gavin6942 The crown jewel to ten years of Bruce Brown surfing documentaries. Brown follows two young surfers around the world in search of the perfect wave, and ends up finding quite a few in addition to some colorful local characters.Now, how seriously this film was meant to be taken, I don't know. It is an incredibly honest look at surfing around the world, and has plenty of good scenes. But it also has subtle humor due to Brown ribbing his friends. Who was his intended audience? The film now (2016) operates as both great documentary on surfing, but also as a bit of a time capsule. This was 1966, and it was an "endless summer"... just before the "summer of love". There is no way that Brown could have seen this film as indicative of the era, but in many ways it is.

ptb-8 Just get the DVD and settle into your favorite chair, add some pals, a few kids, some snacks and a drink and you have the complete setting and the perfect film for 90 minutes to make you delighted with life for the next 90 days. I first saw the ES in 1964 when Bruce Brown came to Australia and would hire old cinemas on a night they were usually closed. He ran the film silent and spoke the narration over the microphone live in the theater! The word of mouth of this film was 100% as the entertainment value... and in a city thronging with teen surfers desperate to see their sport on a real movie screen, this film projected in 16mm in a crumbling 2500 seat suburban theater (struggling to stay open) was a joyous hilarious revelation that has us kids and older pals living the dream ourselves at our local beaches. This is a perfect piece of family entertainment and you are encouraged to get it see it show it and keep it to remind yourself at what fun life can be. It is a life reaffirming experience and we are all the richer as humans for having it in our lives. The only other two films I feel this strongly about, and they are so different as films... are the 30s musical ROBERTA and the new documentary THE BALLET RUSSE. A short film called THE RED JACKET is equally strong and humanist... each of these films will do for your senses and heart to elate you beyond your wildest wishes. The music score for THE ENDLESS SUMMER by the pop group the Sandals (!) is equally unforgettable. It is worth buying as a CD when you get the DVDs of The Endless Summer, Endless Summer 2 and other Bruce Brown comedy surfing documentary valentines.

lrathome Beautifully filmed, wonderfully nostalgic trip to a simpler time. A labor of love by those who lived the life and embraced the philosophy of the lifestyle. Characterized by friendly exploration of different beaches (as they chased Summer around the globe) as well as different cultures; a true escape in every sense of the word. These ambassadors of the sport don't perform a high energy showcase of different surfing moves, rather they exhibit the beauty and grace of 60's style surfing, making friends along the way. A must for anyone who has ever been on a board or dreamed of it. A great film for the whole family, I put it on on a Sunday night to forget the stress of the upcoming week. Watch it over and over-- it gets better every time.

Piafredux It's not just the mid-60's surfing scene time-capsule of a film that gives Bruce Brown's 'The Endless Summer' its timeless appeal. The film appeared just as jet travel was becoming commonplace, just as, for the first time in history, young people could afford to sojourn globally almost at will, so the world-circling quest of the movie's two surfers also captures the first movement by affluent youths to hitherto inaccessible lands. 'The Endless Summer' is thus not only a surfing film, in its time it was one of the many emerging spurs to today's so-called "eco-tourism." 'TES' is one of the most easygoing and pleasant films to watch - and to listen to in the form of Brown's laid-back California-accented (lots of very Round R's) narration - even though the narration is, at times, a trifle overly self-conscious it's never abrasive, insulting, or - one of the early two thousand-aughts' irritating "entertainment" prerequisites - "edgy." Younger viewers might feel baffled, or scornfully amused, by Brown's gingerly phrased admiration for an Australian woman's then-cutting-edge-scanty two-piece cozzie: the bikini in question is nowadays far from daring bathing attire. Youngsters accustomed to instant worldwide communications, and addicted to their I-Pods will also snicker at the teensy, ginsu transistor radio one of the travelling surfers packs in his suitcase. Of course the surfing gear is also antiquated - battleship-big boards sporting enormous skegs, for example, and no bungees tethering board to surfer. Also dating the film is Brown's genuine shock at the exorbitant cost of a Dakar hotel room and that establishment's price for a cup of coffee: thirty dollars a night, and a dollar a cup. Brown also speaks his horror at the high cost of petrol in Africa - almost a WHOLE DOLLAR for a gallon!: a comment made when gas cost Americans no more than 35¢ a gallon. Such then-shocking prices would scarcely provoke so much as a yawn from today's much more affluent (spoiled) and jaded teens who have, it seems, been lamentably misled to disbelieve that all of their world's problems are the fault of intrinsically avaricious and malevolent "dead white guys." Though the quaintness of Brown's laconic, good-natured narration dates 'TES,' as time marches on this quaintness also burnishes the film's appeal - it's just an endearing, lovely, wistful gaze at simpler, gentler halcyon days.'TES's' photography also remains pleasing - perhaps because Brown wasn't afraid to linger on, for one example, long establishing shots; and these lingering shots help greatly to communicate the film's overt and underlying soothing natural rhythms of the sea and the sky, and of our planet spinning for itself its cosmological alternations of night and day. The almost, but not quite, campy soundtrack music fits the period and subject perfectly - no Dick Dale frenetic here, just one surfer-filmmaker's enjoyably idiosyncratic blending of surfing music and scarcely updated travelogue scoring.I first saw 'TES' upon its 1966 theatrical release and, though I wasn't then and I've remained uninterested in surfing, it's a movie I can watch and enjoy regularly - perhaps because those lingering shots take me back to a time before gratuitous shock-schlock and instant-gratification became the be-alls and end-alls of today's so-called entertainment. 'TES' is, quite simply, pleasant and relaxing, and yet its rewarding and entertaining. In the spirit of its time, I recall feeling in the theatre during my first viewing of 'TES' that the film could have been about The Peace Corps if surfers had been allowed to serve in it as United States goodwill ambassadors.'TES's' latter-day sequels do not, and they never will, create the same warm wave of pleasure and joy and contentment that 'The Endless Summer' generated in, and propagated among, 1966's viewers. Because when it debuted there'd been no earlier film like it; and 'TES' ran for months in theatres, from beginning to end of that golden summer of '66 - a phenomenon unrepeatable in today's utterly profit-driven film industry.There you have it: 'The Endless Summer' wasn't a one-slam-dunk-weekend box-office blockbuster proposal on some market-study/focus-group-driven parent corporations' financial forecast: it was a labor of love, and when you see 'The Endless Summer' you feel the earnest, genuine, pure-hearted, virginal love that Bruce Brown poured into filming and editing it - love that you can't even come close to feeling from any of 'The Endless Summer's' imitators or sequels.