Rathbone. Musical guest stars The musical talent that AIP hired was a mixed bag of established artists and those who were about to break. Shimmy sensation Candy Johnson appeared in the first four films (appearing with her band, The Exciters, in the third film, Bikini Beach). Dr. Pepper spokesmodel Donna Loren appeared and sang in four films beginning with Muscle Beach Party. The aforementioned Dick Dale & the Del-Tones appeared in the first two films, and a 14-year-old Stevie Wonder performed in the second and third films. An up-and-coming Nancy Sinatra acts and sings a song in Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (two months after her hit record "These Boots Were Made For Walking" was released), backed up by the also-yet-to-break Bobby Fuller Four. General manager of American International Records, Al Simms, also commissioned the recording of four songs by his daughter Lu Ann Simms, released on soundtracks and singles for Beach Party and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Other acts that appeared include James Brown & The Famous Flames, Lesley Gore, The Hondells, The Kingsmen, The Pyramids and The Supremes. Contributions to the genre by other studios All seven of the major studios of the 1960s managed to release at least one film that would later be deemed part of the 'beach party' cycle, either big-budget affairs that they produced themselves, or low-budget knock-offs that they picked up for distribution. With the exception of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Girl Happy (an Elvis Presley vehicle) and United Artists' For Those Who Think Young, none of these were able to duplicate the box-office success of the AIP product. The beach genre peaked in 1965 with no less than 12 features released that year. (The television sitcom Gidget starring 19-year-old Sally Field as the titular California surfer girl, also premiered in 1965, lasting one season.) Similar to AIP, other elements sometimes were blended into the mix – horror, science fiction, spy spoof, college melodrama, etc. – however, unlike the AIP films, none of the following films were sequentially related. Major studios Columbia Pictures Columbia released the mostly surf-less Gidget Goes to Rome in August 1963, and rather than copying what Beach Party had started, the studio released a true "surf drama" in the form of 1964's Ride The Wild Surf, which turned an eye on big wave surfers challenging Waimea Bay – the first surf drama to do so – albeit with the usual