Why did everything look so....crappy? in the 1970s

[FedoraFan112390]

Everything from the movies to tv shows to fashion, there just seemed to be an air of, I guess the best word for it is 'cheapness', like, if you watch a TV show from the 70s or some movies, it looks cheaply made; it looks coarse as well, almost vulgar, especially the fashions and how loud and decadent everything appeared; everything looks a bit sleazy, dirty, cheap, cheesy...And there's also, in the early-mid 70s, this odd eeriness/creepines about the early-mid part of the decade. Does anyone get what I mean?

Like for example just some images.

Even the color grading of professionally shot films in the 70s can't match the glitz and beauty of films from the 30s-60s:

vs:

 

[Stanley Doble]

You should have seen the cars. They outdid even the music, movies and fashions in crappiness. I was there, and you are 100% right. The country descended into a level of crappiness it has never completely recovered from.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

You should have seen the cars. They outdid even the music, movies and fashions in crappiness. I was there, and you are 100% right. The country descended into a level of crappiness it has never completely recovered from.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I feel cars hit their peak sometime between 1951 and 1965 or thereabouts.

 

[Stanley Doble]

You are not in the minority. Between 1949 and 1957 cars advanced tremendously. From 1957 to 1967 there was relatively little advance. From 1968 to 1980 quality, performance, economy, drivability, engine life, appearance, and value for money all took a nose dive. Around 1985 they started making decent appliances. Not real exciting automobiles, but reliable appliances.

 

[Stanley Doble]

You know how excited young fanbois get over a new Apple product or a new video game system? That is what it was like every year at new model introduction time. Can you imagine anybody being excited today to see the new Fords Chevs or Dodges?

 

[Lean'n'mean]

The 70's was a great place to be but rather embarrassing looking back now, particularly hair styles & fashions. There was a great need for color after the austere post war 50's & the strict early 60's............there was an explosion of ideas, a new found liberty & a rejection of what had been & a leap into the future. It can look cheap & kitch now but so much of it was the result of cutting edge technology. There were some great movies made in the 70's & freed from many censorship laws, imaginations & political freedom flourished. The music was pretty good too, the Beatles were dead but there were plenty of great groups to take their place & of course there was 'The Osmonds' ..who can forget Donny ?
There is a current revival of the 70's decor & a genuine piece of brightly colored plastic furniture can fetch considerable sums on the market...

The 70's for me was a time of carefree voluptuous pleasure.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The 70's was a great place to be but rather embarrassing looking back now, particularly hair styles & fashions. There was a great need for color after the austere post war 50's & the strict early 60's............there was an explosion of ideas, a new found liberty & a rejection of what had been & a leap into the future. It can look cheap & kitch now but so much of it was the result of cutting edge technology. There were some great movies made in the 70's & freed from many censorship laws, imaginations & political freedom flourished. The music was pretty good too, the Beatles were dead but there were plenty of great groups to take their place & of course there was 'The Osmonds' ..who can forget Donny ?
There is a current revival of the 70's decor & a genuine piece of brightly colored plastic furniture can fetch considerable sums on the market...

The 70's for me was a time of carefree voluptuous pleasure.

The 70s were the greatest, most creative decade ever in popular music, and it's not even particularly close.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The 70s were the greatest, most creative decade ever in popular music, and it's not even particularly close.

The Twenties would like a word with you outside.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The seventies were the inevitable culmination of postwar consumerism -- shoddy goods shoved down the gullet of a brainwashed public by a ruthlessly-cynical corporate machine.

But "Network" was a very, very, very good movie.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Even the color grading of professionally shot films in the 70s can't match the glitz and beauty of films from the 30s-60s:

The main difference there is that entirely different processes were used. Three-strip Technicolor, the process responsible for that "thirties color look" was abandoned in the mid-fifties, in favor of less-expensive single-strip processes like Eastmancolor. Three-strip Technicolor imbibition printing lasted into the early seventies before it too was abandoned as too costly to continue.

Three-strip Technicolor *did not use color film.* It split the light coming thru the lens and sent it thru red, blue, and green filters onto three synchronized strips of black and white film. These three negatives would be used to create printing matrices which would then be printed sequentially onto a blank piece of film using special dyes in a process more like lithography than photography. It's impossible to create true Technicolor using color film or video.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

You can have everything else just give me the Stingray bike behind the TV.
actually that's the deluxe model Krate version

 

[vitanola]

The 70s were the greatest, most creative decade ever in popular music, and it's not even particularly close.

The mind boggles.

 

[Harp]

The 70's for me was a time of carefree voluptuous pleasure.

After the Army cut me loose, I chased wahines and waves on Kaneohe Beach and had a crash pad in Makki Heights in Honolulu.
Those were the days...

 

[Frunobulax]

The mind boggles.

There is a plethora of fantastic music in every decade since the advent of the recording and distribution of commercial music. Everything else is just taste. The 20s-30s saw an explosion in recorded music due to technological advances in recording techniques and the popularity of that there newfangled wireless device. The 60s-70s saw similar technological leaps due to the development of Les Paul's electric guitar, advances in the studio, advances in distribution and marketing, and the advent of FM stereo radio. Couple that with the post-war baby boom, a strong middle class with disposable income, and the fact that a lot of musicians took possession of their own music, and you have the perfect storm.

We are seeing a similar thing happen right now. The music market is terribly fragmented, like so many areas of the market. However, with the introduction of the internet, digital downloads, the ability to support an artist directly, and the ability of the artist to write, record, and market their music independently, and you have another perfect storm. It's a good time, right now, to be a music fan and a musician.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

A few things about the '70s weren't all that bad.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My favorite thing from the '70s.

 

[AmateisGal]

I was born in '75 so don't remember a lot of it, but from an aesthetic standpoint, I, personally, struggle to find one good thing about it. Not a fan at all of the fashion, the music, the movies, the decor. Whenever I watch or listen to anything from the '70s, I get depressed. (Yes, really). Maybe it's repressed childhood trauma.

 

[Bob Roberts]

Blame it all on "Disco!"

 

[Feraud]

There is good and bad from every era. I am not a fan of the fashion or most home decor of the 70s.

But there was a lot of great music and film from the 70s. And muscle cars too!

 

[LizzieMaine]

You can actually trace a lot of the visual grotesqueries of the seventies back to the modernism of the late fifties and early sixties -- they're the logical culmination of the trends that came out of that period, right down to the unsettling color combinations. Go back and look at any high-end decor magazine from 1963 or so and you'll see the germs of what blossomed in the seventies -- the emphasis on browns and oranges and yellows, the weird spindly furniture, the distasteful carpeting, all of it. The "seventies looks" was simply this look strained thru the filter of consumption-driven capitalism -- dumb it down to the lowest common denominator, market the hell out of it and make the proles think it's "the thing," and then shove it at them until the warehouses are empty.

Not a fan of postwar auto design at all -- too much chrome encrustation, too low, too wide, and too bombastic. And if Vance Packard and John Keats are to be believed, a lot of people at the time thought so, too.