Just for the hell of it I’ve created this summary of the way 70s movies looked, with visual examples.
Let me know if I left anything out and I’ll try to add it…
It’s an amusing start, but it’s not complete until the add the Guide to How 70’s Movies Sounded, complete with various flavours of “wakatchu”.
Most main characters in science fiction movies wore all-white skintight suits.
All women stopped wearing girdles, and most of them stopped wearing bras.
James Bond wore fewer tuxedos and more safari jackets.
Leading men tended to be less handsome and more ethnic. Leading ladies stayed about the same, but dressed a lot sloppier.
There were fewer movie cowboys, and they usually claimed some kind of American Indian tribal affiliation.
Is that last one from “Carnal Knowledge”?
Yup, and the one with Nicholson and Garfunkel in the overcoats.
I like it. I like it so much I want to see more.
How long did it take you to set that up?
You’ve left out the general “shagginess” of everyone, men and women alike. I think they called it the “Let It Be” look: hair that looks like it’s in desperate need of cutting and hasn’t seen a comb in a month. Hell, some of the pictures you already have on there show the shagginess in spades.
Vests. There were always vests.
One thing I used to snicker about that they absolutely nailed on That 70s Show was the bizarre crap hung on walls in people’s homes. Like copper Jell-O molds, and big wooden kitchen utensils, and yarn sculptures, and funky mirror arrangements, and macrame owls with big wooden beads for eyes, and woven reedy baskets, and the family’s sole telephone, and so on and so forth. I’m sure you can find many examples.
Afros, afros, afros–on white guys!
You need to have women in very tight t-shirts emphasizing their enormous busts, and guys all drinking Olympia (Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Every Which Way But Loose, The Graduate[sup]*[/sup]) and Coors (Deliverance, Semi-Tough) beer. You also need to say a little more about wacky, anachronistic period films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Kelly’s Heroes.
Other than that, nice work. It looks exactly like the 'Seventies, though you really need to insert a few images from Starsky and Hutch to fully capture the canonicity of the decade, and possibly a Billy Jack film as well.
Stranger
[sup]*[/sup]I realize that The Graduate was released in 1967, but it really did presage the lost “Me Generation” aesthetic and lack of purpose of the 'Seventies.
You forgot the sideburns. In the seventies every man had sideburns.
The Native American kid in the yellow shirt - that’s from Billy Jack. Don’t you remember it from the infamous ice cream shop scene?!
I feel it is missing a thing about how women did not wear bras.
You need to include a disparaging image of the military. Either a hard-ass warmongering officer or an inept common soldier. We hadn’t yet let go of the whole baby-killer label.
And a shot of Bigfoot is a must.
That transcends all space and time.
Stranger
Had the suits-with-elbow-patches thing started yet, or was that more of an 80s problem?
Elbow patches are definately 70’s.
Stranger, the 60-70’s hate for the military was very different than what came before and after. In the 50’s you’d have stuff like Sgt Bilko where indivisiual soldiers might be portrayed as bad but not the army as a whole. And one of the trends of the 80’s was the sudden contriteness movies and TV displayed about Vietnam. Shows like “Tour of Duty” fairly screamed, “We’re sorry we called you baby killer and threw dog crap on you at the airport.” Very different than the “millitary=bad” that permeated the 70’s.
Don’t forget to add a mention about ENORMOUS hoop ear-rings that women wore. Or the floor-length skirts that women use to wear to cocktail parties (Can’t find a good google image to show, but Mary Tyler Moore often wore them on for fancy dress-up occasions on her show. Ellen Burstyn wears one at her cocktail party in “the Exorcist”)
Maxi-skirts!
You got something in a corrupt small-town sherrif, preferably Southern?
I think Billy Jack fits the bill…let me get a good screen-cap of that asshole deputy with red hair…
“I’ve been balled by so many guys, I don’t know whether the baby is going to be white, Mexican, Indian, or BLACK!”
[POW!!!]