MBP – the Parts We Waited for Back in the Day

Sunday afternoons could seem quite tedious when I was a kid in the 70s. The seemingly endless stretch from church until dinner time yawned like dismal doldrums. Your playmates were busy with their own families, so you couldn’t play outside (otherwise the saving grace of our simpler childhood), and your parents might be entertaining guests. Even if the grown-ups left you to your own devices, and you had a TV you could watch in a separate room, pickings were pretty slim.

Outside of football season, the primary choices seemed to be endless hours golf or auto racing. We had a local independent channel that ran movies, but these were not classics. The selection ran to middling fare from the 60s, lightweight stuff they deemed suitable for the time of day, nothing challenging or especially good. There weren’t many entries in that category, so they recycled periodically. The ‘Beach Party’ flicks of the early 60s were perpetually in the mix. Even for a child, these films were obvious garbage, not as clever as the lamest sitcom reruns we endured and never as amusing. Still, they helped pass the time as you half-watched while mindlessly drawing or rereading a comic again.

One entry stood out in this sub-genre of undistinguishable dreck – ‘Muscle Beach Party’. By the time I first heard the title, my eyes had already been opened to the allure of muscle, so when it finally appeared in the upcoming TV listings at the start of the week, my anticipation began building. On the day itself, I was fortunate to be left alone to enjoy it without interruption, though I listened carefully to make sure I wasn’t disturbed.

I can’t say that it rose to my high expectations even then, as it was over a decade old, and the physiques I was already savoring in the mags greatly surpassed anything I saw on screen. Still, in those days, seeing moving muscles being flexed was nearly impossible, so I was pleased, even if circumstances prevented my deriving physical pleasure in the moment. Needless to say, the most memorable images figured in my bedtime reveries for some months afterward.

Looking at it now, the movie itself is not entirely terrible, despite its many trite plot-points and lame jokes. From the point of view of muscle connoisseurship, it is a window onto a world which many of us might perceive as a golden age of sorts, an innocent, simple Eden of muscular men displaying their azing bodies on the beach.

The physiques may seem lackluster compared to what bodybuilders later developed, but they are nonetheless superhuman and remain inspiring. Arguably, the primitive aura makes them even sexier in retrospect.

This video encompasses all scenes featuring the musclemen, or at least those wherein an appreciable amount of muscular flesh is visible. At some points, they just feature as eye-candy in the background. There are some very familiar faces among them, and midway through, the Don Rickles character lines them up for a roll call. In order, we have 1) Biff (Dan Haggerty, later TV’s ‘Grizzly Adams’); 2) Rock (Larry Scott, a yearor so before his first Olympia win); 3) Tug (Gordon Case); 4) Riff (Gene Shuey); 5) Hulk (Chet Yorton); 6) Sulk (Bob Seven); 7) Clod (Steve Merjanian); and 8) Flex (Peter Lupus, of future ‘Mission Impossible’ fame).
The beach scenes are, of course, iconic to those of us whose lust for muscle dawned in the pre-cable/video era. However, the real treat here might well be seeing Scott, Yorton, et al pumping up in the background as Rickles negotiates in musclemen’s home base. Those scenes certainly brought me immense enjoyment watching them.

As we’re now spoiled by the cornucopia of amazing material online, it’s easy to forget the challenges faced by muscle aficionados of earlier generations in getting our ‘fix’, so we need to be thankful for awesome sites like this one.