If you’ve ever wondered what Seaside Heights looked like before Snooki, Karma nightclub, and the famous boardwalk brawls, a promotional film produced in 1973 offers an unintentionally hilarious glimpse into another era.
The 14-minute film is meant to convince tourists to spend their summer vacation in Ocean County and Seaside Heights. It features soaring orchestral music, impossibly cheerful narration, and sweeping shots of beaches, amusement rides, miniature golf, fishing boats, and families enjoying the Jersey Shore.
It’s also full of language that perfectly captures how differently America talked about tourism more than 50 years ago.
Perhaps the most memorable line comes while the narrator is describing Seaside’s beach.
“One of the major attractions is its wide and safe beaches for sandcastle builders, amateur sunbathers, swimmers and fans of girl watching.”
Imagine the Ocean County Tourism Department approving that line today.
They wouldn’t.
Seaside even held an annual “most beautiful grandmother parade” back in the day.
The Jersey Shore through a 1973 lens
Watching the film today feels like opening a time capsule.
Women lounging on the beach are casually presented as part of the tourist attraction, something listed alongside swimming and sandcastle building.
Back then, “girl watching” was a common phrase in American pop culture. There were songs about it, magazine articles about it, and countless television shows that treated it as harmless fun.
Today, most tourism professionals would likely consider the phrase outdated at best and objectifying at worst.
It’s probably the single line that reminds viewers this commercial came from another America.
But it isn’t the only one.
The narrator proudly boasts Seaside offers “the highest degree of perfection” for vacationers before promising visitors “the pleasure of sunshine” and describing Ocean County’s “luxurious vegetation.”
The script has all the charm—and all the awkwardness—of 1970s promotional writing.
Before MTV, Seaside Heights was a family town
Ironically, much of the film isn’t wrong.
For decades, Seaside Heights really was one of New Jersey’s quintessential family beach towns.
Founded as a resort community in the early 1900s, the borough incorporated in 1913 and quickly became known for its wide beaches, wooden boardwalk, amusement rides, arcades, and affordable motels.
Unlike Atlantic City, Seaside wasn’t built around casinos.
Unlike Cape May, it wasn’t known for Victorian elegance.
Instead, it became the place where middle-class families from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Quebec, and New England could spend an affordable week at the shore.
The film proudly notes Seaside welcomed more than 70,000 visitors each day during the summer season.
It promotes everything from surf fishing and boating on Barnegat Bay to bicycle riding, playgrounds, miniature golf, roller coasters, seafood restaurants, fireworks, talent shows, and parades.
It even suggests visiting in the spring or fall because “there are no crowds.”
Good luck finding a tourism commercial that tells people not to come during peak season today.
Then came the party years
The Seaside Heights shown in the 1973 film wouldn’t last forever.
Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s and early 2000s, the borough increasingly became known as one of the East Coast’s biggest nightlife destinations.
The boardwalk was still there.
The rides were still there.
But bars, dance clubs and late-night entertainment became just as much of the attraction.
Then came 2009.
MTV debuted Jersey Shore, and suddenly Seaside Heights became internationally famous.
Millions of viewers watched the cast spend summers drinking, partying and fighting along the boardwalk and inside clubs like Karma.
For many visitors, the television show became their first introduction to Seaside Heights.
For longtime residents, it became something else entirely.
While the show generated enormous publicity and tourism, it also permanently altered the town’s image.
Instead of being known as a family beach resort, Seaside became associated with nightlife, bachelor parties, fistfights, and reality television.
Then Sandy changed everything
Three years after Jersey Shore premiered, Superstorm Sandy devastated the borough.
The iconic Jet Star roller coaster ended up partially submerged in the Atlantic Ocean, creating one of the defining images of the storm.
Large sections of the boardwalk were destroyed.
Just as rebuilding began, another disaster struck.
In 2013, a massive boardwalk fire consumed dozens of businesses stretching from Seaside Park into Seaside Heights.
The town suddenly found itself rebuilding twice.
Reinventing Seaside Heights
Over the past decade, borough officials have worked to reshape Seaside Heights’ reputation.
The bars haven’t disappeared.
Neither has the nightlife.
But local leaders have increasingly emphasized family entertainment rather than party culture.
New playgrounds, boardwalk improvements, family festivals, concerts, classic car shows, free movies, fireworks and expanded recreational programming have all become part of that effort.
The amusement rides remain one of the biggest draws on the Jersey Shore.
Casino Pier continues attracting families during the summer, while events throughout the year help extend tourism beyond Memorial Day and Labor Day.
It’s not about eliminating the nightlife.
It’s about reminding visitors there’s far more to Seaside Heights than what MTV showed fifteen years ago.
The commercial accidentally got one thing exactly right
One surprising part of the 1973 film is how little the fundamentals have changed.
The narrator celebrates the same things people still come for today.
The beach.
The boardwalk.
The rides.
The arcades.
The fishing.
The sunsets.
The fireworks.
Those remain Seaside Heights’ biggest attractions more than half a century later.
The biggest difference isn’t the town.
It’s the marketing.
No modern tourism video is going to invite visitors to enjoy “girl watching.”
Today’s commercials would focus on families, accessibility, inclusivity and experiences.
Back then, they focused on sunshine, bikinis, and an almost relentlessly cheerful narrator convinced every vacation in Seaside Heights would become “a dream come true.”
A fascinating piece of Jersey Shore history
As a historical document, the film is fascinating because it captures Seaside Heights before reality television, before social media, before Superstorm Sandy, and before the borough became a national pop culture reference.
It also preserves the optimism of an era when tourism advertising could be wonderfully awkward without anyone thinking twice.
Today, Seaside Heights is still trying to balance its dual identity.
It’s still a nightlife destination.
It’s still a boardwalk town.
And increasingly, it’s trying to remind visitors of something the 1973 film emphasized from the very beginning—that beneath the headlines and reality TV fame, Seaside Heights has always been, at its core, a classic Jersey Shore family resort.
Just don’t expect the next tourism commercial to advertise it as a paradise for “fans of girl watching.”
