Hippie Name

Michael: What's your name?
Star: Star.
Michael: Oh, your folks too, huh?
Star: What do you mean?
Michael: Ex-hippies. I came this close to being called Moonbeam or Moonchild, or something like that.

— The Lost Boys

The stock type of name for a New-Age Retro Hippie or their offspring, the Granola Girl, Commune residents, or other folks that are inclined to be on the Hippie Index, dude.

Fictional Hippie Names are commonly composed of words that evoke:

• Nature, such as "Flower" or "Rain".
• Wisdom, enlightenment, and other values/virtues typically espoused by hippies, like "Sage" or "Peace".
• Space and the cosmos, like "Moon".
• And finally, multiple such names strung together, often resulting in a name like "Galaxy Flowerchild".

While these are the stereotypical ways Hippie Names show up in fiction, other names that are otherwise considered unusual, odd, or "groovy" apply as long as the weirdness is attributed to the namers being free-spirited bohemians.

In most cases, children with Hippie Parents bestowed with a Hippie Name find it embarrassing or otherwise unfortunate and may opt to change it to something more "sensible" after one too many Who Names Their Kid "Dude"? reactions from outsiders. Alternatively, someone who decides to become a hippie may rename themselves with a hippie name as an indicator of their new lifestyle.

In real life, hippies may or may not carry such names; many who embraced the lifestyle have rather mundane names.

Likely to be the "Aerith" in an Aerith and Bob situation. There may be some overlap with Floral Theme Naming, Rock Theme Naming, Luke Nounverber, and Darkness Von Gothick Name. Contrast Preppy Name, Ghetto Name, and Hayseed Name, which speak to the character's socioeconomic status and background.

---

Examples:

Comedy

• Bill Bailey, in one of his stand-up shows, jokes about hippies with names like "Incantation Spirit of the Wind" and "Astral Fridge-Magnet".

Comic Books

• The Forever People of the New Gods were based on the hippies and members of youth movements Jack Kirby met in the sixties. They are a group of young, flower child-esque idealists; their members include Mark Moonrider and Beautiful Dreamer.
• Sunny of the Sunny Series has the full first name of Sunshine. She says it's because her mother "liked hippies".
• In The Wicked + The Divine, Emily changed her name to Hazel Oak Ash Thorn Greenway while going through a "druid-y stage" before she became the goddess Amaterasu.

Fan Works

• Psychedelic Epiphany Series: In addition to carrying over New-Age Retro Hippie Tree Hugger from the source material, the story also has her mother's name Willow Song.

Films — Animation

• Soul: The New-Age Retro Hippie crew that helps Joe in the afterlife are named Moonwind, Windstar, Dancerstar, and Dreamerwind.

Films — Live-Action

• During the course of Flashback, it is revealed that FBI yuppie agent John Buckner is the offspring of Hippie Parents, he grew up in a West Coast hippie commune, and his real name is Free.
• Harold and Maude: One of Harold's ill-fated dates is a long-haired, rather nutty flower child-type named Sunshine, who takes his bizarre antics completely in stride.
• The Lost Boys: Michael suspects his love interest Star had flower child parents because of her name and mentions he came very close to having a Hippie Name himself.
  Star: What do you mean?
  Michael: Ex-hippies. I came this close to being called Moon Beam or Moon Child or something.
• Played with by Night Moves. The three environmentalist terrorists do not have hippie names (Josh, Dena, and Harmon). Dena is suggested to be a Rich Kid Turned Social Activist, so it makes sense that she wouldn't have one. However, one of the girls that Josh lives on a commune with is called Surprise.

