Creating Secret Spot
by John Lamb, Laguna Beach, CA - 1973
In the rearview, "Secret Spot" was a pivotal milestone in my life, but at the time I was simply making an animated film about one of the things I loved most… surfing. For years, I'd been animating my surf-rat character "Willy Makitt" while riding my own secret spots on the southern California coastline. So when I began to pencil out Willy's incredible ride, the transition was natural.
Wildly enough, my first two animated shorts, "Secret Spot" and "Rocket 88" made it to the big screen. As the opener to Forgotten Island of Santosha, by Larry and Roger Yates, "Secret Spot" was among the first modern animated surfing cartoons. It included something I'd dreamed of doing but didn't seem possible: surfing up the face of a wave, flying out of the water only to re-enter the wave firmly in control. Willy pulled off this stunt with style in 1974, and the aerial would show up roughly 10 years later with pro surfers introducing and mastering the stunt in the 1980s.
"Rocket 88" was featured in the iconic Five Summer Stories by MacGillivray-Freeman Films in 1975. In "Rocket 88", Willy Makitt pulls off a "shove it", where the board is kick flipped and spins, while the rider lands perfectly to continue the ride. The shove it would show up first in skateboarding in 1979, and would eventually make its way into surfing as a brand of new, more extreme tricks were introduced in the 1980s and beyond.
While "Secret Spot" and "Rocket 88" paddled off into the sunset of psychedelic inspired animation, Willy Makitt took on a life of his own and was featured on on Hang Ten’s fiberglass skateboards in 1975. This great historical news clip on “the phenomenon of skateboarding” includes footage of the Willy Makitt Hang Ten skateboards being manufactured.
2009 - Oceanside, Ca.
In 2009, the California Surf Museum built a new location in downtown Oceanside.
The museum curator at the time, Ric Riavic, approached me with some great news... the new museum had the perfect location to feature Willy and pay tribute to "Secret Spot" by dedicating a permanent, immersive exhibit. Murals had been my primary medium for a number of years, and this exhibit made perfect sense.
Totally stoked, I looked at the space and returned plans to blow their doors off. We’d take the spirit of Secret Spot and enhance it with the biggest wave ever bombed by Willy Makit, and complete the experience with indigenous coastal scenery, a stoked tiki in a hot rod, a VW combi filled with surfer girls and a vintage woody. The museum's board of directors unanimously accepted.
Humbled and honored, "Secret Spot" is now a permanent installation at the California Surf Museum.