MaryMc's Seventies Stuff
I am a child of the '70's. Well, okay, technically, I was
a baby of the 50's (born March 12, 1958), so I was mostly a child
of the 60's. But while I remember a lot of things that happened
then (I'd gotten off the bus from kindergarten and come in the
house to find my mother standing in the middle of the living
room, vacuum cleaner in hand, staring at the TV. She shushed
me because what the newsman was saying was more interesting than
whatever it was that I wanted to tell her about my morning at
school. That's where I was when I heard President
Kennedy had been shot), my frame of reference was still too
limited to understand most of it. The decade where I started
to form a coherent sense of what the world was all about was
the 1970's.
So every now and then I enjoy a good wallow in nostalgia for
the days of my youth. I play the Carpenters,
or England
Dan and John Ford Coley, or the Bee
Gees. I watch Nick at Night. I drag out my high school yearbooks
and gaze in wonder at the picture of me in bellbottoms, polyester
turtleneck, red-white-and-blue crocheted vest, floppy denim hat,
and brown suede Earth
Shoes. And of course, I look at websites like these (okay,
strictly speaking, some of the links here aren't 100% seventies
stuff. Well, it's MY Web page, MY memories, MY wallow. Okay?)
DeeT's 70's Page
Great sound clips from '70's TV (including commercials) and music,
great 70's links page.
Stuck in the '70's
seventies TV, movies, music, toys, fads and fashions, cars, and
much more!
Super70s.com
"Where the 1970's never ended!"
The Super Seventies
Rock Site features music and pop culture
of the seventies--reviews, interviews, trivia quizzes, photos,
sound clips, and more.
InThe70s.com has info on seventies music, movies, television,
world events, fads and fashion, plus games, quizzes, and
a message board.
The 70s Project  music artists bios, song lyrics, TV show summaries and movie DVD reviews from the decade of the 70's
Lisa's
Nostalgia Cafe '70's music, TV, movies, consumer products,
home decor, fads, fashion, and more
Web Generation
1970's features fads and styles, music, personalities, TV,
and movies
Gordon Bathgate's Seventies
Slammer has a great, year-by-year seventies
timeline, plus features on seventies television, music and arcade
games
The
Jones Zone remembers styles, TV, movies,
sex, drugs, and rock & roll, and more fun from the seventies.
It
Seems Like Only Yesterday... is the home page for alt.culture.us.1970s,
"a newsgroup for people stuck in a retro timewarp!"
Those Suburban
Seventies is a site promoting a book of the same name, about
the author's memories of her seventies upbringing. It features
some excerpts and links to other groovy sites
The Suburban
Seventies: Photographs by Bill Owens
was a 2000 exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. "Capturing
the essence of suburban culture--tract houses, block parties,
mini-skirts, bell-bottoms, rolled-out 'instant' lawns, swimming
pools, garage sales, and shag carpeting--Bill Owens' classic
photographs are considered to be the definitive treatise on the
suburban sprawl that occurred across America in the 1970s."
Don't know about "the definitive treatise,"
but the photographs here, and the accompanying quotes, do look
great.
Avocado Memories
is another site featuring the author's own memories of growing
up in Burbank, California in the sixties and seventies. It's
his effort to document a time past for his kids, but he says
"If it's entertaining enough for complete strangers to wander
through, so much the better!" I think it is.
Short and sweet, Last day of school '76  is somebody's home movie that could have been mine.
It's
in there, real deep... so keep prying!!!
is a quirky, occasionally surreal, a little bit dark, and very
funny site with some weird and wonderful reminiscences about
the seventies.
Robin Remembers the
70's!! is a great-looking site with
a lot of wonderful seventies memories
Flashback
to the Seventies With Wenise Relive the seventies!
Feeling Retro "If
you were born around 1960 (give or take a few years) you might
actually like this site."
Pimpadelic
Wonderland features "The Weird World of 70s Cinema,"
"Jimmy Carter's Peanut Gallery," and more 70's fun
The Baby Boomer HeadQuarters
"Being a baby boomer is more a state of mind than a year
of birth. So if you know that Paul McCartney was in another band
before Wings, then we have a place for you here at BBHQ"
Boomer
Baby! This site was created to collect
and display memories of Baby Boomers--fashion, food, TV and radio,
transportation, vacation amusements, and more.
It actually starts in the 1940s, and the dizzying pace gets
even more frenetic as it blasts through the seventies--but I'm
including Ye Li's We
Didn't Start The Fire here anyway. This
dazzling collection of images, set to the 1989 Billy Joel song,
is every American Baby Boomer's childhood in fast-forward (but
don't anybody tell this guy about Life
Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me), or his head might explode).
Okay, it was inevitable...I wrote that last sentence a couple of years ago, and while Ye Li hasn't posted a version of Life is a Rock yet, marnielynn2001 has, as has abmcw , and earthmachine .
Everclear's AM Radio is another great seventies nostalgia trip, especially when paired with this wonderful animation.
Do You Remember? is a series of pictures book on nostalgia.
The site also has a message board for posting your own memories,
and some wonderful e-cards.
YouRememberThat.com is an online community focused on sharing and reminiscing about pop-culture video, audio, and images that stir our memories of the past. They have some great seventies-era material--music, comedy routines, TV shows, sports, and more.
Tweeners.org is a site
for people born between 1960 and 1965--not really Baby Boomers
and not really Gen Xers, according to these folks.
Generation Jones, on the other hand, sets the limits a little wider--they claim that anyone born between 1954 and 1965 is too young to be a Boomer and too old to be an Xer. They call these folks "Generation Jones."
EarlyXer.com is a nostalgic website dedicated to those born in the early part of Generation X
Keep on
Truckin' Re-Visited brings us back to the best of hippie culture
P*Funk
Review--Notes on Funk Culture Not just funk music of the
seventies and eighties, but the cultural context that it existed
in.
