Why were the 70s such a tacky decade?

sheeplady · Dec 17, 2014

As far as the 80s, I wouldn't mind bringing back Mister Rogers and Sesame Street that wasn't 50% animated and taught actual values.

The rest I can leave behind, including the housing bust, recession, the AIDS panic, and drug use. I also wouldn't want to go back to my childhood.

rjb1 · Dec 17, 2014

The folks who are taking shots at George Lucas for "American Graffiti" just weren't there at the right place and time to experience for themselves what he was portraying as an autobiographical account of what he experienced growing up in Modesto, CA in 1962.
I was in exactly that sort of culture a few years later in 1966 in Nashville, TN., so I consider the film to be (sort of) biographical for me.
You could have taken almost anyone from my senior class and put them in the movie or taken anyone from the movie and put them in my senior class and they would have fit perfectly.
When I saw it for the first time - in 1973 - I was stunned at how similar the movie people were to my own people, even though they were a few years (1962 vs 1966) and a few thousand miles away from us.
You may or may not like the movie, but lack of authenticity in its people and events is not the problem - at least for a section of time and space for the folks who lived then.
It does cleverly compress everything that ever happened in high school over four years into one night, but that's the way my memory works - looking back it becomes a whole ball of good memories without as much time-separation as it really had.
Also, the music that most people here hate was perfect background music for us as we did what we did, and was perfect just as Lucas used it.

The 1970's had a lot of faults and problems - a very depressing decade - but the release of "American Graffitti" in 1973 wasn't part of the negativity.
("American Graffiti": 1973 - "The Wonder Years": 1988 - who's stealing from whom?)
("Fonzie" - whom I dislike and would never watch - was not a creation of George Lucas.)

HoosierDaddy · Dec 17, 2014

I agree rjb1
My high school years 1961-65 here in mid Indiana was nearly a mirror image of the movie. Some things were a little exaggerated..but not much. Very similar characters in my hometown and surrounding area cruising the streets and meeting at nearby hangouts. After my graduation in May 1965 a HS friend and I traveled around the south on a bus trip to Florida to stay at my Uncle's house on the beach for two weeks. School was still in session there until mid June so we had the chance to mingle with some of the HS Florida kids. Attended a couple school dances..local drive in..and beach parties. Kids there did the same thing as those of us up north. Cruising A1A and towns along the coast along with their local juke box hangouts. Cool cars..pegged levis..white socks..(although sandals may have often taken the place of penny loafers). American Graffiti did indeed capture the teenage culture during the time period in many U.S. towns...IMO. Things did begin to change in the late '60s and by the mid '70s it had become quite something else.
HD

31 Model A · Dec 17, 2014

rjb1 said:
The folks who are taking shots at George Lucas for "American Graffiti" just weren't there at the right place and time to experience for themselves what he was portraying as an autobiographical account of what he experienced growing up in Modesto, CA in 1962.
I was in exactly that sort of culture a few years later in 1966 in Nashville, TN., so I consider the film to be (sort of) biographical for me.
You could have taken almost anyone from my senior class and put them in the movie or taken anyone from the movie and put them in my senior class and they would have fit perfectly.
When I saw it for the first time - in 1973 - I was stunned at how similar the movie people were to my own people, even though they were a few years (1962 vs 1966) and a few thousand miles away from us.
You may or may not like the movie, but lack of authenticity in its people and events is not the problem - at least for a section of time and space for the folks who lived then.
It does cleverly compress everything that ever happened in high school over four years into one night, but that's the way my memory works - looking back it becomes a whole ball of good memories without as much time-separation as it really had.
Also, the music that most people here hate was perfect background music for us as we did what we did, and was perfect just as Lucas used it.

The 1970's had a lot of faults and problems - a very depressing decade - but the release of "American Graffitti" in 1973 wasn't part of the negativity.
("American Graffiti": 1973 - "The Wonder Years": 1988 - who's stealing from whom?)
("Fonzie" - whom I dislike and would never watch - was not a creation of George Lucas.)

:eusa_clap Better put than I did. To understand things so much more, one has to walk in the other's shoes.

LizzieMaine · Dec 17, 2014

Oh, I can understand why it would appeal to that generation. That's just a generation whose popular culture I can't stand.

