In the 1960s, surfing was exploding on both coasts. I know. When I was 14, I bought my first board for 50 bucks, a humongous 9.5 ft. Jacobs with a battered nose, and rode the wild surf of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Back then, the coolest things a young cat could be was in a garage band or a surfer.
There was a glut of sixties Hollywood surfing films in which stars like Fabian, Elvis, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello never got wet. And then there were the low-budget indie documentaries that featured bona-fide surfers like Ricky Grigg and Greg Noll riding real waves. Blue Surf-Ari was one of those films. Despite threadbare plots, cheesy voice overs and lots of footage of teenyboppers milling around waiting for something to happen, these flicks did deliver when it came to awesome wave action. What the low-budget surf films lacked in narrative, they made up in some dynamite footage of surfers shredding down the walls of bigass waves, shooting the curl and being battered by merciless bodies of water.
This is for the old skool. Dig those longboards.