The Wacky World of KuKuAchoo
features trivia, movies, music, TV, collectibles, and more
Yesterdayland
promised "Your childhood is here." They once served
up a comprehensive recap of TV, toys, movies, arcade games, fashion,
music and more from days gone by. Sadly, the owners are no longer
maintaining the site. But while some of the links are gone, large
amounts of information have been archived and are still accessible
here.
Backdate "is
a glance back in time to the 1960s and 1970s in Britain" and features links to arts, culture, history, music, and more.
Skooldays is a British nostalgia site with memories
of TV, toys, and more.
DoYouRemember.co.uk modestly welcomes you "to the ultimate
online resource of nostalgia
and memorabilia from the
70s, 80s and 90s."
The 70's Preservation Society
features links to 70's movies, TV and especially music. Check
out "This Week in Music History" and tune in for the
RealAudio broadcast of the "70's Saturday Night" radio
show.
And another great page brought to you by folks who also do
a seventies radio show (also available here on RealAudio) is
Cosmic Slop: The Forgotten
Pop of the Seventies.
Suck.com's Super Sounds of the Seventies offers some interesting thoughts on the decade.
The World
Renown Definitive 1970's List
The
70's Game "Far out memories. Very
little bread." a board game of seventies trivia
Planet
Smiley has an amazing collection of free smiley face graphics--animated
.gif's, non-animated .gif's, horizontal lines and backgrounds--plus
smiley quotes, e-cards, an award, and more
Izan has more free 70s
.gif's and images for you to download--lava lamps, disco balls,
platform shoes, and more.
Designed to a T has a few great seventies clip art designs.
Hippie Stuff Graphics has some more fun .gif's
Did you save any of your toys? Most people wish they did.
My husband has never forgiven his mother for throwing out his
GI
Joe Mercury Space Capsule (current
value: around $350), but he has only himself to blame for tossing out
his baseball cards. I sold my half-a-dozen Barbies to a
collector in the early 1980s, but if I'd
kept them longer, I probably could have gotten more than $70.
But who knew that yesterday's junk would become today's hot collectibles?
Tick Tock
Toys features "a cavalcade of images and ideas"--food
packaging, cereal box toys and other premiums, fast foods, cartoon
characters, theme parks, and other memorable artifacts of the
70's and beyond.
Retro Toys
Liddle Kiddles, Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots,
Creepy Crawlers, and much more!
The Secret
Fun Spot has some amazing retro culture artifacts--kiddie
Halloween costumes (I swear I wore that witch one year!), dime
store toys, great tourist traps and roadside attractions, ancient
video game art, and much more. But my favorite here is their
feature on Marvin Glass, the unsung hero whose design studios
created such classic toys as Operation, Lite-Brite, Mouse Trap
(one of my personal favorites as a kid), Mystery Date, Rock'em
Sock'em Robots, Tip-it, and dozens more.
ToyLove , from PlaidStallions.com, features cool toys from the seventies.
This Old Toy is a
site dedicated to Fisher Price toys, offering information for
fans and collectors alike.
The
Vintage Toy Encyclopedia features a positively exhaustive
description of dozens of toys you probably haven't seen in years.
Bug Eyed Monster.com pays homage to some classic toys of the 60's, 70's and early 80's--many of them inspired by classic seventies TV shows and movies like Battlestar Galactica, Alien, The Black Hole, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
Do you remember Dawn?
Introduced in 1970, she was billed as "The Most Beautiful
Doll in the World." I guess I just missed her--at twelve,
I was probably at the right age to be scrupulously avoiding anything
that remotely resembled "kid stuff." But Dawn has stayed alive in the
memories of those who loved her--including the people
who are making big bucks on her these days as a hot collectible.
Blythe is another
doll that enjoyed a short production run in 1972. She had a rather
unique look, to say the least. The Village Voice observed
that her "eerie gaze, sometimes melancholy as the Mona Lisa,
sometimes blank as a zombie, is more than enough to wig out the
faint-of-heart child." Gina Garan has created this fabulous
site on Blythe, and she's published a book about her as well.
The Milton-Bradley game Which Witch? has a site of its very own (but can you picture the Religious Right letting this one stay on the market these days without a fight?)
I never had a metal lunch box. I wasn't deprived--I didn't
want one. I never could pick just one TV show, cartoon character,
or celebrity that I could commit to and honor above all others
by carrying them to school every day (I'm not kidding--I took
this stuff seriously!) I always had a red plaid plastic
lunch pail, shaped like an oval cylinder, with a black plastic
strap that I once broke swinging it over my head to bash Eric
Ladd on the playground. You, however, may have less violent memories
of your elementary school lunch box, in which case you'll probably
enjoy the Lunch Box Pad.
PopHouse sells reproductions of flower power stickers, smiley face rings,
Sweathog paper dolls (featuring John "Vinnie Barbarino" Travolta), Bee Gees posters, and lots more.
Groovy Juice Another
great site, where they sell 70's clothing, sewing
patterns, toys, and other indescribably...well, groovy
stuff.
Betty's
Attic has all kinds of reproductions
of cool seventies junk.
Time Warp Vintage Toys sells toys from the 1950s through the 1970s
AllPosters.com has a great selection of seventies pop culture posters
Posters-Now.com sells some classics from seventies music, TV, movies, and other cultural icons
PosterLovers.com has some great posters from seventies TV shows.
RetroKit is
a site dedicated to 70s technology collectibles--calculators,
LPs, and other memorabilia.
The Obsolete Computer Museum is a place to stop by and reminisce about the old days of personal computing, stretching back into the 1970s
This Sharp Calculator commercial brings back the days when you could get a machine that could add, subtract, multiply AND divide--"all the calculator know-how you'll probably ever need!"--for only $345!!!
Come on, admit it. Whether you belong to the generation that
lusted after Marilyn
and Elvis,
or the one that glorifies Britney
Spears and Orlando Bloom,
everybody had their teenage celebrity crushes. I started with
the Monkees,
when I was eight. Their debut album was the first pop record
I ever owned. My friend Christy Lawrence and I used to go in
my room after Blue Birds meetings and crank it up on my Radio
Shack record player and put on our go-go boots and do the Watusi
on my bed.
