is being spent on surfboards.”
The amount of young people who were interested in surf culture was exponentially higher. Not only that, but the interest in surf culture was also mostly divorced from the actual sport of surfing itself, since the majority of them were just mimicking surf culture via surf apparel. So now you have a lot more producers, writers and artists noticing that the kids are into surfing, and this time they’re even less likely to see those kids actually doing any surfing. It’s the perfect storm of conditions that lead to once again sticking a bunch of random surf scenes into movies, like Snake Plissken and Peter Fonda riding a tsunami in Escape From L.A. in 1996:
Or Batman getting back on a board, this time while skydiving, in Batman & Robin in 1997:
Or James Bond riding a different tsunami in Die Another Day in 2002.
Which brings us back to Poochie. By the late ’90s and ’00s, the trend of adding surfing into things had become hacky enough for it to be ripe for parody. Krusty The Clown suggesting to add “a nice schmear of surfer” wasn’t a producer trying to desperately appeal to youth – it was a comedy writer parodying that producer. The snake had eaten its tail, and the random surfing scene was a joke itself, which is how we eventually get to Paul Rudd’s surf instructor character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall:
All throughout this time, there were other, more genuine depictions of surfing in fiction: Big Wednesday was a coming of age drama about surfers against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Point Break is a ridiculous free for all of crime and extreme sports that at the heart of it actually understands the deep emotional relationship surfers have with their pursuit. North Shore has that one scene where Turtle says, “Nobody listens to Turtle.”
However, as much as I appreciate a work of art that’s truly about surfing, I’ll never not be entertained by the insane ways in which it will pop up in places where it doesn’t belong.
