I grew up in the seventies, so I tend to think of it as a Golden Age in the popular arts. In music, you had Steely Dan, Sparks, Warren Zevon, The Ramones, Parliament-Funkadelic. TV brought us The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbo and The Rockford Files. And as for movies, it was a time when Hollywood routinely produced small, personal films, and even things that were meant to be Big Dumb Entertainment became something more--like The Godfather and Jaws.
Then there was this:
This would be William Shatner on Dinah Shore's old talk show. He does this sort of thing now as a joke, but back then, he was painfully serious.
People didn't really get irony in the seventies. The old guard floundered, trying to be hip, missing by a mile:
The mannish, sexually ambiguous Bea Arthur and closeted gay Rock Hudson singing about drug use--the seventies in a nutshell.
Hudson, with his manly man appearance, may have convinced many, but what was the thinking here?
Paul Lynde with a wife and kids? In retrospect, one of the most painful aspects of the seventies was how the mainstream neutered the gay revolution. Paul Lynde could be allowed on TV if he pretended to be straight, and even The Village People were presented as asexual--they could sing about staying at the YMCA, but to get a gig on one of Dick Clark's shows, they couldn't suggest they'd engage in any, you know, inappropriate activities.
The early seventies saw the emergence of hardcore porn, but as the decade wore on, it got sublimated into the mainstream:
You've got to feel sorry for poor Karen Grassle there, sanwiched between the awesome mounds of Adrienne Barbeau and, in Howard Cosell's words, Lustrous Lynda Carter. Battle Of The Network Stars was a seriously weird show, full of down time in between shots of wet celebrity tits. Which, let's face it, was the only reason anybody watched.
I was in Junior High when this happened, one of the defining events of the decade:
People pledging unswerving fealty to a fanatical leader? That sort of thing could never happen now.
