The 1960s
1963 | Rising Competition from Television
During the early 1960s, family movies became increasingly popular in Little Rock. These films’ appeal began growing in the late 1950s, but they really peaked in 1963, comprising 10% of the movies shown in Arkansas’s capital city.
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Family
Movies
What Was
Popular?
Genre Trends of the 1960s
Rise of Family Movies
Family movies' rise to fame was the result of one of Hollywood’s strategies to combat the increasing competition from television. As the number of televisions in American’s homes grew and movie ticket sales dropped, Hollywood turned to its most reliable customers: children and young adults.
Initially, movies theaters played matinee shows that children could attend with or without parent supervision. While these films featured young stars, they preached adult morals. Then, with the competition from television, the studios switched to more teen and youth films that specifically targeted the younger audience and catered to youth trends and attitudes. They casted young actors who were similar in age to their target audience to draw more crowds of young people, and the storylines differed from the previous family films by focusing on the protagonists’ coming-of-age stories.
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At the beginning of 1950, almost every Disney film was animated, but by the 1960s, less than 10% were.
Hollywood also made more family movies in the early 1960s because they were low-risk films. Although the major studios did make a few big picture family films, overall, they tended to be lower-budget films, making them more cost effective for the financially struggling studios. Once they had produced a string of successful family movies, they repeated making similar ones.
For example, Walt Disney studios switched from making animation movies to live-action ones. At the beginning of 1950, almost every Disney film was animated, but by the 1960s, less than 10% were. Disney realized by tapping into the youth culture and featuring young stars in live-action films, it could draw in more children and teenagers. Moreover, Disney’s movies were low-risk because they did not discuss controversial topics. They presented fun utopian-like worlds that completely washed over racial and social conflict. Instead, they offered a few hours of light entertainment to escape from the anxieties and conflicts that permeated people’s everyday life.