31 Model A · Dec 18, 2014

What does 'Culture' suppose to represent other than namely the full "expression" of the unique or "authentic" self. The movie portrayed that exactly. People of the predominant 40/50s called the 60s, "Rock and Roll has Got to Go", Saturday night cruising, the hair styles, girl/boy relationships, the cars, the music, all those were in the movie, nothing fiction about the movie...at all. Science fiction Star War movies might have come from the mind of Lucas, but there wasn't anything fiction in "American Graffiti" . It portrayed a true culture of exact events that impacted a whole generation......and still does.

Harp · Dec 18, 2014

rjb1 said:
The 1970's had a lot of faults and problems - a very depressing decade - but the release of "American Graffitti" in 1973 wasn't part of the negativity.

The girl Ron Howard's character was leaving-the car hop waitress-what a knockout. Only part of the flick that didn't make sense....

rjb1 · Dec 18, 2014

"That's just a generation whose popular culture I can't stand."
It's a free country. No one asked you to like it...

LizzieMaine · Dec 18, 2014

You say authentic, I say cynical marketing-driven exploitation of nostalgia. For what it's worth, my parents graduated from high school in 1957 -- a bit before AG -- and the world they knew was nothing like that depicted in the movie. There was no "teen car culture" in northern New England, and even rock-n-roll was not especially popular here. My mother's favorite recording artist all thru high school was Liberace, and in the early sixties, the only records she bought were by the likes of Billy Vaughn, Mitch Miller, and Lawrence Welk.

In an event, I stand by my earlier remarks. I don't particularly like *any* youth culture, but the 50s-60s rock-n-roll culture just strikes me as especially puerile. Thirties jitterbugs could be just as shallow, but at least they had decent taste in music.

31 Model A · Dec 18, 2014

LizzieMaine said:
You say authentic, I say cynical marketing-driven exploitation of nostalgia.

and what movie does not exploit ??????

I grew up with Mitch Miller, Welk and even Hootenanny and they too were part of the early 60s. The movie doesn't depict the Hippy generation, the Beetles, dope smoking, and Woodstock. It depicted the first half of the 60s, when teens were still innocent and naïve. Not the dope smoking rebellious long haired anti-Vietnam protestors of the late 60s which is what I think you're confused with.

jamespowers · Dec 18, 2014

LizzieMaine said:
The Sixties were the Golden Age of Insincerity.

Man, you aren't kidding. Then the 70s came along and did it one better. :doh:

HoosierDaddy · Dec 18, 2014

31 Model A said:
and what movie does not exploit ??????

I grew up with Mitch Miller, Welk and even Hootenanny and they too were part of the early 60s. The movie doesn't depict the Hippy generation, the Beetles, dope smoking, and Woodstock. It depicted the first half of the 60s, when teens were still innocent and naïve. Not the dope smoking rebellious long haired anti-Vietnam protestors of the late 60s which is what I think you're confused with.

Exactly

LizzieMaine · Dec 18, 2014

The eighteen-year-old boys in our town were working on the docks, working in the shoe or chicken factories, or in the service in the early sixties. They weren't cruising. They were neither innocent nor naive. And most of the girls were married between eighteen and twenty-one. My mother never "cruised" in her life.

I don't know where you're getting any connection in my remarks on AG to dope smokers. I'm criticizing Lucas for jumping on the nostalgia craze of the early seventies and jerking it away from the thirties and into a wide-eyed fixation on The Fifties/Early Sixties that continues to this day. I saw AG with my mother when it first came out -- and she thought it was ridiculous. And as a movie, as a piece of filmmaking, it's got all of Lucas' known weaknesses, especially his utter inability to write anything approaching a believable female character.

I don't particularly like "nostalgia," especially the manipulated, dished-out stuff from Hollywood. I thought "The Waltons" was just as much of a sentimental distortion as AG was. I prefer my view of the past to be thru clear eyes, not misty ones.

31 Model A · Dec 18, 2014

LizzieMaine said:
The eighteen-year-old boys in our town were working on the docks, working in the shoe or chicken factories, or in the service in the early sixties. They weren't cruising. They were neither innocent nor naive. And most of the girls were married between eighteen and twenty-one. My mother never "cruised" in her life..

