EDITOR’S NOTE: Wild In the Streets was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1973 and March 1, 1974.

Barry Shear (Across 110th Street) directed and Robert Thom (Death Race 2000) wrote this youth-oriented movie that yeah, is kind of heavy handed, but it also has Shelley Winters trying to escape a barbed wire fence on a prison and I’m all for that.

Rock singer and revolutionary Max Frost (Christopher Jones) leads the Troopers, a band that lives with him in a Beverly Hills mansion. They are 15-year-old guitarist and legal mastermind Billy Cage (Kevin Coughlin),  anthropologist Stanley X (Richard Pryor) playing drums, ex-child star Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi) on backing vocals and hook-handed bass player Abraham Salteen (Larry Bishop) on bass guitar and trumpet. Their song “Shape of Things to Come” would end up coming out in the real world and hitting #22 on the charts; it’s really Paul Wibier  and his band The 13th Power.

An entire album of songs would come out, including the song “Fifty Two Per Cent,” which explains to their fans that 52% of the world’s population is 25 or younger. That means that they can rise and take over.

Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook) wants to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 and decides to use Max’s popularity to get some attention. It blows up because Max and the band sing a song called “Fourteen or Fight!” and demand the voting age be lowered to 14. Protests start all over the country, but Max and the Senate candidate come together and announce that the new age should be 15 and Max introduces a new song: “Fifteen and Ready.”

The politician thought the band was done with politics. They’re just getting started.

When a Congressman from Sally LeRoy’s home district dies, the band enters her in the special election because she’s the only one old enough to run. She easily wins thanks to all the young voters. Fergus’ son Jimmy (Michael Margotta) joins the group, the voting age does become 14, teens spike Washington’s water with LSD and send teenage escorts to keep all the senators occupied.

The Grand Old Party gets Max on their side and he runs for President. Once he wins, he turns on them. Everyone over thirty must retire and be dosed on LSD for life in re-education camps. Fergus tries to bring Max’s parents in (Bert Freed and Shelley Winters) but he feels nothing for them. His first political act was exploding their car. He even tries to kill the new President, who soon takes over and round up the Fergus family.

Does Max change the world? Yes. He takes the military out of every country, puts actual smart people and computers in charge of the gross national product, ships surplus food to starving countries, breaks apart the secret police and turns America into a hedonistic place. But the problem is that even if the rest of the world is following, now the under ten kids want to put the old people — those in their twenties, like Max — in camps someday.