Why do I hate the 1970s so much?

[Dr Doran]

I was talking to my daughter earlier, well trying to, who can talk to an almost 14 year old who never talks in complete sentences? Yeah, she prob gets some of that from me. I told her use some verbs, nouns, adjectives, conjuctions....which led me to the School House Rock song Conjunction Junction, Whats Your Function..... Which now leads me to this thread..(kinda a thread of unconsciousness huh lol) it gives us something to LOVE about the 70s.[huh]

Conjunction Junction ruled. Schoolhouse rock ROCKED. Another thing I loved about the 70s? SESAME STREET. A beautiful dream of racial harmony. Too bad Big Bird was such a doofus. Was Big Bird supposed to be male or female? Or was he, like God, "above such human distinctions"?

 

[jamespowers]

Conjunction Junction ruled. Schoolhouse rock ROCKED. Another thing I loved about the 70s? SESAME STREET. A beautiful dream of racial harmony. Too bad Big Bird was such a doofus. Was Big Bird supposed to be male or female? Or was he, like God, "above such human distinctions"?

Schoolhouse stuff I can live with even though the characters were drawn by what appears to be cross-eyed artists.:eusa_doh:
Sesame Street?! Geez, I still hate those characters to this day. Then you have to listen to them ad nauseum if your children like it. Makes you want to shoot the TV. :rage: If I see one more Elmo......

Regards,

J

 

[pretty faythe]

Conjunction Junction ruled. Schoolhouse rock ROCKED. Another thing I loved about the 70s? SESAME STREET. A beautiful dream of racial harmony. Too bad Big Bird was such a doofus. Was Big Bird supposed to be male or female? Or was he, like God, "above such human distinctions"?

Wikipedia refers to Big Bird in the male pronoun, so he must be a he.lol

 

[jamespowers]

Wikipedia refers to Big Bird in the male pronoun, so he must be a he.lol

Its a he---maybe.

 

[J. M. Stovall]

Remember those after school specials? I liked 'em. At least they were trying to pass on a good message to tweens. Where is such an effort on tv now? All those Disney live action sitcoms aimed at that age group are full of smart aleck kids that are "obviously" smarter than all the adults.

 

[J. M. Stovall]

Its a he---maybe.

He's never laid an egg has he? Male. Otherwise they would be having some nice big omlettes at Hoopers!

 

[jamespowers]

He's never laid an egg has he? Male. Otherwise they would be having some nice big omlettes at Hoopers!

If Oscar didn't steal it first.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Remember those after school specials? I liked 'em.

No, they sucked -- and for one big reason. Here in Southern California, they were shown at 3:00 pm. Hello! We got OUT of school exactly at 3! How could we go IMMEDIATELY to our TV sets and watch the show? Impossible! :eusa_doh: Did the programming geniuses at ABC think that we all lived right next to our schools?

.

 

[Lincsong]

No, they sucked -- and for one big reason. Here in Southern California, they were shown at 3:00 pm. Hello! We got OUT of school exactly at 3! How could we go IMMEDIATELY to our TV sets and watch the show? Impossible! :eusa_doh: Did the programming geniuses at ABC think that we all lived right next to our schools?

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That made no sense whatsoever. After a while they started showing them at 3:30 here in the Bay Area. But, I still preferred watching The Three Stooges and Little Rascals. Also the Spiderman cartoons came on at that time.

 

[pretty faythe]

No, they sucked -- and for one big reason. Here in Southern California, they were shown at 3:00 pm. Hello! We got OUT of school exactly at 3! How could we go IMMEDIATELY to our TV sets and watch the show? Impossible! :eusa_doh: Did the programming geniuses at ABC think that we all lived right next to our schools?

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Well, gee, didn't you? I just had to hope on the city bus to get home when I lived in Torrence. The show was half over by then. lol

 

[J. M. Stovall]

Boy they were really great! I enjoyed each and every one over in my Central Time Zone! Couldn't you just TiVO it?

 

[Rafter]

Remember those after school specials? I liked 'em. At least they were trying to pass on a good message to tweens. Where is such an effort on tv now? All those Disney live action sitcoms aimed at that age group are full of smart aleck kids that are "obviously" smarter than all the adults.

Rosanna Arquette and the guy from "James At 15" were in a lot of those ABC Afternoon specials.
Can't seem to remember his name...oh yeah, Lance Kerwin. Everyone knows what happened to Rosanna Arquette. But what ever happened to Lance Kerwin?

 

[Dr Doran]

Is Rosanna Arquette the sis of Patricia "hottie" Arquette? Cause in that pic she looks dorkamundo. The black guy on the other hand looks very handsome for someone in a photo from that period.

 

[Rafter]

Is Rosanna Arquette the sis of Patricia "hottie" Arquette? Cause in that pic she looks dorkamundo. The black guy on the other hand looks very handsome for someone in a photo from that period.

Doran, You got it right! Rosanna Arquette is Patricia's sister. Their grandfather was the late Cliff Arquette (AKA Charlie Weaver), the center square of the original "Hollywood Squares".
One of Rosanna's most successful films was "Desperately Seeking Susan", a film that also featured Madonna.

