We read The Hobbit in 8th Grade English in '71 or so. LOR was quite big. The Hildebrant Bros. calendars were coming out in the mid-'70s. Posters, too.
I knew a guy walking around my college campus calling himself Strider in '77-'78. He was a shade behind times, cause people by then were already dressing up as Darth Vader. . .
Only some elite techno geek would have had a computer in the 70’s. I don’t care when the first Apple was made.
CB radios were a super big thing.
The mono cassette player was a major Christmas present in the earlier 70’s as was a transistor radio.
Getting the little sister or brother to touch a 9 volt battery to their tongue was a popular trick. It was also how you checked to see if the battery was dead. It didn’t hurt too bad.
One year getting a very expensive pong game was the goal of every kid at Christmas 1975.
About 1980 the hand held games like Merlin were popular for Christmas and sold in the range of $50 to $150
Snoopy was popular and showed up everywhere teens did art.
The Royal Guardsmen did a lot of popular Snoopy songs. Snoopy for President
Heath Kits
Latch hook rugs on the wall.
Those drip candles on a bottles were an in thing.
Every thing was cool man.
DJ’s but together a story from song snippets and played them on air.
Bill Cosby tapes were the bad tapes kids listened to when the parents weren’t around.
Wacky Cards were the number one collectible trading cards for a few years.
Somebody owned a Banana bike. The newest best teen’s bike was getting a Huffy 3 speed. Bikes had stuff like reflectors and lights and baskets on them. Kids often used a deck of cards and clothespins to make noise when riding as the cards kit the revolving spokes.
Cap guns were still popular. Hitting them on the sidewalk with a hammer was popular. A whole role at once would deafen you and send the hammer flying back.
The bad ass toy of the teen was the tennis ball gun made from beer or pop cans and firing the tennis balls. A can of starting spray for engines was the fuel.
Beer can collections were the rage. We spent hours at a time up to a whole day collecting new beer cans and cleaning them up to display. The cans were just switching to aluminum in the 70’s so we could collect cans and half of what we ran into was aluminum which gave us spending cash if we didn’t need that can. There wasn’t a big group of people digging for aluminum cans at that time.
Budman stickers were a big collectors item for kids that could get them.
P.S. Aliens the movie scared the shit out of all kids.
UFO sightings were having a run in the 70’s as was pyramid power. Sharpen your razor in a pyramid. Sleep under a pyramid. Calculating your Biorhythms went it’s rounds in the school.
I don’t know if this is still popular, was always popular, or what, but in the early seventies one of the the first questions you asked a person was, “What’s your sign?” And everybody knew their zodiac sign because everyone always asked.
Oh, I thought of another one!
This fellow B. Kliban released a cartoon book of cats. It really took off and B. Kliban cats were freaking everywhere. Pillowcases, little statues, calendars, t-shirts, etc.
In 1975? Nah. Richard Pryor.
But you’re right about UFOs. There was a BIG UFO craze in the mid-70s, kicked off by two fishermen in Mississippi who claimed to have been abducted, as I recall. And everybody was into Chariots of the Gods?.
Agree.
Television: just the big three stations plus PBS, and Saturday morning cartoons were a huge ritual for me and my friends.
I can’t quite remember when it was except that I was just a little girl when my father came home with the first calculator we had ever seen: the size of a book, pricey, and could perform four functions!!
The Mississippi alien abduction case that set off the mid 70s UFO craze. By the way Chariots of the Gods might have been another topic of geeky conversation.
Nope, still true where I grew up.
Chico and the Man
Boat People
Farrah hair for girls and center part for the boys
Dragsters! Mongoose vs Snake!
Jarts aren’t the only 70s toy that was banned. I give you, Click Clackers!
OG fill us with preservatives! Those things were mayhem in our household.
Basically, nunchucks.:smack:
I was dead certain your link would be to the Betty and Barney Hill abduction. I had no idea that ‘happened’ in 1961…
In about 72 or 73, the Boone’s Farm company started selling their Apple wine. It was sold out of the cooler for about seventy nine cents a quart. It was awful, but we didn’t know any better. We would hit a liquor store and just buy all of the cold boone’s farm they had.
A Boone’s Farm hangover was the worst…
I had a Boone’s Farm T-shirt.
My sister let me have Strawberry Hill with 7-Up.
I thought this link was going to go to a clip like this.
Anybody remember “Up With People”?
Reminds me of the “Texas: Speed Limit 70” T-shirt I bought in defiance at a head shop when the highway speed limits were knocked down to 55mph.
Which reminds me of CB radios, already mentioned here. We used to play games of hide and seek using those. One car would be “it,” the driver would broadcast clues as to his whereabouts, and the rest of us had to drive around and find him. The car that was it was not allowed to change locations until found. I never had a CB radio, but some friends did, and I was on their team. Great fun.
And Annie Green Springs wine. Which we all called Annie Bed Springs, because, you know…