Remnant of "Red Scare" repealed.

[MisterCairo]

Most of the people who consider the 1950s a "golden age" were children then. The "golden age" of everything is eight.

I was eight between June 1975 and June 1976.

I consider the 1970s from my recollection to be many things.

"Golden" is not one of them!

I have fond childhood memories, of course, including some pop cultural things like my favourite cartoons and other shows, but otherwise, ick...

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always considered the '70s to be the Golden Age of Nixon jokes, three-camera videotaped sitcoms, lick-and-stick tattoos, dehydrated mix-in-the-mug noodle products, baseball players with comedy haircuts, taco-flavored snack chips, and late-night absurdist call-in radio shows. It was also the last period in which mainstream American movies were directed to an audience other than pimply-backed fifteen-year-old boys. But I can't think of too much else I can say in their favor.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I've always considered the '70s to be the Golden Age of Nixon jokes, three-camera videotaped sitcoms, lick-and-stick tattoos, dehydrated mix-in-the-mug noodle products, baseball players with comedy haircuts, taco-flavored snack chips, and late-night absurdist call-in radio shows. It was also the last period in which mainstream American movies were directed to an audience other than pimply-backed fifteen-year-old boys. But I can't think of too much else I can say in their favor.

At least we had the National Lampoon magazine in the first half of that decade. Iconoclastic humor in print that has not had anything as an equal since.

 

[LizzieMaine]

At least we had the National Lampoon magazine in the first half of that decade. Iconoclastic humor in print that has not had anything as an equal since.

I have fond memories of "Trots and Bonnie."

 

[ChiTownScion]

I have fond memories of "Trots and Bonnie."

Lampoon was my first exposure to Gahan Wilson's animation. Really insane, off the wall stuff, some of it... but I always thought that "the kid" in "Nuts" nailed the essence of childhood as well as anyone.

 

[tonyb]

Give it a couple-three more decades and the surviving '70s artifacts (platform shoes, Betamax tapes, BeesGees albums, etc.) will be selling for thousands of Bitcoins.

 

[tonyb]

Lampoon was my first exposure to Gahan Wilson's animation. Really insane, off the wall stuff, some of it... but I always thought that "the kid" in "Nuts" nailed the essence of childhood as well as anyone.

If I'm not mistaken, Wilson's stuff had appeared in Playboy long before the National Lampoon came along. He appears from time to time in the pages of The New Yorker, although I don't know when that relationship started.

Among my faves in Lampoon is the late Vaughn Bode, whose Cheech Wizard character spoke to a late-stage adolescent me.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Give it a couple-three more decades and the surviving '70s artifacts (platform shoes, Betamax tapes, BeesGees albums, etc.) will be selling for thousands of Bitcoins.

I can't see anyone in their right mind pining for those 1975- 1976 atrocities known as polyester blend leisure suits. At least I hope not. Three piece (with vest) wool suits that were popular at the end of the decade: that's another matter.

 

[tonyb]

I can't see anyone in their right mind pining for those 1975- 1976 atrocities known as polyester blend leisure suits. At least I hope not. Three piece (with vest) wool suits that were popular at the end of the decade: that's another matter.

Yeah, that '70s does '30s (but not quite) look. I had such a three-piece suit back then.

 

[Fading Fast]

Growing up in the '70s, I had almost none of the historical perspective I do today, but I was into old movies and even then (and I am not revising my history) saw the decade as one that had lost its way. To be honest, that was how my father described it, so I was hearing it at home all the time, but it "fit" with my aborning understanding of prior decades.

Yes, the politics, but also the music, the clothes, the hair styles, the drugs, the protests - it all felt chaotic to me as a kid. It felt as if the adults had lost control. I didn't hate the '70s, but I sincerely believe I recognized that whatever was "normal," that wasn't it. You could see and feel the generational anger, the political anger, the economic anger and angst (inflation scared my parents to death), the cultural anger and none of it felt like a positive country on a good path.

And shows like "That '70s Show" (like "Happy Days" before it) pretty much whitewash all the really tough stuff out. Sure, they had an episode here or there that touched on inflation or job loss, but most weren't like that, and even the episodes that were, usually found a simple solution and then it was on to the next laugh.

When "That '70s Show" (I know it's off the air now) does an episode on a worried-about-the-cost-of-food mother, literally, having her kid go through all the cans on the grocery store shelf to see if any of the older ones haven't been marked up yet or has the mother announce to the family what is now off the normal food rotation owing to price increases - then "That '70s Show" will more reflect "Fading Fast's Life in the '70s" Show.

 

[BlueTrain]

The fact there was even a "70s show" demonstrates my point about how, for some reason, television shows are often set in that 20 to 30 year distant past. But I lived through the 70s and 80s as well as the decades before and after. Even though there are sometimes events which were very significant, real changes happen so gradually that you're barely aware of them. It's like the past disappears at the same speed your clothes wear out. Or something like that. Because you live life continuously, if you follow me, you absorb each and every change as it happens. But only if you're actually there. If you go away, then come back, the changes are jarring, as when you go back to your hometown after a ten year absence. You will notice all the changes that took place, and there were sure to have been some, and taken all together at once, it can almost be too much. And you don't even have to go that far away for that to happen. Say you always go a certain way back and forth to work. Then you get a different job and go the other way for a long time. By and by you have some reason to go back where you used to work and you are amazed at everything that has happened. That's not necessarily bad. If things are like they are where I'm from, things will be overgrown, torn down, closed up and so on. Only the cemetery seems to be in good shape.