Literature

• In Blast From The Past by Ben Elton, Polly had an affair with the much older Jack when she was a 16-year-old peace activist. Twenty years later, he tries to kill her to prevent the relationship becoming public knowledge and potentially tanking his chances of becoming the National Security Advisor. She tries to talk him out of it by lying that they have a son together whom she named Misty Dawn (knowing he would expect her to have chosen a name that fits this trope.)
• A minor character in The Clique is tree-hugging eighth grader Sage Redwood, who owns a cafeteria smoothie shop.
• Good Omens: Pepper's full name is Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, which is attributed by the narration to her mother being a hippie. Pepper herself is a hot-headed tomboy in active rebellion against becoming the kind of person you'd expect to bear that name.
• Harry Potter has the resident kook — and a daughter of a kook — Luna Lovegood.
• The Tayledras in Heralds of Valdemar take use-names for themselves of this flavor (Moonwing, Shadowstar, Firesong, etc.) Their distant parent tribe, the Kale'da'in, use similar names with animals mixed in (Winterhart, Silverfox, Amberdrake). They're probably more graceful and poetic in the native language. If a Tayledras suddenly changes their use-name, it means they've renounced their former identity and the person known by the old name is gone forever.
• jPod: One of the characters was born and raised in a hippie commune, and his birth name is "crow well mountain juniper" (all lower case, because the commune felt that capital letters discriminated against lower case letters). As an adult, he changed his name to "John Doe" as part of his efforts to distance himself from his upbringing.
• Juniper Sawfeather: June's activist parents named her after a tree. In Whisper of the Woods, she learns that her last name counts, too - her dad, a Chinook Indian, was born Peter Clark, but he wanted a Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom like the Indians in movies, so his siblings named him Sawfeather as a joke, and he had it legally changed when he grew up.
• Leaf and Branch's parents from Keys to the Kingdom were appropriately eco-conscious hippies, resulting in their natural names.
• King Dork: Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is mentioned as an unfortunate victim of his Hippie Parents' naming, as his name makes him a social outcast.
• The titular characters of Moonkid and Liberty were named by Hippie Parents, and their names are noted to stick out in modern society.
• Mouse (2017) has Bliss and her brother Rain.
• The Scholomance: Galadriel "El" Higgins was named by her mother, a White Mage Granola Girl who lives in a rural Welsh Commune. El wryly observes that her own affinity for destructive magic makes the "love me and despair" connotations more apropos.
• Schooled: The main character is a teenage boy named Capricorn who was raised on a near-defunct commune, though he usually goes by "Cap." His grandmother, who was one of the original hippies in the 60s and never gave up her tree-hugging New Age sensibilities is named Rain, and she named her daughter (Cap's mom) Flora. It's never specified if "Rain" was her given name or if she picked it to reflect her new lifestyle.
• 1632: The Stone boys answer to Ron, Frank, and Gerry, but their legal names are actually Elrond, Faramir, and Gwaihir, respectively.
• Stargirl tells the story of a run-of-the-mill high school shaken up by the arrival of Stargirl Caraway, a free-spirited sophomore. She wears floor-length peasant dresses and ribbons in her hair, plays the ukulele during lunch, and carries around her pet rat Cinnamon in a sunflower-print tote bag. She reveals to Leo that she gave herself the name along with a series of other failed self-renames.
• In The Suitcase Kid, Carrie is a modern hippie who named her children Crystal and Zen. Her stepdaughter Andy thinks they're weird names and mentions her mother laughed when she told her what her stepsiblings are called.
• Yellowface: June's full name is Juniper Song Hayward. Her sister is Aurora Whispers. June blames her mother's hippy phase.
• The Winnie Years: Cinnamon's Hippie Parents named her that.

Live-Action TV

• In the miniseries The Sixties, Katie (Julia Stiles) gives birth to a son named Rainbow after moving to San Francisco. Given that it was 1967 it's not a surprise.
• black•ish: Dre's wife was raised in a hippie commune and was given the name Rainbow. She's usually called Bow for short. Her younger brother Johan has a normal name, but their youngest sister is named Santamonica.
• Boy Meets World and Girl Meets World has Topanga, who was named for Topanga Canyon and characterized as a Granola Girl way back when she was introduced in Boy's first season; she has since been rewritten to be more normal and her weird name has become The Artifact.
• The full names of the title characters of Dharma & Greg are Dharma Freedom Finkelstein and Gregory Clifford Montgomery. One of them came from a hippie family, and it wasn't Greg.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy": The members of a group of hippie traveling performers have names like Bellboy, Flower Child, and Juniper Berry.
  • Subverted by Professor River Song - her name appears to fit this trope at first, but it isn't the result of her having Hippie Parents. She was kidnapped as a baby and raised by aliens, and the birth name her human parents gave her, Melody Pond, has been translated into an alien language and back into English.
• Feel Good: Laura, Maggie's daughter, was originally named Lava, a name Maggie came up with while high.
• Lampshaded and defied in the Friends episode "The One Where Chandler Takes a Bath", where Ross and Rachel are considering baby names.
  • Ross rejects "Rain" because it sounds too hippie-ish; Granola Girl Phoebe responds positively to it.
    Rachel: If it's a girl, Rain.
    [...]
    Ross: Rain? "Hi, my name is Rain. I have my own kiln, and my dress is made out of wheat."
    Phoebe: I know her! I bought a homemade soap from her at a Dead show.
  • Ross complains that Rachel would want to name the child "Sequoia." Rachel starts to scoff but then realises she actually like the sound of it. Ross immediately vetoes it.
• Ghosts (US) has Flower, who in life was a hippie in the 1960s.
• Downplayed in House of Anubis, where the resident new-age Cloudcuckoolander is named Willow. She's not a blatant hippie, but she's into things like auras, mythology, crystals, and essential oils.
• How I Met Your Mother: One of Ted's previous girlfriends was a Soapbox Sadie named Strawberry who ruined a celebratory dinner at a steakhouse by throwing red paint on the chef and screaming "MEAT IS MURDER!"
  Ted: Okay, I admit, Strawberry was a mistake. But how could I have possibly known that going in?
  Everyone: HER NAME WAS STRAWBERRY!
• jPod: One of the characters was born and raised in a hippie commune, and his birth name is "crow well mountain juniper" (all lower case, because the commune felt that capital letters discriminated against lower case letters). As an adult, he changed his name to "John Doe" as part of his efforts to distance himself from his upbringing.
• The Gottlieb children of Neighbours: brothers Cosmic and Freedom, and sister Serendipity. The brothers call themselves Mark and Stephen; Serendipity, being something of a free spirit herself, kept her name but uses "Ren" as a nickname.
• Rookie Blue has Officer Dov Ezekiel Epstein, whose hippie parents really, really didn't like their son becoming a cop, and Shaw's girlfriend, self-professed witch Celery.
• Amanita in Sense8. Her name comes from the fly agaric mushroom, which contains hallucinogenic compounds. Her mother is fittingly a hippie academic in a polyamorous relationship.
• In an episode of That's So Raven a singer named Rayne Bow performs for Chelsea's vegetarian club. When the Rayne is locked in a closet, Raven tries to cover for her and pretends to be a singer named Sunshine.
• Played with on Taxi. Jim changed his last name to Ignatowski because he was so high he thought it was "Star Child" spelled backwards.