But I really came into my own as a teenybopper just in time
for the golden age, the Bobby
Sherman/David Cassidy/Donny Osmond
era. As always, I was a little out of step (a pattern I established
early on by being a Mickey fan, and not a Davy devotee). I had
Bobby's and David's and Donny's posters on my bedroom walls,
but I saved my most fervent adoration and half-understood lust
for Jack
Wild. Who?? I hear you say. His best-known movie
was "Oliver!" (he played the Artful Dodger), but you
might remember him better for his immortal portrayal of Jimmy
on H.R. Pufnstuf on Saturday
morning TV. He was never as big as Bobby or Donny or David, but
he was a regular in Tiger Beat
and 16 Magazine, which I read faithfully
each and every month. He put out a couple of records, which I
bought and swooned over. He was cute, wholesome, unthreatening,
and British--just about everything a twelve-year-old girl could
want (and now, alas, may he rest in peace).
Here are some more links to the objects of our young lust:
Feelin'
Groovy! The World of Singing Teen Idols
Rhino Records
They were retro before retro was cool
And if you don't see your faves here, check out the Secret Email
Addresses and Fan Pages site. You might find them there!
Or, they may have suffered the indignity of ending up on OnceFamous.com.
There was more to seventies music than teenybopper idols,
of course. I got my first radio for Christmas in 1969, so I literally
began listening to pop music just as the decade dawned. There
was only one pop (don't even think of calling it rock)
radio station in Redding: KRDG, 1230 AM. Their playlist consisted
mainly of bubblegum schlock, repeated relentlessly, and heavily
interspersed with advertising and inane disc jockey yammerings--but
it was all we knew. I listened faithfully, ran down to Woolworth's
every Friday to get their mimeographed weekly Top 40 chart as
soon as it came out, and won many pizzas and drive-in movie passes
on the 1230 Club, their weekly trivia game (since I had no social
life then, what else would I be doing with my Saturday nights?)
I accumulated a big collection of 45's by people like Lobo,
Barry Manilow, Bread,
Ray Stevens, Edison
Lighthouse, and Neil
Diamond.
The first big-name concert I ever saw was the Carpenters,
at the Redding Civic Auditorium, in 1974. But strictly speaking,
I don't suppose you could call them rock; so the first rock concert
I saw was Chicago ,
in Spokane, Washington (we were there for the Expo
'74 World's Fair), later that summer.
By the mid-seventies, a few things had changed. For one thing,
I had a social life. For another, my friends and I had the money
now to buy albums (or at least, enough to promise Columbia House
that we would buy some, as soon as they sent us those thirteen
for a penny). Some of the ones we listened to were by Three
Dog Night, Carly Simon,
Elton John, the Electric Light Orchestra,
and Queen.
We still listened to KRDG faithfully (because there still wasn't
an alternative). I still remember those New Year's parties at
Eric Ladd's house, drinking Hawaiian Punch  (196 K) and eating Pringles
potato chips and listening to them count down the Top 100 songs
of the year.
I left Redding for Los Angeles in 1976 to go to college. One
of the most memorable images I have of the first few weeks of
school was being in my dorm room and, through the open window,
hearing "Frampton Comes
Alive" echoing around the courtyard, blaring from two
or three different stereos at once. I'd never even heard
of this guy. I soon discovered there were a whole lot more bands
out there that KRDG didn't play--Alan
Parsons Project, Genesis,
Jethro Tull, David
Bowie, and more. My musical horizons were broadened considerably.
And then came...DISCO
(81K). In 1977 I started hanging out with a bunch of people who
were regulars at a club in West Hollywood called the Odyssey.
It didn't serve liquor, so the minimum age to get in was just
eighteen (or considerably younger, if you were a pretty young
boy), and they could stay open until 5:00 am (it also meant that
the patrons usually arrived with enough mind-altering chemicals
in their bloodstreams to last the night without alcohol). We
stayed until closing, every Thursday night (Friday classes, consequently,
were a total loss). The music there was loud, throbbing instrumental
dance tracks that came on EP's and nobody knew or cared who the
artists were. But when we weren't at the Odyssey we listened
to the pop disco on the radio: the Bee
Gees, the Village
People, Donna Summer,
Anita Ward (447K),
Gloria Gaynor (435K), Sylvester ,
and all the rest. We didn't exactly have a choice--the stuff
was everywhere.
In 1978-79, I went to England for my junior year of college.
I was looking forward to discovering all those hip new European
bands, and I found a few--Dire
Straits, The
Clash, Tom Robinson,--but
I soon realized that most of what they played on the radio there
would have been right at home on KRDG. I heard far more that
year than I ever needed to hear of acts like Boney
M, Suzi Quatro,
Cliff Richard, and
Abba.
Musically, it seems like the seventies ended up a lot like where
they started for me.
Here are a few more cool seventies music links to artists
I love (or at least loved):
Janis Ian
Olivia Newton John
The Jackson Five
Shocking Blue
Bobby Bloom
Linda Ronstadt
James Taylor
Cat Stevens
The Doobie Brothers
Jim Croce
Barry White
Mungo Jerry (501K)
The Guess Who
Gordon Lightfoot
Fleetwood Mac
Rod Stewart
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
Cheech
and Chong
Don McLean (548K)
What the heck did the lyrics to American Pie mean, anyway? If you had a hip English teacher, analyzing
them in your high school English class was a quintessential 70's experience. Here is one
version, and another,
and another. Here's
one that says that the whole song is a metaphor
for the computer industry and a prophetic look at the future
of the PC (uh-huh). Here's a site with links to a
whole bunch of interpretations. And here's one that quotes
Don McLean, saying that...he's not saying what it's about.
Walter
Egan
Warren
Zevon
Dead Kennedys Strange
but true, I saw them live once. By choice. Really. Boy, did I ever stick out in that crowd!
