Last week I talked about Shatner in the '80s "teens out of control" flick
Broken Angel where he played a concerned Dad who wondered what was the matter with kids today. Today's film put The Shat on the other side of that equation. The early Sixties may well have been more of a time of chance than the latter part of the decade. With the rise of Rock and Roll (even in this pre-Beatles era) and "race" records, the conformity of the 50s was beginning to wane in the youth of the nation. As we all know by the mid to late 60s the pendulum had swung in favor of the hippie free love movement and anti-war protests. The makers of
The Explosive Generation fashioned a movie that was prescient of the changes in youth culture, and even though the actions the teens take might not seem so "explosive" to us now, these were the kind of events that lit the fuse of the cultural explosion. Of course, as always, and I'm sure he'd be the first to say, William Shatner created that spark of revolution.
