Tuesday, July 01, 2025

Sound of the Surf: When California was Fun

It is the only rock & roll subgenre that has largely been instrumental. Yet, ironically, its most popular artists are considered phonies by the real fans, because of their vocal harmonies. They would be the Beach Boys. Surf musicians might have played for beach bums, but virtuoso guitar work was always part of package. The original Surf music pioneers look back on Surf culture’s early 1960s heyday in director-cinematographer Thomas Duncan’s documentary, Sound of the Surf, which releases today on VOD and DVD.

Its closest cousins were garage rock and punk rock, but the founding Surf music musicians had two major influences. Not surprisingly, 1950s instrumental rock guitarists like Duane Eddy and Link Wray were significant musical role models. However, most of the Surf music veterans have more to say about jazz artists, especially big band drummer Gene Krupa.

In fact, jazz musician Tom Morey, who also invented the Morey bogie board, expressly compares jazz and surfing, because both require improvisation. Alas, nobody discusses Bud Shank by name, but his soundtracks for Bruce Brown’s surfing documentaries are duly acknowledged. Regardless, jazz collectively gets its full due.

Dick Dale claims the title as the original Surf music guitarist for himself and pretty much everyone Duncan interviewed agrees with him. Indeed, Dale had some of the biggest Surf hits, including his reverb heavy arrangement of “Misirlou,” which became popular again thanks to
Pulp Fiction. Eddie Bertrand, co-founder of the Belairs and Eddie & the Showmen represents a not-so-distant second.

Yet, one of the more prominent voices turns out to be Kathy Marshall, who gets her overdue credit for her contributions to the Surf music scene. Technically, she never recorded commercially, but she performed regularly with Eddie & the Showmen and the Blazers, even though she was still a teenager. Plus, viewers also hear from Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman, a.k.a. the real “Gidget,” whose father wrote the novel the film and TV series were based on, building on her accounts of her new surfer friends.

Appleseed Alpha, on Tubi

In this film, the two heroic protagonists of Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed franchise sort of get the DC treatment. They are the same characters fans know and love, but they now have a new narrative continuity—familiar, but slightly different. It is also sort of a prequel, but Briareos is already a cyborg—and partly on the fritz. Unfortunately, the world is also still mostly destroyed, especially the post-apocalyptic New York City, or perhaps it is just post-Mamdani. Regardless, hope is in short supply, until Briareos and his comrade-life partner Deunan decide to go out and find some in Shinji Aramaki’s anime feature, Appleseed Alpha, which starts streaming today on Tubi.

WWIII bombed out Times Square, yet the jumbotron remains, broadcasting old, pointless propaganda. Some people still call the City home, including the cyborg gangster, Two Horns (because of his Viking-like headpiece). Unfortunately, Deunan owes Two Horns money, so she and Briareos must complete dangerous assignments, like that of the opening prologue, to pay off the debt.

Rather ominously, the two former soldiers suspect Two Horns has been setting them up for failure. Yet, they have little choice, because Two Horns’s maintenance guy is pretty much the only game in the post-apocalyptic town. Without power, Briareos cannot do much, so they accept the next crummy gig: neutralizing and scavenging a pack of rogue soldier-bots outside of town.

This would be easier work if Briareos were in better shape. Regardless, things get interesting when a group of mech-mercs drive into the drone zone with their abductees, Olson, an enhanced but not full cybernetic former soldier, and Iris, the young girl he was protecting. It turns out they are from the rumored sanctuary of Olympus, which will mean a lot more to longstanding franchise fans. They are also on a mission that Briareos and Deunan will join and ultimately embrace. Meanwhile, the shadowy cabal trying to capture Iris follows their trail back to Two Horns, bringing him into the fray as an unstable wild card.

Essentially,
Alpha arranges things differently on the timeline, but it closely hews to the heart and spirit of the previous anime films. Briareos and Deunan are a compelling beauty-and-the-beast couple, who have terrific battlefield chemistry together. That last part is important, because Aramaki unleashes wall-to-wall action. This kind of light-mecha combat really plays to his animation strengths.

The computer-generated motion-capture (but not full rotoscope) animation looks better here than it did in Aramaki’s later film,
Starship Trooper: Traitor of Mars. Perhaps the distinctive, practically robotic look of Briareos (who reportedly influenced the design of Blomkamp’s Chappie—you can see it in the ears) and Two Horns helped focus the efforts at humanization on Deunan, Olson, and Iris.