The Weather Girls (80K)
DC
Disco's Tribute to Disco music, of course, but there's also
fashion tips, an award, and a collection of free disco-style
web graphics
Izan's Seventies Dance Music
Page is truly a wonder, with over 10 mb of audio clips, plus
album covers, lyrics, links to fan pages, and more!
A History of Disco Music examines disco from many angles--its origins, influential producers and divas, the accompanying drug scene, disco's relationship with gay culture, legendary clubs (the New York ones, at least), the "disco sucks" backlash, and much more.
Disco Savvy is "a chronicle of disco music from 1972 to the present."
Barry Scott's The Lost 45s is a radio show, a CD series, and a book by the same name that
feature songs from the 60's, 70's, and 80's that don't get much
airplay elsewhere anymore--Tony Orlando & Dawn, The Osmonds,
The Ohio Express, and much more.
On his Classic
Bubblegum Music Page, Andrew Bergey
explains the phenomena thusly: "Young AM radio listeners
like myself were turned off by protest folk and rock music and
psychedelic music that was influenced by substances we'd never
tried (nine-year-olds didn't sell and use drugs in those days).
Our experiences revolved around TV and minor explorations with
the opposite sex. Bubblegum music filled that limited area of
interest by combining simple children's music borrowed from schoolyard
games and nursery rhymes and silly, barely concealed lyrics about
sex." I can't say I agree 100% with his opinions (what do
you mean, Terry Jacks and Tony Orlando & Dawn weren't bubblegum??),
but he has a great site here nonetheless.
Bad
Songs of the Seventies Jeez, everybody's a critic! Some people
just have no appreciation of fine schlock.
Remember the 70s features a DVD of hit music performed on Kenny Rogers and the First Edition's "Rollin' on the River" TV variety show.
70s Music - Rock Bands and Artists lets you step back in time and discover some of the best 70s rock bands and individual musical artists and musicians. "Sorry, no disco, just good rock!"
Strawberry Bricks is "the guide to progressive rock," documenting the music era of 1968-1979.
A Brief
History of Banned Music in the United States chronicles attempts
to stifle music that somebody, somewhere found objectionable.
Super 70s.us is a webcast of "Hits From the Groovy Decade."
Alaska
Jim's Music Charts have US and international
pop music charts from a whole variety of sources.
The Airheads Radio Survey Archive is another wonderful collection of radio station top 40 surveys, airchecks, and other bits of the history of radio.
Top
of the Pops: The Best Of the Top 40 Singles By Year
Cash Box Top Singles of the 1970s
GetLyrics.com has lyrics
to a huge number of pop songs, past and present.
And Lyrics
World is another huge collection of
lyrics to your favorite songs.
Mike Mackie is a wicked, wicked man. He devised this innocuous-looking
1970s
Lyrics Quiz and made me spend HOURS obsessing over
it. And now he's got another one, and an 80s quiz,
and a 90s quiz!
AllMusicGuide.com is an exhaustive collection of information
on music and artists of a huge variety of styles and genres.
ClassicBands.com has biographies of your favorite classic
rock bands, plus features on censorship and banned rock music,
rock stars' real names, and other fascinating facts about classic
rock and rockers.
My personal favorite 70's music collection is Rhino's Have
a Nice Day series. They've dug up some fabulous one-hit wonders
and obscure gems of the schlock-pop genre. The liner notes are
amazing (who knew that, before he joined the Grateful Dead, Brent
Mydland was a member of Silver and partially responsible for
the truly forgettable "Wham Bam Shang-a-Lang"?) The abbreviated
Have
a Nice Decade set is good, too, but there's nothing like
the full 25-volume collection (yes, I own them all) for a really
complete immersion in 70's pop.
But as purveyors of true seventies schlock, nobody
could beat K-Tel. Explosive
Dynamic Super Smash Hits! is an article on the company, in all its hype
and glory, from the
Austin Chronicle.
Robert Altman is
a legendary photographer who has documented a generation of rock
and roll and pop culture history. His work has been featured
on albums, Rolling Stone covers, and fine art galleries.
This website features some of his best work that's available
for sale.
Daniel Patmore is a photographer whose portfolio includes some great 70s concert photos.
Classic Rock's Fascinating Facts has some great ones on seventies stars. Who knew that a record company executive really did ask the members of Pink Floyd "Which one's Pink?" or that Freddie Mercury of Queen once said that his main musical influences were Jimi Hendrix and Liza Minelli?
Precious and
Few: Pop Music in the Early Seventies is a site showcasing
a book that examines popular music (and related subjects like
film, TV, trends, and politics) from 1971 to 1975.
A Touch of Classic
Soul is a book about the great soul singers of the early
1970s.
The Rockfest Archive is a site celebrating a some of the great rock festivals of the early 1970s, including a couple that never really happened.
The Archive is a great repository of memories of blues, jazz, rock, folk, psychedelia, and world music festivals in the UK in the sixties, seventies and eighties.
Harv was a guy who was there to hear a lot of historic music in the seventies.
Of course, television was a big part of my seventies experience,
and there are some great websites out there that celebrate the
shows we knew and loved.
The
Brady Bunch
C'mon, Get Happy!!!
(The Unofficial Homepage of the Partridge Family)
Love American Style (107K)
Scooby Doo
The Banana Splits
All in the Family (77K)
Maude
Saturday Night
Live (with the original cast...of course!)
The Mary Tyler
Moore Show
WKRP
in Cincinnati
Roots
Alias
Smith and Jones
Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (here, with Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5!)
Soap
The Six Million Dollar
Man and The Bionic Woman
The Rockford Files (60K)
Starsky and Hutch (86K)
The A-Team
Emergency!
What's Happening!!
Welcome Back, Kotter (110K)
M*A*S*H
Hawaii Five-O
The Gong Show
Toon Tracker "The Home of Lost Cartoons"
Don Markstein's Toonopedia "A vast repository of toonological
knowledge...welcome to the world's first hypertext encyclopedia
of toons"
And the Big Cartoon DataBase
provides an in-depth, detailed
look at your favorite cartoons, including a searchable database
of cartoon information, episode guides and crew lists.