Since the ultimate fantasy is to be young again, it should be no surprise that you remember things the most vividly from when you were a teenager though sometime in your twenties. Usually those are pretty happy years, even though you may have no money, maybe no job, and have all sorts of problems, including what your future is going to be. But at the same time, you probably have no health problems, all your friends are young (and "with it"), your parents and all the people you knew growing up are still alive, and you aren't worried about where you're going to spend the night or where your next meal is coming from.

Eventually, though, you life gets sorted out and things don't look so bad but you spend all your time working. So much so that you don't have time to worry about the things that you can't do anything about and which aren't your problems anyway. You have enough of your own. That period in your life lasts about 40 years on average. After that you have time to complain about the younger generation. Then, eventually, you'll be saying something like, "Oh, to be 70 again!"

 

[LizzieMaine]

I absolutely hated being a teenager, and wouldn't go back to that time in my life for all the tea in China. Probably the best time in my life was my forties.

As for the 70s themselves, the HUAC was finally abolished in 1976. At least that's something.

 

[BlueTrain]

I always get a laugh when I walk around the office saying "These are the best days of our lives."

 

[Edward]

I'm always interested to read about the foundational context of the CCA. Here in the UK, we had the same moral panic About comic books in the early fifties, but in place of an industry-based self-regulatory code, we got the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 (the Wikipedia on this is quite good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_and_Young_Persons_(Harmful_Publications)_Act_1955). This made it an offence to publish or distribute comic books that depicted violence or horrific acts in a way that made them likely to appeal to children.

Amusingly enough, the driving force in campaigning for this issue to be taken seriously by Parliament was a bizarre alliance between the National Union of Teachers, who objected to being expected to deal with sleepy kids who's stayed up all night filling their minds with trashy comic books, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, whose primary objection to these publications was that they were predominantly the effluent of the Great Capitalist Satan, the USA.

Give it a couple-three more decades and the surviving '70s artifacts (platform shoes, Betamax tapes, BeesGees albums, etc.) will be selling for thousands of Bitcoins.

No doubt. It's no accident that the strongest form of nostalgia seems to kick in among those too young to have lived it, or at least too young to have remembered it. The Sixties and Seventies fads have passed, and for the last two decades in the UK we've had a huge pop culture nostalgia for the eighties, typically most lapped up by people who didn't live through it. I'm certainly grateful I was only fifteen when the eighties passed out; it wasn't an era that I found much to recommend it. I'm always amused when I see kids dressing now in fashions I remember thinking were bad enough the first time round. I was eight in 1982, and I still knew they were stupid-looking!

 

[LizzieMaine]

The CPUSA dabbled in creating comics of its own in the 1930s and 1940s -- the Daily Worker featured a number of comic strips over those decades, some of them quite good even in comparison to the mainstream comics of the time. "Little Lefty" was an odd amalgam of "Little Orphan Annie" and "Skippy" with the reactionary politics of those strips reversed. Lefty was created by Maurice Del Bourgo, who did quite a bit of comic book work in the 1940s, including The Green Arrow and The Crimson Avenger at DC, and toward the end of his run by Lou Ferstadt, who occasionally drew the Flash and the Green Lantern for DC. (If only Harry Donenfeld knew!)

Another Worker strip, "Pinky Rankin -- Nazi Fighter" was a well-done international adventure strip in the style of Milton Caniff, drawn under an alias by Dick Briefer, who had a very successful career in mainstream comics books as the writer-artist of Prize Comics popular "Frankenstein" feature. Pinky was a globetrotting crusader against Fascism, who wasn't afraid to get into fistfights to prove his points and always had time for romance on the side. The strip really took off during the war years, and for a while was one of the Worker's most popular features.

And for several years in the mid-1930s, the Worker featured a series of panel cartoons about the foibles of the capitalist class by Syd Hoff, the well-known children's book author (Danny and the Dinosaur) and New Yorker cartoonist. Hoff did his Worker cartoons under the name of A. Redfield, and created his very first children's book, the socialist parable "Mr. His," under that name as well.

 

[BlueTrain]

One definition of nostalgia is a fond remembrance of things you never experienced.

Mark Twain also said that his memory improved as he got older, eventually reaching the point where he could remember things that never happened.

 

[Fading Fast]

I absolutely hated being a teenager, and wouldn't go back to that time in my life for all the tea in China. Probably the best time in my life was my forties.

As for the 70s themselves, the HUAC was finally abolished in 1976. At least that's something.

I have no truck for my childhood or early teen years. That is in part, I guess, why I feel no nostalgia for that time.

It wasn't until I moved out of my house out 17 and started paying my own way in the world that things looked up. I liked my twenties and loved my 30s which coincides with the late 80s up until the early 00s. That said, I don't feel nostalgia for that time.

My favorite things from the '70s are some of the early-in-the-decade classic rock music and those Yankee World Series championships.

Edit Add: And I love not having to see NY Giant football from the '70s ever again. They were not just bad, they were pathetically bad.

 

[tonyb]

I always get a laugh when I walk around the office saying "These are the best days of our lives."

As I have reminded my dewy-eyed bride, who is 18 years my junior, these are the good old days. (With apologies to Ms. King.)

Plan for the future, of course, but live today.

 

[BlueTrain]

One should live for today like you were going to die tomorrow and live for tomorrow like you were going to live forever. Or something like that.

Nostalgia isn't about the life you lived as a youth; it's about the life you didn't live.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Live every day as though it were your last -- and someday you'll be right."
-- Fred Allen