Comments on: Looking for examples of surfers, people talking about surfers, or people depicting surfers in media.

Question: Looking for examples of surfers, people talking about surfers, or people depicting surfers in media.

iamkimiam — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:11:14 -0800

Looking for depictions of surfers in mainstream media. Examples by people who aren't actually surfers (actors, reporters, wannabe surfers) are great, but people in the surf community are good too. The more common, well-known examples are better. I'm thinking of scenes from movies, passages in books, news stories, documentaries, blogs, comedy skits, but unscripted examples are best.

I've got the big ones covered...Point Break, Surf's Up, Endless Summer, etc.

Here are a few examples of the type of things I'm looking for (surfers, non-surfers, scripted, unscripted all good):

Documentaries about surfers/surfing (I've pretty much got this nailed, but if there's some good historical clips of surfers talking somewhere that I haven't thought about, well, that would be great. Bonus points if the bit is relatively well-known or representative of the community in some way.

A scene from a popular movie featuring surfers talking.

An interview or skit or piece on a talk show, SNL, comedy bit, news spot.

This is for a research paper. Thanks!

By: box

box — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:15:12 -0800

Jeff Spicoli

By: Sara Anne

Sara Anne — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:18:43 -0800

Greg Brady's surfing disaster in Tthe Brady Bunch Hawaii special

By: ShootTheMoon

ShootTheMoon — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:18:56 -0800

Surfer on the morning news in LA.

By: Shepherd

Shepherd — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:29:21 -0800

Have you covered John from Cincinnati yet?

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:34:15 -0800

Gidget!

By: Mach5

Mach5 — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:47:00 -0800

Sublime is a very 'surfer' band, with songs like Paddle Out. I'm assuming you have the whole genre of surf music covered, but if you don't, two words: Dick Dale.

By: Cool Papa Bell

Cool Papa Bell — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:06:23 -0800

Cameron Diaz in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

By: cgc373

cgc373 — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:10:46 -0800

Kate Bosworth & friends in Blue Crush: The whole movie is about a surf competition, and it doesn't completely suck.

By: DWRoelands

DWRoelands — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:22:19 -0800

Don't forget Skeet Surfing!

It's the opening song from Val Kilmer's movie, "Top Secret".

By: The corpse in the library

The corpse in the library — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:23:55 -0800

Have you checked The Encyclopedia of Surfing? Matt Warshaw's other books might be helpful, too.

By: ROTFL

ROTFL — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:24:06 -0800

Last year, on the Sundance Channel documentary/interview series "Iconoclasts," Eddie Vedder and Laird Hamilton interviewed each other. IIRC, it was filmed at Hamilton's surfside house.

By: Asherah

Asherah — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:24:49 -0800

North Shore is heavy on the cheese factor, but is an old favorite and may feature something close to what you are looking for. If not, its still entertaining!

By: cgc373

cgc373 — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:26:29 -0800

Oh, and the "Charlie don't surf" scene from Apocalypse Now. (It's about three minutes into this eight-minute clip; the line itself is at the very beginning of Part 1, just before the "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter attack sequence.)

By: donovan

donovan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:31:28 -0800

Craig Venter is invariably described as a "ex-surfer."

By: nicwolff

nicwolff — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:33:50 -0800

Riding Giants, and the surfing scenes at the beginning of Dogtown and Z-Boys.

By: General Malaise

General Malaise — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:36:37 -0800

Seconding Blue Crush for the stunning cinematography alone. I've heard a lot of folks say that nothing has ever captured what surfing is like nearly quite as well.

By: cgc373

cgc373 — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:56:45 -0800

donovan reminded me of Garrett Lisi, who journalists describe as a "surfer-physicist." Last year he published a candidate for a "theory of everything" that was taken seriously by other physicists. (So he's not a crank, so far as I know.)

By: Stewriffic

Stewriffic — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:11:36 -0800

Menino do Rio, but I have no idea where you'd get a copy of it. I saw it in an undergrad Portuguese class. Lotsa surfin'. Here's a short summary from the NYT.

Oh, and the song with the same title by Caetano Veloso is a great one. I thought they were perhaps related, but Caetano's song doesn't show up on the movie's soundtrack.

By: jason's_planet

jason's_planet — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:19:19 -0800

You almost certainly have Step Into Liquid on your list but in the event that you don't, I'll mention it here.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:38:01 -0800

Puberty Blues

By: iamkimiam

iamkimiam — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:16:30 -0800

ShootTheMoon, that is just the type of stuff I am looking for!

Examples of surfers talking, people talking about surfers, or people pretending to be (or identify with) surfers through the use of language.

Keep 'em coming folks!

By: rdr

rdr — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:54:20 -0800

I know you wrote that you had documentaries covered but if you get a chance look at Swell. It's a very sweet movie and it does something interesting with how surfers are represented. It was made at the beginning of the upswing in the interest in women surfers before Roxy Girl and companies like it really got rolling. To me it seems like there was a lot more space then to portray women surfers as human being who surf than there ever was to go beyond the "whoa dude, gnarly wave" stereotypes of male surfers in the mainstream media.

By: roofus

roofus — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:04:26 -0800

Kelly Slater appeared in 10 episodes of Baywatch as a surfer dude.

By: roofus

roofus — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:06:51 -0800

Oh and YouTube is barred at my workplace, but I recommend a video called something like "Most insightful articulate interview ever" in which a San Diego surfer tries to describe how awesomely gnarly and bodacious the waves are.
I think it's this one.

By: goo

goo — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:53:47 -0800

Some Aussie classics:

Morning of the Earth

Coolangatta Gold