 

[Dr Doran]

If that is Roseanna next to Madonna, she certainly improved after puberty.

 

[pretty faythe]

Boy they were really great! I enjoyed each and every one over in my Central Time Zone! Couldn't you just TiVO it?

On the BETA machine.

 

[Lincsong]

Fleetwood Mac

Dobie Brothers

 

[Dr Doran]

With the following note I am, once again, not trying to insult anyone who had a good time in that period, nor am I insulting the years themselves, only expressing a subjective distaste for many of its attributes. Continuing what James Powers and I were talking about several posts ago, I think the essence of why he and I, on the one hand, do not appreciate the seventies, while some of us out here do, is, again the utter ubiquitousness of 1968-1979 popular culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's 2007 and James and I CANNOT get away from it if we try. Everywhere I go, there are old hippies, staring with fish eyes at me because I wear a suit, muttering things -- like the "grumblings of grim old men" in that early Catullus poem (rumoresque senum severorum, etc).
Here are some possibilities for the difference in opinion between Powers and me on one hand and some our respected fellow-loungers on the other:
A.) Some of you either lived in places where the hippy/70s movements (they are certainly very closely linked) was indeed a fresh unusual thing and it did not MASSIVELY overstay its welcome like it did here.
B.) Some of you had a very interesting time in the 70s, like Salv, which bore little relation to the American cliched 70s experience.
C.) A last possibility is that some of you might genuinely appreciate the countercultural political movement that came of age around 1968 and continued in the 70s. I personally do not.
This can veer into politics, so I'll be ginger about this. It is possible to have fairly left opinions while rejecting the extremism of the youth of that period. The alternative to what people perceive(d) as the sterile conformity of the 50s did NOT need to be the Revolution, the talk (in the Bay Area, again, I know) about assaulting power stations, overturning the US government, and so on.
If you think I am exaggerating any of that, I am not. Read the marvelous book The White Album by Joan Didion, who was there, in the late 60s and early 70s, and was reporting on it. Read memoirs of the Black Panther movement by anyone who was at all critical of it and who does not report an entirely positive view -- I'd recommend Radical Son by former late 60s/early 70s radical leftist David Horowitz, who became a radical right winger specifically in reaction to the excesses of the counterculture, except that personally I think he went overboard in his reaction. If he is too much for you, read Joan Didion's writings on the Panthers in the volume mentioned above. Read Didion's essay "Slouching toward Bethlehem." This woman was not a member of "the establishment" nor was she considered as such, but was simply a gifted writer reporting on the things going on around her, who was sympathetic to, but did not buy, the rhetoric of the youth movements of the late 60s/early 70s. She spent a lot of time in the Bay Area and was, unusually for someone hanging out with these people, critical of them.
Unfortunately, there is no critical sense toward that period here. The aging members of that counterculture never even say "yeah, we were a bit silly in many respects," much less conduct a serious inquiry into how their generation screwed up various things for the future. They look at their actions with a view so uncritical that it makes the rose-colored lenses through which many of us on the Flounge view the "golden era" seem intensely critical. In contrast, for example, ex-punk rockers very often are appropriately critical of the youth movement to which they belonged.
It is right to be critical of all things, or else cerebral functioning stops. And as a resident of the Bay Area, I very seldom see the veterans of the late 60s and 70s youth movements being critical at all.
This, mes amis, is one of the reasons why Powers and I may seem like sourpusses about the late 60s and the 70s. (And another is the Brady Bunch.)

 

[Quigley Brown]

No, they sucked -- and for one big reason. Here in Southern California, they were shown at 3:00 pm. Hello! We got OUT of school exactly at 3! How could we go IMMEDIATELY to our TV sets and watch the show? Impossible! :eusa_doh: Did the programming geniuses at ABC think that we all lived right next to our schools?

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You didn't have a VTR?

 

[Atomic Glee]

Was there any architectural salvage done of the details? There's a lot of magnificent sculpture there that could have been saved. Yes, it does make you go out and shoot somebody, doesn't it?
There are a couple of really gorgeous Deco buildings near Grand Central Terminal that I was admiring the other day. I'll try to get some pix and post them.

I have heard that the giant Indian Princes on either side were saved by somebody, but I've never been able to confirm that, and if they were saved I have no idea where they ended up. Fortunately, a lot of our classic Golden Era buildings survived the demo-fest of the '70s, but I'd still give a kidney to have them all back.

In the interest of saying something *good* about the '70s, I will say this: the Fort Worth Water Gardens here in downtown were built in the '70s (designed by Philip Johnson), and I absolutely LOVE them. They've recently been fully restored. A few pics (yes, the signage is new, and has a distinct Golden Era feel rather than a '70s feel.):

The big building in the back is the Convention Center, which was recently completely redesigned from a disgusting '60s concrete form.

The Quiet Pool.

The Aerated Water Pool.

The Active Pool - parts of "Logan's Run" were filmed here.