Theatre

• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: The Cloudcuckoolander contestant comes from a hippie family; his name is Leaf, he has siblings named Marigold, Brooke, Pinecone, Landscape, Raisin, and Paul.

Video Games

• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, the Strato colonists' penchant for distinctive names (Geranium, Melatonin, Antecedent, etc) is an early hint that they're nonconformists who left Earth in the hope of creating a more flexible society. Very rarely do the colonists use anyone's full name.
• Discussed by Max in Sam and Max: Beyond Time and Space Episode 4:
  Sam: Remember, Max, if you see a hippie, just shoot to wound. We don't want to kill the parents of important scientists or something.
  Max: Riiiiight, because all the best scientists have names like "Tree" or "Sunshine"!

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: Pees'lubn Andistan'dhin ("peace, love, and understanding") is a hippie-ish monk who Looks Like Jesus and plays gentle music in court.

Web Animation

• Don't Walk Home Alone After Dark: In The Worm, Sparrow’s full name is Sparrow Anne Moon; it’s mentioned her mother was part of an "offbeat spiritual commune" at the time Sparrow was born before leaving to start a new life.

Webcomics

• Daisy of Cirque Royale. At age three, she was encouraged by her Hippie Parents to select her own name (as she was born intersex) and chose to name herself after the flowers in her mother's flower crown. Her brothers did the same and are named Monster Truck and Caterpillar.
• General Protection Fault: Trudy Trueheart was born Moonbeam Gertrude Glowerhausen because she had Hippie Parents.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Cage," laid-back geography teacher Mr. Corneille reveals to his girlfriend, Nurse Joan Markham, that his first name is Moonchild. She decides to just stick with calling him Corneille.
• Clone High: When Cleo becomes a hippie after smoking raisins, Abe refers to her as "Rain Melon" and he refers to himself as "Captain Lavender."
• On Daria,:
  • A substitute teacher decides that the title character has a "hippie name" and calls her Darlene instead.
  • Jane has Hippie Parents and an older brother named Wind (who, as a child, apparently wanted to change it to "Ronald"). The oldest sibling is also named Summer, which, while more common, does fit the nature theme. Their surname is Lane, so Jane and her other sister Penny are also fairly whimsical.
• Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Hippie Parents are named Wind Bear and Ocean Song. In the spirit of gender non-conformity, they also named him the Gender-Blender Name Susan, which he hates.
• Edgar & Ellen: The leader of the hippies who camp out in the twins' yard in one episode is named Moon Violet.
• Futurama has the Waterfall family, who have a hippie surname. The first two members introduced, Free Waterfall Jr. and Sr., also have hippie first names.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic introduced Tree Hugger in "Make New Friends But Keep Discord". She's a textbook hippie as a cute pony mare.

Real Life

• River Phoenix came from a hippie family and as such he and his siblings Liberty, Joaquin (AKA Leaf), Summer, and Rain all have hippie monikers. Rain has continued the family tradition by giving her oldest two children hippie names: Rio Everest, named in honor of her brother River and Indigo Orion.

---