A quick market
As soon as the hippies became a news story, entertainment companies saw a market. Television networks, film studios and record labels all wanted a share of the young audience, and they often did not wait to understand the movement before borrowing its look. The results ranged from sharp comedy to quickly made exploitation, and they show how fast the counterculture became a product.
A note on timing: Laugh-In, one of the best-known examples, premiered in January 1968, so it belongs to the aftermath of 1967 rather than to the year itself. The Monkees began in 1966, and most of the hippie-themed films discussed here were released in 1967 and 1968.
The Monkees
The Monkees was a comedy series that premiered on NBC in September 1966. It was modelled on the idea of a band of young musicians, in the style of the Beatles’ films, and the four members were cast for the show. It was a pop product from the start, with songs supplied by professional writers and studio players. As a Monkees television band, the group also sold records in large numbers, but here the interest is the show.
The programme’s look was playful and quick, with fast editing and visual jokes that echoed 1960s film comedy. It did not set out to depict the counterculture directly, but it carried a long-haired, informal image into millions of homes. In 1967 the group pushed for greater control over its recordings, a dispute that echoed wider arguments about authenticity. The series won Emmy awards in 1967 and ended in 1968, after two seasons. Their film Head, released late in 1968, made fun of the whole machine and was a commercial disappointment.
Hippie films
Hollywood studios, particularly smaller companies aimed at young audiences, produced films about drugs and youth culture. The Trip (1967), directed by Roger Corman and written by Jack Nicholson, followed a man’s LSD experience. Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) dramatised tension between young people and police in Los Angeles. Psych-Out and Wild in the Streets followed in 1968. These films often combined a warning tone, to placate censors and parents, with scenes of colourful excess to attract viewers.
Most were low-budget and short-lived, and many people in the counterculture considered them inaccurate or condescending. Their significance lay mainly in what they said about studio thinking, and in the way they led, with others, toward the more successful youth pictures of the next few years. Other mainstream releases such as The Graduate dealt with the generation gap without focusing on hippies at all.
Laugh-In and television
Television took the style in a different direction. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In appeared first as a special in the autumn of 1967 and then as a weekly series in January 1968 on NBC. It used rapid sketches, bright colours, body paint and catchphrases, and its sense of humour was influenced by the psychedelic look without being countercultural in a political sense. It made the style easy to watch for a broad audience that might never visit San Francisco.
At the more politically pointed end, the Smothers Brothers faced repeated conflicts with network executives over censorship. Networks wanted young viewers, but they were less ready to broadcast material that criticised the war or officials.
Dramas followed. The Mod Squad, which began in autumn 1968, featured young characters with a countercultural appearance working with the police. The pattern of taking the surface of the movement and fitting it into a conventional format was clear by then.
The commercial use of hippie style
Advertising and merchandise followed the same route. Companies used flowers, bright patterns and slogans to sell goods to young buyers, and some adopted language such as “groovy” in their copy. It had become unremarkable to see psychedelic design on packaging or in department store windows.
This did not please everyone in the movement. Some residents of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district felt that mass-media attention had pulled in tourists and spoiled what they had been trying to build. Entertainment companies, for their part, said they were giving audiences what they wanted.
Reading the evidence
It is worth treating screen depictions with care. They tell us more about how older producers imagined young people than about daily life in the Haight. Taken together, though, they show something real: by the end of 1967 the counterculture was a recognised commercial category, and a style that had started on the margins was being sold across the whole country.