Does anyone else find the 70s creepy? I mean, I was born in the 70s, but I’ll be damned if every episode of “Three’s Company” doesn’t seem just a little bit off. I mean, maybe it’s the colors or something. But, I can’t quite place it.
It’s probably just lousy videotape. It seems much color video (and film) from the sixties ans seventies is washing away.
Fleetwood, stop rationalizing. My formative (“Wonder”) years were in the 70’s and I feel scarred fot life. They sucked… and it wasn’t just me and my pathetic little adolescent world. Everything was out of joint and in a shambles. People were mean, clothes were dreadful, television – to use kflan’s example – was brain dead, and the country was directionless. What a f*cked up, worthless decade.
A decade in which gave birth to a lot of dopers.
Hey, don’t take history out of context. That was a real cool time.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
The 70’s…bellbottoms and sandals were fading out to be replaced by leisure suits and platform shoes.
Disco <:::shudder:::> became popular.
Yeah, that was creepy.
>> What a f*cked up, worthless decade
And now we are reaping the consequences. Much of what is wrong today can be traced back to that era. The 70s are not over yet.
in fact, they had a mystique still left over from the 60’s.
The mid to late 1970’s though were creepy. Even watching reruns of television or news shows from then, I get this “something just wasn’t right back then” feeling.
Let’s see, the '70s off the top of my head…
-'60s rolled on for a bit
-Drugs were everywhere
-Watergate
-We withdrew from Vietnam
-Arab-Israeli war
-Oil embargo - prices shot up, lines at the pumps, odd-even days
-Nixon resigned
-Vietnam fell
-Joan Baez embraced disco
-CB radio bloomed
-Alcohol became legal for 18 year olds in manny states
-Mayaguez and Pueblo incidents
-Cambodia turned on itself
-Cable TV arrived
-Nobody had a computer
-Slide rules disappeared
-Jimmy Carter materialized out of nowhere and bumbled through a term in the White House that included attack rabbits and double digit inflation
-National Lampoon, Blues Brothers, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, High Times
-Kurt Vonnegut was popular
-New Wave/Punk
-Reggae
-Heavy Metal was ‘old’
-The boat people arrived
-The New Volunteer Army
-Iran shed the Shah and became the center of gravity for militant Islam (and overran the U.S. embassy)
-ATM machines arrived and credited deposits to your accouunt immediately
-Minimum wage started the decade @ $1.65 and ended it @ $3.15
-8 track tapes abounded
Hmmm…, not really any weirder than the last decade.
I’m sending all you guys and your bad Barney Miller wide ties over to In My Humble Opinion.
It is of course relative.
“They” were going to send my young a_s to die in Vietnam, “They” woulsn’t let me buy a beer and I couldn’t vote for “Them”.
I lucked out, “They” ended the War and the draft given riots in the streets and as noted, I could buy beer.
Of course the 70’s were responsible for many of todays problems(now why can’t I think of what is wrong with that statement)
Let’s see - Germany was unified and started on it’s quest for great power staus, Italy too was unified and did the same.
The Ottoman empire began to break up, so did the Austo-Hungarian though the process still had a god deal further to run.
Lots of English soccer clubs were formed in the 70’s and we all know about those.
Didn’t Karl Marx have something to say at the time?
It couldn’t have been far from Hitlers birthday too, or Joseph Stalin maybe a little early perhaps.
There was still slavery in Cuba.
And Victoria’s mourning of Albert, very odd that.
Yes the 70’s were a creepy time.
With the proper pot and pharmy Quaaludes, everythin 70s becomes clear.
Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise, starring Paul Williams. (The 70s stardom of Paul Williams–that short, blonde singer with dark glasses who later did several stints on the Muppet Show–is suggestive in itself). A “rock opera” incorporating the plots of Faust, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, this flick neatly encapsulates that decade’s profound malaise.
What a bunch of whiners!
I, personally, loved the 70s! I had more fun, got laid more often, went to more parties and met more of the coolest people then, than at any other time in my life. (Though, looking back today, I must admit, some of the clothing got a little ‘old’ and I got real damn tired of every guy wearing a ‘Fu-Manchu’ mustache and big hair.)
I loved the introduction of the illuminated dance floors, the pulsating optical lights and sound activated strobes and light displays. (A lot of what was developed then has been modified and is in the clubs now.) Polyester sucked but it sure looked good! I thoroughly enjoyed how most of the girls looked. I liked disco music – most of it and I liked something which you do not see a whole heck of a lot today – bands having fun, smiling and looking good as they performed.
Most of the groups today dress like shit, try to act like they’re ‘bad’ and seem pissed off when singing.
Leisure suits sucked, but the iridescent colors polyester produced were fantastic. I loved the girls in their skin tight hip huggers with bells that came down over their feet, which were clad in cool platform shoes. The clubs were fun and colorful and those of us who drove hot cars (like me) had them rigged to run - not set so low they had to creep over a parking lot entrance, or tricked out to act weird with a back that just raised up and down at odd angles or set to bounce up and down like a jumping bean but couldn’t move worth a crap.