I was born just a little too late for Sesame Street. I was
eleven when it premiered in 1969, just at that critical point
where most kids would rather be caught dead than watch a "baby
show" like that. But if you're the right age to have been
a fan, Sweet
Sesame Memories will remind you of those good old days with
Big Bird and friends.
Schoolhouse
Rock was another show that was just
a little after my time...but it sure has staying power with folks
who watched it!
The Vanderbilt Television
Evening News Abstracts is an amazing collection of summaries
of the nightly network news shows broadcast every night
since August 5, 1968!
CBS's retrospective on their 75 years of broadcasting includes these highlights of the 1970s
TV Party.com
is your source for everything in vintage television--from
a remembrance of the PBS kids' show Zoom, to a feature on the
game shows of 1974, and much, much more. They have even more
stuff on their pay site, TV
Party Plus, but for the true addict, what's $5.00?
TV.com "A whole new TV reference guide for the shows you love"
TV Acres
"The Web's Ultimate Subject Guide to Television Program
Facts"
TV
Ratings United Kingdom presents the top
rated seventies TV shows in Britain, year by year!
Cult Television
Theme Lyrics
Coca
Cola's television advertising has earned a place in the archives
of the Library of Congress. One memorable ad from the seventies,
featuring a wholesome, multi-ethnic crowd of young
people on a hilltop in Italy singing about buying the world
a Coke, has a page all its own. It features film clips and some
great outtakes, like the singers chasing each other around and
spraying each other with bottles of Coke.
Remember that goofy Grape
Nuts Cereal commercial, where the teenage
boy gooses a woman in the pool thinking she's his girlfriend
Dale, only to find out it's Dale's mother? Well, Dale's little brother
Adam has immortalized it here. And now, thanks to YouTube, you can see the original ad !
There were a lot of memorable TV ads in the seventies...
Budweiser (412 K)
Hershey (396 K)
Lowenbrau (388 K)
7UP
Meow Mix (208 K)
Miller beer (400 K)
Wisk
Mounds and Almond Joy (200 K)
McDonalds
Nutter Butter cookies (108 K)
Super Sugar Crisp
Grape Nuts
Old Spice (464 K)
Oreo cookies (456 K)
Kool-Aid
Oscar Meyer bologna (136 K)
Sergio Valente jeans (176 K)
Yahoo! Video has a great collection of video clips of seventies commercials.
There were some memorable movies made in the seventies, including...
Planet of the Apes, et
al Well, okay, only four of the five Apes movies were made
in the seventies. The first (and best) came out in 1968. But
it was 1974 when the Starlight Drive-In showed all five movies,
from dusk 'til dawn, and my friends and I borrowed my mother's
'69 Ford
LTD and sat there drinking RC Cola and eating bananas and watching
them. All. Five. That was the first time I ever
got to stay out all night.
Back in high school, my friends and I loved the drive-in. It might
have been that the novelty of driving still hadn't worn off.
Or maybe it was the illicit thrill of getting past the ticket
booth with two or three people hidden in the trunk (we could
all afford to pay, but that wasn't the point). Or maybe it was
the movies they showed. There was a special kind of classic trash
film that was just meant to be seen at the drive-in. Movies
like Gumball
Rally, The
Van, Gone
in 60 Seconds ("93 cars smashed in 97 minutes!"),
Billy
Jack, The
Swinging Cheerleaders, and my all-time favorite drive-in
movie, Death
Race 2000...it just doesn't get much cheesier than this.
Blazing Saddles
Young Frankenstein (90K)
The Way We Were Redford and Babs...sigh!
Love Story
"Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Jaws Just when you
thought it was safe to go back on the Internet...
Once upon a time in the town of Point, everything--all the
buildings, trees, and even the people were pointed...except for
one little round-headed kid named Oblio. Harry Nilsson's The Point! tells the story of Oblio and his dog Arrow
in this strange, trippy 1971 ABC Movie of the Week.
Animal House (60K)
Shaft
Saturday
Night Fever
Roller
Boogie
Kentucky Fried Movie
The Exorcist
we've never looked at guacamole quite the same...
Rocky Horror Picture
Show
Star Wars (54K)
Greatest Films
of the 1970s features academy award winners and top box office
hits, plus an essay on film trends, top directors, and the state
of the film industry during the decade.
TerrorTrap.com's Supernatural
Seventies features their picks for the
best horror films of the decade.
Something Weird Video, "America's Favorite Crackpot Video
Company," features "bottom of the barrel celluloid
wonders," including some classic seventies trash.
The Bad Movie Review Website
includes some memorable seventies stinkers.
And some memorable books (and other printed materials)...
Jonathan
Livingston Seagull
The
Sensuous Woman
Everything
You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask
Have so many ever been misled and filled full of so much misinformation
by such a collection of biased bullshit? But back in the day, this was the most surreptitiously-passed around book in every junior high and high school in America.
Our
Bodies, Ourselves
Rubyfruit
Jungle
A
Child's Garden of Grass
My
Darling, My Hamburger
Favorite Teenage Angst
Books is a site dedicated to the genre that brought us Paul
Zindel, Judy Blume, M.E. Kerr, and the rest of your faves.
1970's bestseller
lists
And who can forget MAD
Magazine?
...or the National
Lampoon?
...or High Times?
Time Magazine's covers tell a unique
visual story of the decade
Tales of the
City Before it was a miniseries, before
it was a series of books, Tales was an absolutely addictive serial
run daily in the San Francisco Chronicle (and later, in
a major coup, the San Francisco Examiner).
Comic
Book Covers and Ads of the 1970s features your favorite superheroes,
plus the ads that helped bring them to you. The ads are my favorites.
They're all here...joy buzzers, the Hypno-Coin ("The magic
power of hypnosis can be yours!"), x-ray specs, and Sea
Monkeys...enticements to sell garden seeds, greeting cards (oh
yeah...my mom had to buy the whole damn case after I failed to
sell a single box) and Grit
(remember Grit??)...Evel
Knievel and Battlestar Galactica action figures...posters of
Shaun Cassidy (life-sized!) and Cheryl Tiegs and the Dallas Cowboys
Cheerleaders...all just as you remember them!
