If you didn't have a Simon, you knew someone who did. I didn't, but I didn't need one, as my trusty Merlin (see previous posts) had a Simon-like game on it. Yep, my Merlin was too cool for simple Simon.
This article, from CNET, opens the lid, literally, on Simon, and takes a look at what made him tick. Fun to see what back in 1978 we considered a "computer-controlled game", really...
In these days of extreme sports, you'd be hard-pressed to find some kid who hasn't ridden something over 16 buses, but back in the day, man... Evel Knievel would do it and everyone would skip school to watch.
Sure, we were watching to see if he crashed, and if he never did, it would be boring. These days we expect our stuntmen to be perfect. 70s stuntmen routinely clipped the last bus or dropped thousands of feet down the Grand Canyon, and we would love them all the more for it. Seriously, this from the tribute article in the New York Times: When he was 27, he became co-owner of a motorcycle shop in Moses Lake, Wash. To attract customers, he announced he would jump his motorcycle 40 feet over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes and continue on past a mountain lion tethered at the other end. Before 1,000 people, he did the stunt as promised but failed to fly far enough; his bike came down on the rattlesnakes. The audience was in awe.
“Right then,” he said, “I knew I could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff.”
See? His first stunt was techniocally a failure, but we continued not just to watch in awe of him, but also his son, and the amazing regular failures to clear unusual objects performed by the line of Evel Knievel toys, such as the cycle, chopper, skycycle and touring van. Those things were being held together with staples, super-glue and sheer force of will by the end of the first week of ownership, as they were made of 100% pure fail - and yet we loved them. To add insult to injury, if you were to place a Stretch Armstrong or a Steve Austin action figure on the chopper, you'd barely make it off the ramp, yet Imperial Stormtroopers would fly about 40 feet. Say what you want about the Empire, man, they knew how to jump a bike over row of 5 six-year-olds, yessir.
I have a vague memory of Bing Bang Boing, or something similar from the mid-70s. But seriously, how many of those ball bearings are you going to lose under your leather couch before you give up trying to learn the laws of physics the had way?
That waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa sound takes me back some, though. SSP Racers, the closest us 6 year olds would ever get to drag racing, and suddenly the most useless toy when you lose that T-stick.
Can't say much about the slip-n-slide that hasn't been said before. I didn't have one, didn't know anyone who had one, and it would been useless anyway as we all had concrete back yards where I grew up. Looks like fun, though. Anyone who damn near killed themselves on one of things? Feel free to add your comment.
Okay, so we know that cop shows were cooler, with the exception of Hawaii Five-0, which had a great theme tune, but was essentially pants. But something else we had in the 70s was live-action superhero shows. Shows like Wonder Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk and the short-lived SpiderMan series.
Wonder Woman I may have been a little young to fully appreciate Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, but I remember being extremely confused by the show. Back then, British television (and US television, to be honest) didn't care much about running episodes in order. The problem was that it was really made up of two shows. The first was set during WW2, and Wonder Woman is fighting Nazis. The second is set in the 70s with Wonder Woman fighting terrorists and sinister rock stars and such. She had an invisible plane, which was technically useless, as it didn't make her invisible. So anyone looking up would see this woman in a spangly costume floating at high speed in a sitting position through the sky. Very silly. Very 70s. It does have the best theme tune of them all, though.
The Six Million Dollar Man Also known as the Bionic Man. Steve Austin was my favorite, and I spent most of my childhood wishing I could get the action figure, with the bionic eye that you could look through and the arm that would open up to reveal his mechanical arm. It was possible to get the action figure for his boss, Oscar Goldman. But who the fuck would want that? IIRC, in the pilot, Steve Austin, once he gains his new powers, would run really fast, meaning they sped up the film of him running. I guess they realized that eventually he would have to run past something moving or people would catch on, because later in the series they switched to his more signature slow-mo running and jumping ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac moves. You just had to imagine that he was really going fast or jumping that high, or bending those bars. When you got the ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac sound effect for his vision, though, it seemed a little silly. Totally jumped the shark when Bigfoot arrived, but I loved it when I was 6. We won't talk about the Bionic Woman, though - they gave her a Bionic Dog, and that was just stupid.
The Incredible Hulk Sadder and more introspective than any of the other shows, Hulk wandered the wilderlands of central California doing odd jobs and trying not to get angry.
SpiderMan This show is the strangest. Most people don't remember that there was a live action Spiderman before the Tobey Maguire version, they just remember the cartoon. In the UK, I even got to see the pilot at the theater, played as a movie. I went with a whole bunch of kids for someone's 6th birthday, and it was on a double-bill, believe it or not, with Breaking Away, which we'll get to later. It was your standard this-looks-stupid-now superhero fare, but it really did look like Spiderman was crawling up those skyscrapers. And that's because he was. Back in 2005, on a trip to California, I took a tandem hang-gliding jump. The crazy old guy who drove us up the mountain I was about to jump off was the guy you see in the Spidey suit climbing up the Empire State Building. Seriously, he did that. Fun Spidey Facts: Kim "Facts of Life" Fields' mom was in it.
Because there is already a "That 70's Blog", which has one entry and was last updated in 2005, welcome to Made in the 70's, a little blog about that long overlooked era of (mostly American) culture that made me the person I am right now. I was born in 1971, and missed much of the early 70's due to being very small and not very popular, so this is as much a journey for me as it is a repository for stuff and ideas that were Made in the 70's. Hope you like it. - Ridski.
NEW FEATURE: Feeling a little competitive? Check out the bottom of the page in the central section. We've added the classic 70s game Connect 4 to the site. Play against the computer or player vs. player (not against online players, unfortunately). It's so groovy!
