Personally I’m glad they’re reviving the beach-party
franchise. The 1960s beach movies were superb, in their way: Frankie and Annette,
and Harvey Lembeck, and the Himalayan Suspension Technique, and from time to
time people like Luciana Paluzzi and Dwayne Hickman and Don Rickles.
But I mourn the loss of the original beach kids. I
mourned Annette Funicello’s passing a few months ago in this blog. And now,
very late, I’ve discovered that another member of the Beach Party cadre left us
some years ago: Jody McCrea.
Jody was the son of handsome / beefy actor Joel McCrea and actress Frances Dee. He was a
nice-looking man who very much took after his father. Take a look at these
photos of the two of them:
In the Beach Party movies, he played a character named
“Deadhead,” and sometimes “Bonehead.” He was the designated dummy. He was big
and adorable and stupid. In one of the beach party movies, he finds a mermaid
(naturally, none of his friends believes him), and they fall in love!
He was a bodybuilder, as you can probably tell from the
above pics. He was well over six feet tall, as was his father. (Jody seldom
took his shirt off. Partner said: “Well, naturally he didn’t take off his
shirt. He would have make Frankie Avalon look pathetic.”)
He made a few more movies after the beach fad died, but
mostly left show business after the 1960s. He became a rancher in New Mexico,
where he died of a heart attack in 2009.
I didn’t know of his death until the other day, when
Apollonia and I began researching him.
I was so sorry.
Annette’s dead, and Jody too.
They were the spirit of youth to us, back in the mid-1960s.
Knowing that they’re dead is very depressing for us older folks.
It means that we might die too.
Unless we can figure out a way out of it.
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