In September ’69, in the aftermath of the summer of Woodstock and Manson, the first episode of Scooby-Doo, which combined both the goofiness and sinister undertones that the adult world saw in hippie culture, like, hit the screens and in the long hangover of the Summer of Love, as hippie burnout Danny says in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, they were selling Beatle wigs in Woolworths. In 1968, “The Monkees” TV show – which had channeled the same Pop Art zeitgeist as the 1966 “Batman” show as well as the pop music of the Beatles – was cancelled, and the group – as by now it had evolved from its manufactured origins – released their unabashedly psychedelic movie Head. Yet that still left two years for its spirit to seep into the mainstream, and it manifested itself in many and varied ways. Popular history dictates that the hippie dream really took flight in 1967 with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Summer of Love and peaked in August ’69 at Woodstock, but was killed that same year by a combination of the Manson murders (which actually took place a few days before Woodstock, but that’s mythology for you), the Stooges debut album (ditto, although its shock waves took a while to spread) and the final blow of the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway that December.
