High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Gidget Grows Up is a 1969 television film directed by James Sheldon and starring Karen Valentine, Paul Lynde and Edward Mulhare, freely adapted from the novel Gidget Goes New York by Frederick Kohner. It premiered on ABC on December 30, 1969, and was intended as a pilot for a possible new Gidget series, possibly a sequel to the 1960s sitcom Gidget.