I remember being bummed when Carter lost to that old fart in the red sweater. Didn’t know anything about Carter or Reagan except I didn’t like Reagan’s old man sweater he wore when I first saw him on tv. Plus I liked Carter. We had a song about him we used to sing on the playground:

Marijuana, marijuana, pcp, pcp,
Jimmy Carter smokes it, Jimmy Carter smokes it,
Why can’t we, why can’t we.

So out went Carter and all those old rusty unsafe but fun as heck playgrounds, and in came plastic, sanitized, and safe playgrounds bought on credit. A lot of things were fixed up by Reagan with money we didn’t have. The rusty old 70s were replaced with the plastic 80s.
The old RTD buses with the glass sliding windows and pull cords for stops were replaced with the plastic brown tinted windows that pushed out and the rubber strips that you pushed to request a stop. The new bus had that grinning front bumper.

But the biggest change was that in the 70s parents let us kids do whatever we wanted to do, and in the 80s we were sanitized for our protection.

As far as cars and music, the early 70s were pretty good but quickly went downhill the rest of the decade. Ted Nugent was the worst. Cat scratch fever? WTF was that shit. How did that guy ever have a career? Even his pinball machine sucked.

The presto burger maker burgers tasted funky. The presto hot dog cookers tasted like electricity. You had to bend the hotdogs in an arc and stick each end of the dog onto a metal spike thus completing the circuit. There was a decent chance the hot dog would break during the process. I actually liked the electric taste and smell. With the advent of the microwave, the hot dog cookers went away.

Well, the vids worked sometimes. The controls quite often failed. People would get pissed off when things didn’t work right and would abuse the games thus making things worse. The throttle on most stunt cycles didn’t work very well. I loved Boot Hill, but like all the 70s games, didn’t like how games were timed. No matter how good you got, games wouldn’t last much more than a minute.

Jordache really didn’t become popular until the early 80s with Brook Shields’ commercial. The 70s were all about low rise jeans which I much preferred. Low rise came back in the late 90s early oughts. Those lousy high rise or “mom jeans” came back this decade and they suck.

Edit: Brooke Shields did Calvin Klein. But they were basically the same

I had a nice pair of blue corduroy op shorts that maybe covered 3 inches of leg below the inseam. We had a British foreign exchange student that wore shorts that went down almost to his knees that he called Knickers. We all thought it was the strangest thing.

Clear channel, where they not only edit songs they play, sometimes deleting entire versus, but also demand that the band do a sanitized version to play on their stations. If there is true evil in this world, clear channel is it, or at least Disney’s right hand man to it.

Speaking of Clear Channel, they outright banned Tom Pettys “The Last DJ” from playing on any of their stations because the song was about a DJ that moved to Mexico so he could still play the songs he wanted to play and not be restricted to the Corporate playlist. I urge you all to watch the latest South Park Episode. The new Clear channel for everything entertainment is China. Sorry for the digression.

Geez Odin, enough with the gawdawful cars of the 70s.

That was a common occurrence in the arcade during the 70s and early 80s. The older kids would either steal your quarter if you put it on the game or else just push you off the game while you were playing it. Kids weren’t considered special or untouchable back then. Noone cared if you got swatted by some Odin type 20 year old when you were 10 or 12 years old. I would like to ask all those now 55-60 year old men why they felt the need to be such scumbags back then.

Found these in an old trunk in my parents garage. Almost the 1970s.

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Take a pic of the actual album if indeed you physically found it. Anyone can do a google search.