Radio Sweethearts

One time, I was out at my mom’s house, picking her up to go to dinner. When I went in the house, my mom was still in her work clothes, engrossed in a classic beach party movie on AMC. You know the kind - no real plot, lots of dancing, Frankie, Annette and some kid named Goofball (all of these movies have a kid named Goofball).

Anyway, I sat down, and we started watching the movie, and it was awful. Every time a plot started to emerge, the action would stop and everyone would start dancing. I loved it. It was campy, and it lent itself well to Mystery Science Theatre-esque critique.

The point of all this? Today on NPR’s most emailed list, there was a link to a video about the worst beach movies of all time. I got kind of excited and clicked on the link, only to find that the video wasn’t what I expected.

The video embedded into the story is a review of the week’s movie. It starts with Slate’s Mark Jordan Legan talking about “Stepbrothers”, and I don’t want to know if Will Ferrell would be Frankie or Annette.

At the end of the write up, it does say “Below, Legan also offers a tour of more modern (but equally bad?) summer fare — like Step Brothers” in regards to the embedded video, but still - I wanted to see bad beach party movies.

A bit of digging led to the actual bad beach party movie round-up. NPR, I love it when you use video, but I also love it when the online-only content is what I think it’s going to be.