And here's somebody else who remembers being suckered by those
ads on the backs of comic books promising "Prizes
or Cash!" (plus fun, popularity, and of course, leadership
skills) for selling greeting cards, seeds, or Grit.
But possibly the weirdest 70s comic book phenomena are the
Hostess Heroes--Marvel
and DC Comics superheroes like Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk,
and Captain America who were enlisted to use their superpowers
to hawk Hostess Twinkies, Cupcakes, and other snack foods. Sorry,
Lois, but Metropolis can just go hang until Superman finishes
his Hostess Fruit Pie!
And you must remember that classic piece of prefab 70s philosophy,
the Desiderata.
It was a hit record in 1971, and it adorned posters (the one
I remember best was done in calligraphy and printed on faux parchment)
on a few million teenagers' walls in the 1970s. The posters usually
claimed that it was "Found in the Old St. Paul's Church,
Baltimore, dated 1691," but it was actually
written in the early 1920's by Max Ehrmann, a lawyer from Terre
Haute, Indiana (so much for claims of ancient New Age wisdom).
Inevitably it inspired parodies, my favorite of which was the
National Lampoon's brilliant Deteriorata.
...and some landmarks in art and design...
Seventies
Design is a page packed with images
of the decade's most striking cars, fashions, furniture, houses,
interiors design, and more.
Design 70 displays furniture, lighting, household items and decorative arts of the decade.
American
Architecture of the Twentieth Century--1970 to 1979 has information on some of the most significant
buildings of the decade.
The
Futuro House was designed by
Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968, but many of the twenty
that were eventually produced were built in the seventies. It
was wacky-looking, it was movable, and it was all plastic...how
much more seventies can you get?
Interior
Desecrators "Horrors From the Land of Shag"
Eurobad '74 1974 home interiors in all their brown and apple-green glory
Wallpaper From the 70s "First they only appeared in clubs and lounges...now they conquer our living rooms."
I never saw Christo's Running Fence in person, even though I was living in northern California when they built it there in 1976. But in 1979, when I was living in London, there was an exhibition about it at a museum there. I remember going to see it, and watching a movie about the whole process of creating it. Maybe because I was already tremendously homesick, this movie just floored me. It was the landscape of home, but even more, the people--just the way they talked and moved and worked--they were all just so American. I've had a special place in my heart for Christo's work ever since.
Another important piece of art from the seventies--and another I've always wished I'd seen--was Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. In Table for 39 , an article for Slate.com, Mia Fineman talks about her first time seeing the installation, in 1980--at age 14--and her second, 27 years later. She concludes, with some surprise, that Chicago's work stands the test of time.
I have to admit: I was never much of a fashion plate, even
in my youth. Oh, sure, I had a pair of platform shoes (I think
I wore them just once, of all places, to a Giants game at Candlestick
Park, where I nearly killed myself climbing those steep concrete
stairs), and a mood ring, and I remember a pair of disco-ready
black satin palazzo pants that I never actually got to wear (I
bought them at the very end of a diet, which was swiftly followed,
as always, by the regaining phase). But either the really hip,
out-there styles didn't come in my size, or (early in the decade)
my mother wouldn't buy them for me, or I just didn't have the
nerve to wear them. Still, I'll never forget some of the things
I saw people wearing (and yeah, occasionally, even I wore)
CostumeGallery.com has a great set of links that feature women's fashions
of the seventies and menswear
of the seventies (and the rest of the twentieth century).
Hats Off to History's Clothing
of the 1970's
Hippies
in Polyester--Women's Fashions of the 1970s
F-F-F-F-Fashion features photos taken at the University of Surrey, England in the 1970s.
It Came From
the 1971 Sears Catalog! features actual pages from the Fall
1971 Sears catalog. Sad but true--this is actually more like
the stuff I wore in those days.
Strap in, shut up and hold on. We're going back shows us how popular fashion had progressed (or regressed, depending on your tastes) by 1977, through the pages of the Spring/Summer JC Penny catalog.
Fashion Mockery invites you to "Revel at the ugliest clothes, hair and expressions the decade had to offer." Their motto is "Mocking the 70's, one catalog page at a time."
Platform
Diva A history of the platform shoe
High School Town is a fascinating site, featuring vintage photos collected from old high school yearbooks from across the United States. You can see clothes and hairstyles of various eras, as well as concerts, local businesses, celebrities, and more. You have to pay to see most of the images, but you won't find many like them anywhere!
Leisure
Suits Forever!
The
Mood Ring
RustyZipper.com
has a great selection of 70s vintage clothes for sale
Fever Vintage has all kinds of groovy disco dresses, smoking
jackets, vintage sweaters and more
Sydney's Vintage Clothing suits, purses, hats, shoes, and jewelry
DressThatMan.com specializes in funky, fabulous vintage menswear from the 60's and 70's.
I think I was born a feminist. I remember doing a report in
eighth grade history about equal rights for women (I counted up the number of male and female doctors and lawyers
in the local phone book, and indignantly reported the disparity),
much to the displeasure of my ultra-conservative, George Wallace (252 K) -loving
teacher, and the indifference of my apolitical classmates. In
high school, my best friend Robin and I bought the 45 of Helen
Reddy's I
Am Woman and donated it to the campus radio station--and
then went on a two-woman hellraising campaign when they refused
to play it.
In college I finally found a few more like-minded folks. I
became an intern in the university Women's Center, joined a couple
of uppity women's groups on campus, took women's studies classes,
went to Take
Back the Night Rallies, and demonstrated
for various women's issues. I read books like The
Second Sex and Sisterhood
is Powerful and A
Plain Brown Rapper. It was an exciting
time.
The Feminist Majority Foundation's Feminist
Chronicles offers a very readable year-by year record of
events, lifestyle, education, economics, religion, legal and
political issues, and the anti-feminist backlash. There's some amazing information here!