Plus we didn’t shoot each other over a scratched paint job, guys didn’t walk around in baggy pants grabbing their packages or were their boxers halfway up to their navels for all to see. Gangs were bad places. Crack was not even invented but people tooted a bit of coke and smoked some weed. You did not have to go armed with a cannon at night to get to the corner store and buy a pack of smokes.
We knew there were Gays but hey did not hit you in the face with Gay Rights every time you turned around and there were few, if any, transvestites posing as female hookers to entrap straight guys. AIDS was not known about. OPEC had not yet screwed America in fuel prices and plunge us into nearly a 10 year depression/recession which created an army of street people.
Most people did not have the 80s syndrome of ‘I got mine, screw the rest of you.’ Blacks were not churning out Black exploitation films portraying themselves as gangsters, gang members, murderers, racists or hating themselves and then wondering why Whitey treated them funny.
The 70s were fun, cool and great. Gas was cheap, food was cheap, rents were cheap, smokes were cheap and no one was running around telling you that everything you liked to do was harmful for you. Girls expected you to make a pass at them and did not go screaming sexual harassment if you did. If you and a girl got drunk and by mutual consent (usually consisting oof both of you treating each others cloths off) had sex, she did not go running to the cops the next day, screaming date rape.
Kids were disciplined and they did not have more rights than the parents. TV did not spread news showing them how to get a gun and shoot their schoolmates, knowing that some kid out there might just copy what happened.
We partied all night and hated to see the sun come up. Donna Summer was queen and hot looking! The groups performed in colorful costumes and smiled a lot. Most guys carried condoms. So did most women.
We’d work all day, go home, clean up, and dress up, then head for the clubs. You did not go into a place and see guys with skinheads dressed like crap, walking around looking like all they want to do is fight with their pants falling down nearly to their knees.
I made a lot of friends then and had a wonderful time. I was sorry when it all ended. Some of it is coming back along with the 60s styles. I still have pleasent thoughts about some of the exciting women I met. My neighbors in my apartment complex were friendly and exciting – not dull and damn boring like now.
If a guy got into a fight, it was over when the other fellow gave up. One did not beat the heck out of someone when he was down and try to either kill or cripple him. It was very rare to find two combatants pulling weapons on each other.
Not today though.
Yeah. The 70s were cool. A bit goofy, but cool.
Zarathrustra writes:
> (The 70s stardom of Paul Williams–that short, blonde
> singer with dark glasses who later did several stints on
> the Muppet Show–is suggestive in itself).
As someone who looks a little like Paul Williams (I’m about three inches shorter; my hair is redder, usually shorter, and (increasingly) thinner; and my glasses aren’t aviator-type but horn-rimmed), I find this to be prejudiced. Are you saying that anyone who isn’t sufficiently tall and well-buffed doesn’t deserve to appear on TV and in movies?
PRISM02, most of what you say is accurate, but some of it is badly wrong. You write:
> OPEC had not yet screwed America in fuel prices and
> plunge us into nearly a 10 year depression/recession
> which created an army of street people.
Your memory is way off here. The two OPEC oil crises did happen in the '70’s - one in 1973 and the other in 1979.
You also write:
> Blacks were not churning out Black exploitation films
> portraying themselves as gangsters, gang members,
> murderers, racists or hating themselves and then
> wondering why Whitey treated them funny.
The '70’s were the height of the blaxplotation films. For what it’s worth though, blaxplotation films weren’t really about hatred for whites. There was no call for political action in these films, and the only groups that were hated were rival white gangsters and dishonest white cops. These movies were thumbing their noses at the white power structure.
Some of your other comments are a little inaccurate too. I suspect that you’re remembering things a little rosier than they actually were just because you were younger then. (Hey, so was I. I remember the '70’s as a great time too, even if I was a starving college and grad student back then.)
Recently I’ve been seeing an ad for a compilation of what I guess you’d call 70s soft rock, featuring songs by James Taylor, Carly Simon, Carole King, Jim Croce, etc. I recognize all the songs from my childhood. But the commercial shows tape of all the performers singing these songs, and let me tell you, I have never seen an uglier group of people in my life! James and Carly are the best-looking ones in the thing, and some of these folks look like they fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down! I guess I’m shocked because I became a music consumer during the age of MTV, and I suppose people who are unattractive just don’t have the same chance at fame since then, but man!
No, I’m suggesting that I found Paul Williams to be rather creepy as an individual (at least what I saw of him on TV), and the fact that he was apparently such a hit in the 70s is something I found disturbing in and of itself. Since a lot of the kids on this board weren’t born until after Paul Williams’ 15 minutes were up, I described his appearance just in case one of them might have seen him on a rerun of The Love Boat.
Short shorts in the NBA <shudder>. 'Nuff said.