Cruisin didn't start in 1962 nor end in 62. I was cruising on Saturday night in a small mid-west town during the summer months in 64 after putting hay/straw, slopping the pigs all week long and in the Army in Mar 65. I could say, shame you missed out on so much but, I missed out on a few things too, WWII, Bay of Pigs, eating Goober Peas. I did experienced the little outhouse shack out back until 1965 though.

The movie depicted the early 60s in every small town with teenagers but wasn't Maine being part of Canada then?????

HoosierDaddy · Dec 18, 2014

Maybe it wasn't 'reality' in your world or your Mother's ('57 was maybe just a little early and possibly a more isolated environment)...but it was everyday life to some of us throughout the U.S.. Many enjoyed it and have no doubt that AG depicted those early to mid '60s very close to what we lived. Seems you have no idea of what that was like. So you are despising what you know nothing about except what you think surely happened.
HD

LizzieMaine · Dec 18, 2014

All I can tell you is, it wasn't like that here. There was no "car culture" when my parents were in school, and there was no "car culture" when I was in school twenty years later. We don't have freeways here, the nearest interstate is 50 miles away, and the only kids who had cars had rusted-out beaters -- $50 specials in my parents' day, and $150 beaters in my day. There were no hot rods, there were no Kandy Kolored Kustoms, and there was no cruising. You can't cruise on winding two-lane roads, many of which weren't even paved until the '70s.

My father never owned any car at all until he bought a big, white four-doored '56 Nash after he married my mother. It never cruised anywhere, unless you count my mother driving it to her job at the telephone office. My father never got a chance to drive it at all until he got out of the service, and he ended up cracking the block that winter. The next vehicle he drove was a bread truck. When he wanted to loaf and gaum around with his buddies -- which he would rather do than actually hold a productive job for more than a month at a time -- he hung around a cheap poolroom.

I'm merely pointing out that this "generational experience" wasn't as universal as you guys seem to think it was. Maine wasn't the whole world, but neither were the South or the Midwest.

31 Model A · Dec 18, 2014

Please don't get confused that everyone who cruised back in the 50s/60s had their own car, or it was chopped, hopped up or painted Hot Rod Red. I didn't own my first car until 1970 when I returned from Nam, the second time. Most who cruised used dad's car and there had better not be a millimeter of rubber missing from the tires either. Where we finally able to cruise was 22 miles away with a population of 800. No Mel's Diner but we did have an A&W.

I was in Maine, as I said before, in 1962 and, being isolated in Maine is an understatement but take my word for it, cruisin was not just a California culture thing....it was a 50s/60s culture thing in most all states as the music was also.

LizzieMaine · Dec 18, 2014

Well, I can take your word for it, or I can take the word of my entire family and the experience of my own life. Keep in mind I grew up in a gas station, and if there had been any kind of a cruisin' car culture here I would have been very much aware of it, even as a little girl. But if it makes you happy to believe that everybody everywhere spent the fifties and sixties cruisin' to the sounds of Wolfman Jack, be my guest.

(I have to add, though, that the only radio station in our area that broadcast a top-40 rock-n-roll format signed off at 8pm. But we didn't care, because we were all listening to the Red Sox game on another station. Baseball was far, far more important to the youth culture in my area than music. The kids I knew couldn't name any of the four Beatles, but we could name all the infielders on the '67 Red Sox. Or the '46 Red Sox.)

Stanley Doble · Dec 18, 2014

There really was a youthful car culture centered on southern California. Tom Wolfe wrote it up in his first book, The Kandy Kolor Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, a report on pop culture in America in 1962.

This was the milieu Lucas grew up in, and what he memorialized in AG. What do you think the name American Graffiti means?

LizzieMaine · Dec 18, 2014

Again, I'm simply saying that culture wasn't a universal American experience for that generation. The perniciousness of AG is that it's helped to create the image that it *was.* That was no more the definitive experience for early-sixties America than the dope-smoking hippy was the universal experience for late sixties America. In both cases the nostalgia industry has taken a grain of reality and boiled it up into a whole bowl of mush.

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