Duke University's Documents
from the Women's Liberation Movement
is a collection of materials from the women's movement in the
US that focus specifically on the radical origins of the movement
during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical
theoretical writings, to rally speeches and protest songs, to
satirical plays, to the minutes of one grassroots group.
The Equal Rights
Amendment was passed by Congress and sent
to the states for ratification in 1972. In 1982 it died, having
been ratified by just 35 of the necessary 38 states. We were
stunned--it had seemed like such a sure thing, because it was
so utterly, simply reasonable. Here, Jo Freeman gives her 1988
analysis
of what happened.
One of the Women's Center's big events while I was in college
was to host a lecture by Gloria
Steinem on campus. As an intern in the
office, I got to be the one to drive her back to her hotel afterwards
and interview her for the campus radio station. She was gracious,
honest and delightfully real. And, as in this 1970 article Women's Liberation
Aims to Free Men, Too, she made a lot
of sense.
No doubt about it--the seventies were a landmark period for
the "gay community" (we were still struggling then
to get them to call it the "gay and lesbian community,"
and "gay lesbian and bisexual" was still a ways off,
never mind "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered"...which
is why a lot of people just go with "queer" these days)
I only started visiting there in the very late seventies,
and I didn't live there until the early eighties, but Uncle
Donald's Castro Street Gallery brings back some wonderful
memories of the days when we all thought the sexual revolution
was over, and we'd won.
Lesbian Feminism I actually have
more mixed feelings about the lesbian community of the 1970s.
It was lots of fun to be a fag hag then in the gay community,
but being a just-out bisexual in the "womyn's community" was a whole lot harder. This thoughtful (but unfortunately ad-ridden) essay discusses the dominant political and
social attitudes that made the 1970s such a freeing, oppressive,
terrible, wonderful time for people like me.
The
Briggs Initiative was a 1978 ballot
proposition that was meant to ban gays and lesbians--or any teacher
found to be "advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting"
homosexual activity--from teaching in California public schools.
Known officially as Proposition 6, it was the first statewide
initiative on gay rights to make it to the ballot in the US.
It didn't turn out like the its backers planned--not only did
it fail at the polls, but it was credited (along with Anita
Bryant's similar campaign in Florida)
with politicizing and mobilizing the gay community like nothing
else ever had.
Word
Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives
The description of this film once read "Ask a gay man or lesbian over 35 what film most affected
their lives as gay people, and likely as not they'll answer Word
Is Out." If you change that to "over 45," it might still hold true.
Like most queer people in the 1970's, I admired Harvey
Milk. He made us proud, he gave us
hope. Being young and arrogant, I took his accomplishments for
granted--after all, our time had come, hadn't it? A gay man had
every right to get himself elected to public office, and work
to make the world a better place...didn't he? Dan White didn't
think so. He murdered Harvey Milk, along with Mayor George Moscone,
in 1978. I was in London at the time on a junior year abroad
program. It was just a few days after the Jonestown
massacre had made headlines. I remember wondering, what the
hell are they doing to my city?? I can't remember many times
when I felt so cold and bereft and so very far from home.
Here, in no particular order, are some other things I remember
fondly from the seventies (or thereabouts)...
Apollo
11
Earth Day
Nixon goes to China
OozingGoo.com: The Lava Lamp
Syndicate
8-Track Heaven--Your
Guide to the World of 8-Track Tape
Pet
Rocks
Wacky Packages
Streakerama features streaking
news, streaking history, streaking links, and everything else streaking.
The
Man on Page 602 Never had the
Sears Catalog been such popular reading material...
Jimmy Carter is looking like a better president all the time...
In the late seventies, an exhibit of artifacts from the tomb
of Egyptian King
Tutankhamun toured museums
in the US. I saw it at the L.A. County Museum. I stood in line
for hours to get the tickets, and hours more to shuffle through
the crowded gallery. Nevertheless, King Tut and everything Egyptian
was all the rage. Steve Martin's Funky
Tut skit on Saturday Night Live forever
immortalized the over-the-top silliness of Tutmania.
Pong
The one that started it all... (and look here for a much more
detailed history of Pong
that only a true geek could love)
ClassicGaming.com says their mission is "to become the
largest source of information on classic games, giving recognition
to the systems and games that shaped the industry into what it
is today...and to reunite gamers with their favorite games of
old, allowing them to once again enjoy classic games via emulation."
Remember Sillisculpts?
Oh, yes you do. Bet you even bought one for your mother (I did).
The Bad Fads Museum
features memorable moments from the seventies like Afro hairdos,
est, streaking, Rubik's Cube, minibikes, and more silliness.
CrazyFads.com documents more great fads of the seventies--Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific Shampoo, string art, puka shells, and more of your favorites.
Yesterland: A Theme Park
on the Web, featuring discontinued Disneyland attractions.
Yes, Monsanto's Adventures Thru Inner Space, the G.E. Carousel
of Progress, and Casa de Fritos--not to mention
E-Tickets themselves--are gone, but not forgotten!
The Ford Pinto
might have been a rolling deathtrap, but to my friends and I
it had a feature that made it our favorite car: while most cars
had a generic-looking gas cap concealed behind a little door
in the side of the car, the Pinto's was a one-piece contraption
painted to match the rest of the car body. They were interchangeable...and
they didn't lock. Soon, just about every Pinto in Redding that
wasn't locked up at night had a gas cap that was a different
color than the rest of the car, thanks to us.
We weren't the only Pinto fans--1976 Bicentennial Cars is a video clip from someone who was very fond of theirs (and its cousin, the Mercury Bobcat).
A man and his muscle car...it's a beautiful thing.
Energy
Urgency describes energy policy and progress
in "the nuclear-bashing, tree-hugging, energy-starved '70s"
as only a site sponsored by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
could.
From the Food History Timeline we learn that the year 1970 brought us Hamburger Helper, and Reese's Pieces first made their appearance in 1978.
Space Food Sticks were "a non-frozen balanced energy snack in rod form
containing nutritionally balanced amounts of carbohydrate, fat
and protein." Imagine a food whose major selling point is
that it's totally processed and artificial and bears little or
no resemblance to any natural substance, and you'll know what
they were about.
