The Seesaw Seventies: A time when love was free, peace was the sign of the times and polyester was the fiber of choice. A period in history where the men wear polyester leisure suits, flary pants, huge ties and sport highly sprayed and manicured hair, sideburns included. The women have feathered, Farrah Fawcett hair, and wear slinky dresses with no bras underneath. Black people sported huge, poofy Afros as a Take That to past straightening practices. Heck, even white people had afros if they could grow them. Most people spend at least 92 percent of their waking lives at the disco or behind the wheel of a car big enough to tow the Titanic.
Disco music with a tense "waka-chu-waka" beat often plays during chase scenes, or on pornos.
Elsewhere, Western Terrorists (and the Arab ones) are trying to blow up people, the US is still losing in The Vietnam War, and the blockbuster movie is invented, twice.
Media Technology reaches a turning point, as 8-track audio cassettes and VCRs appear for the first time, however the LP and Film are both still king. Movies such as Taxi Driver and The Godfather begin to deal with subjects once considered taboo due to the loosening censorship laws, and pornographic film becomes legal. The world learns the meaning of Kung Fu thanks to a tough little guy from Hong Kong named Bruce Lee. Television is changed forever by such ground breaking shows as All In The Family, MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Saturday Night Live and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Meanwhile gentle family shows like The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie and The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams found their own audience while The Fonz was ruling the kid's imagination while giving Robin Williams his big time start as the master comedian in Mork and Mindy. Meanwhile, Star Trek: The Original Series is Vindicated by Cable and develops a sizable fanbase, spawning a juggernaut franchise that would not die for... well, ever. While the kids have made the best of the Dark Age Of Animation with Saturday Morning Cartoons like Superfriends and Scooby-Doo, they at least had PBS's breakthrough kids shows, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street in their vibrant glory of its youth before they graduated to The Electric Company, Zoom and The Big Blue Marble.
Punk Rock and Disco, two genres of music which continue to influence music to this day come out during this decade, as does the first primitive electronic music under such bands as the German Kraftwerk and Suicide from New York City. Comics enter the Bronze Age, featuring death, politics, and ethnic superheroes for the first time ever. The Cold War slows down as American and Soviet relations improve for the first time since 1945. American distrust for authority reaches a high point with the Watergate scandal.
The post war economic boom that dominated The Fifties and The Sixties ends in recession, turning the American manufacturing Belt into the "rust belt". Crime and grime are on the rise and respect for law and order - from both criminals and their victims - begins to decline in favour of the good old fashioned "headsblownoff" method. The energy crisis has Westerners running out of gas for the first time, showing the world just how dependent we all are on the Middle East.
Covers roughly the period from the Kent State Massacre of 1970 to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
See Also: The Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression, The Forties, The Fifties, The Sixties, The Eighties, The Nineties, Turn of the Millennium and The New Tens.
The Alleged Car: Pollution control systems were in their infancy so stalling, sputtering, and backfiring were often the order of the day. Lemons: The World's Worst Cars makes note that during the seventies, "quality control" took a nose-dive. Noted auto journalist Peter Egan once dismissed the entire decade as The Era of Stupid Design while Dave Barrytheorized that the first generation of American subcompacts were a Batman Gambit to discredit the very concept of a non-aircraft-carrier sized car.
Fan Yay: A phenomenon making its public revival after the beginning of the modern gay rights movement and the easing of mandatory media/postal censorship.
The Fashionista, as stated in Vogue 1970 issue, there are no rules in fashion, and the fashion storm started that left a mark in the catwalk, then leaving a disaster on the next decade.
Man on Wire is about daredevil tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who walked (and ran, and danced) on a wire strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.
The made-for-tv Elvis Meets Nixon comically imagined the events leading up to the meeting of two major players from The Fifties who fell off the radar in The Sixties only to get big again at decade's end.
Fawlty Towers: Ricky Gervais has noted that Basil Fawlty's obsession with climbing the social ladder was much more important in the 1970s than when The Office was made - when David Brent's preoccupation was becoming a celebrity.
The Toku genre exploded in The Seventies, giving us several classic shows and two franchises that are still with us. More Toku shows aired per year in this decade than any other decade before or since.
Kamen Rider began in 1971 with its namesake series, and it's still going on (except for that break between 75 and 79 when Ishinomori was working on Sentai, and the break between 1980 and 1987, and the break between 1988 and 2000).
Super Sentai began in 1975 with Himitsu Sentai Goranger, and it's still going on (except for 1978, where the Spider-Man tokusatsu aired in it's place, making way for the giant robots that are common in Super Sentai nowadays).
David Bowie rose to stardom in this decade (he'd been recording since 1964), and became iconic and influential enough, especially in his native England, that two of the above-mentioned works set in it — Life on Mars and Velvet Goldmine — are titled after songs of his. The latter is a No Celebrities Were Harmed take on his Glam Rock period.
Deep Purple. Debuted in 1968. Released some of their greatest hits in this decade.
Ronnie Milsap. Debut album in 1971, first major hit in 1974.
The Moody Blues. Formed in 1964. Released a number of hit albums within this decade.
Mike Oldfield. Debut solo album in 1973. Oldfield had previously performed and recorded both in a duo (with his sister Sally Oldfield) and in collaborations with various bands.
