The first beach flick with surprising MINDFOOD minus the goofiness

The movie’s iconic because it’s about way more than girl-meets-boy frolics, although there’s some of that. For instance, Kahuna says "Who says so?" in response to how we 'have' to live our lives. Later, he recognizes "everything has a price" or, put differently, everything has a tradeoff. He desperately seeks total freedom, but realizes it doesn’t really exist in our present world, but he instinctively seeks it. His epiphany leads to a turning-point lifestyle choice.

Then there's Moondoggie who admires Kahuna and intends to follow in his footsteps as an alternative to his staunch father's more conventional path to status. Yet it's still about status for Moondoggie and not a lifestyle decision for its own sake, as it supposedly is with Kahuna.

What happens to Kahuna's pet bird, Flyboy, inspires a surprisingly weighty conversation between Kahuna and Gidget, which offers insights about Kahuna's past, including his time in the Korean War and how it negatively affected him. He was obviously working out a case of PTSD. Dropping out of the mainstream for five years and living on the beach was what he needed to get it out of his system and, by the end of the movie, he seems back for the attack. Entrepreneur Steve Jobs had a season in his life where he basically lived as a homeless person and abused drugs, searching out life's most important questions. He now says it was an instrumental period in his life.

Even the idea of Kahuna being tempted to have sex with the under-aged Gidget was bold for 1959. Kahuna genuinely didn’t intend to do so, and was actually trying to teach Gidge a lesson, but he wasn’t above doing it since he had been drinking and she was sorta insisting. Shortly later, Moondoggie vehemently reprimands Kahuna for it.