Relive the days when kids' cereals were actually allowed to
have the word "sugar" in their names, and cute ethnic
stereotypes could adorn the boxes...visit Painstick's
Cereal Box Gallery!
For a look at some far less appetizing seventies foods, take
a look at these Weight
Watchers recipe cards from 1974. Yeesh...no
wonder people were expected to lose weight on this stuff!
Hometown Favorites
This online grocery store of the past offers candy, condiments
and other food items, including some hard-to-find nostalgic ones
and some regionally-distributed brands.
Candy You
Ate as a Kid, CandyDirect.com, CandyFavorites.com, and The Candy Baron are retro candy stores featuring your favorite
sugary junk foods, some of which I haven't seen since I bought
them by the sackful at Woolworth's before the going across the
street to the Saturday kiddie matinee at the Cascade Theater.
...and a few things I remember less fondly...
the
Kent State shootings
Apollo 13 (35K)
the
Munich Olympic massacre
Kissinger promises "Peace is at hand," (84 K) but it isn't
Nixon's "I'm not a crook!" speech
Watergate
Gerald Ford says our Constitution works (256 K) , but he pardons Nixon (100 K) anyway
the
OPEC oil embargo and fuel shortage
the "incident" at Three Mile Island
the
Iranian hostage crisis
The Funky Chicken "Now it is possible for you to learn
this dance in the privacy of your own home..."
Here are a few more repositories of 70's history:
InfoPlease.com has a good timeline
of 70's world history.
About.com's Timeline
of the Twentieth Century: 1970-1979 features headlines and
landmarks of the decade.
Illusion
and Delusion: The Watergate Decade features photos mostly
related to the Watergate scandal, plus a timeline of the sordid
story as it unfolded, and other things that were happening around
that time in the US
Time Magazine's 80
Days that Changed the World begins
the seventies with the
introduction of microchip and ends it with the Soviet
defeat in Afghanistan.
dMarie Time Capsule lets you look up what happened on any day in history--news headlines, birthdays, top songs, TV shows, top toys, and bestselling books.
The Seventies
Almanac has a year-by-year list of hit music, top television
shows, news and sports highlights
Tulsa Counterculture of the 70's I will refrain from comments...after all, Redding had a counterculture, so why not Tulsa?
Archer Audio Archives has a timeline
of 1970's history that includes some great audio clips.
The
History Channel's Speeches and Video collection age is a
treasure trove of sound and video clips, including some incredible
ones from the seventies
The Authentic History Center has some great seventies audio clips and images from the news and popular culture.
The Free Information Society has another amazing collection of audio clips, including some great ones from the seventies--Spiro Agnew, Jimmy Carter, and lots more.
The American Rhetoric site features the top 100 speeches of the twentieth century. The ones from the seventies feature Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Richard Nixon, and more.
Michigan State University Library's Vincent Voice Library
has a collection of U.S. presidential voices, including:
President
Richard Nixon from his 1971 State of the Union address
President
Gerald Ford from his 1976 State of the Union address
President
Jimmy Carter from his 1979 State of the Union address
This Tribute to the 70's video montage from YouTube highlights some very good and some very, very bad moments from the decade.
I graduated from high school in the Class of '76, so naturally
I have a soft spot in my heart for the American Bicentennial.
For a long time I lamented here on my 70's page that nobody had
devoted a website to this memorable era in the history of American
hype. But finally, some Bicentennial sites have begun to appear.
Lisa's
Nostalgia Cafe--American Bicentennial
The Freedom
Train, a traveling exhibition of artifacts from the first
200 year of the nation's history (stuff like George Washington's
copy of the Constitution, the original Louisiana Purchase, Judy
Garland's dress from The Wizard of Oz, Joe Frazier's boxing trunks,
Martin Luther King Jr.'s pulpit and robes, and a moon rock),
rode the rails in 1975 and 1976. Here's a look at the train itself, aka the
Southern Pacific 4449, and another site with many
more pictures of it.
Many local transit systems decorated their busses and trains
with a Bicentennial theme, like these in San
Francisco, Pittsburgh, and New
York.
South Bend, Indiana was one of the cities that painted its fire hydrants with a Bicentennial motif.
Public
libraries had displays of local history
and bicentennial paraphernalia.
Stamps
and coins
were issued commemorating the occasion.
Collectibles, from patriotic belt
buckles to t-shirts to Bicentennial
7UP Cans, were hot sellers. The collection at the Liberty Bell Museum in Philadelphia includes bicentennial commemorative doorknockers, ice buckets, and golf putters.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans got into the act, and so did Liberace, and even Smokey Bear
Greyhound jumped on the bandwagon with this bicentennial-themed ad.
And, at long last...the ones I've been waiting for...there are actually a few pages now on Bicentennial
Minutes!!!
Wikipedia's entry on Bicentennial
Minutes
Lucille Ball and Jessica Tandy made contribution to the series, and President Gerald Ford did the final one .
And then there's this...the YouTube description says it's a "Film For The Big 200 Celebration (On Acid)" and I can't disagree. The last few frames say it's "A production of the United States Information Agency," and I find that part a little harder to believe.
It's official--seventies nostalgia is a trend!
The Seattle Times tells us to "Do
the time warp: The '70s are back"
That '70s Show was
a hit comedy on FOX
VH1 did a series called I Love the 70s
Since I've had this page up I've had a lot of people write
to me because they were planning a 70's theme party and wanted
suggestions. I had a few ideas, and I got a lot more from other
folks. At first I just collected
ideas for party foods, but as people asked for them and shared
them, I've also compiled some ideas for decorations, party favors,
entertainment, and more. So, if you're planning a party, here
are our Seventies Theme Party Ideas.
Fed up with all this seventies nostalgia? Had enough of the
"Me Generation" and its self-indulgent, narcissistic
navel-gazing? Okay, suit yourself...ready or not, it is: The 80's Server!
  
  
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