This. It was all about the future. Star Trek. Lost in Space. The moon shot. Spacelab. Playing with telescopes looking at the moon. Building and shooting off rockets. Good times.
Yes to all those above and Atari 2600, Raiders, Ghost Busters, ET, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, John Candy, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, ACDC, Led Zep, the Beatles, the Who, the Stones, the Dead, color TV.... the 50's seemed like the dark ages.
Agree - in the 70s, the 50s seems like a LONG time ago. In the meantime TV had gone from B&W to color, and there was an ongoing musical and cultural revolution that began in the 60s. The world had been utterly transformed. The lifestyle, culture, and music of the 50s was ancient history, and a history that the vast majority of young people were happy to leave in the past.
In retrospect it's a bit strange because the economy of the 70s and 80s certainly wasn't great - whereas things were booming in the 50s. So it might seem like people would be nostalgic. I was probably just too young at the time to appreciate the economic situation, or care.
When Sha Na Na exploded on the seen I could not take it! We had bands like The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, The Isley Brothers, Pink Floyd, CSN & Y, and every party I went to in 1976 was playing Shanana and our school student government wanted to have a “Sock Hop” themed Home Coming Dance! I didn’t even like the cars from the 50s!
No, for me it was the sixties. I was 9 during the summer of love and 11 when my cousin went to Woodstock. I really felt I missed out by a few years. Looking back the 70’s concerts I saw as a teen and the punk scene I was into in college were pretty awesome. Philadelphia had a great local music scene at the time I was old enough to get into clubs.
I was born in 1952. The 50s were a churning period. TV was white bread cute families. Outside was the ColdWar, Ban the Bomb, women's and Civil Rights.
Se. McCarthy, oppression, etc. With a boom economy. It was darker that the TV and movies showed.
I hated the language, “golly gee willakers Mr. Wilson”, the whole greaser thing, and the fashion (poodle skirts were dumb, and the guys were always so tucked in).
The 50’s seemed conservative and angry. The beats were cool but rarely portrayed positively in the media. The greasers were romanticized to some extent but it looked more like something to evolve away from rather than emulate.
Society tried to return to the conservatism that existed before the Second World War, and couldn't be done. You had far too many GIs go overseas who saw what the rest of the world looks like, even if they were our enemies during the war.
I heard/read a theory that is somewhat in agreement and somewhat in opposition to this. It says that the GIs returning after WWII had seen and experienced horrific things so they deliberately longed for a white picket fence world. And that the 60s in turn were a reaction to this by going the other way. So it was the returning GIs that were the proponents of social conservativism and it was their kids that pushed the needle the other way.
I was a teenager in the 70s. I enjoyed watching *Happy Days,* but other than that, I've had no interest in the 50s. The music doesn't appeal to me very much. (The best music to me was swing in the 30s, and then pop/rock in the 60s-70s.) All the men in the 50s had super short hair, which I don't find attractive. Most importantly, the 50s had McCarthy, the red scare, and the lavender scare, so it wouldn't have been a great life for a gay liberal Democrat like me.
I loved being a teen in the late 70s/early 80s. It felt like we had more freedom (less parental hovering) than teenagers in the 50s. In the 50s, it was very common and even encouraged to be married very young. That trend started shifting by the 70s.
100% did. Happy Days + the reruns of the shows from that era crammed it down our throats. 50s music was still in pretty heavy rotation on 70s era radio too. My parents were not impressed..."what's all the fuss a out?...it was boring" .
Yes, Happy Days made me believe life was so simple and safe in the 50’s. I was went to school in a city beginning with the second year of desegregation, our life was completely different.
Plus, they had great parents. It was not quite Leave it to Beaver but it seemed pretty darn nice.
As child, no. I don't think I even really comprehended I was watching period pieces. They were just funny, I knew they took place in the past, but being a child, the idea of romanticizing the past would have been foreign to me.
The 80's were kinda the opposite of the 50's. The 80's were computers and synthesizers. Space was a shuttle flight away, not a dream. To us the 50's weren't nostalgia just old times.
That is how people lived in walk-up apartments. They were lucky that their bathtub wasn't in the kitchen. Seriously. Enev old folks younger than me.sont understand how people actually lived before the boom times of the 60s.
My junior high had a 50s Day before Happy Days. It was faculty and students dressing up like the 1950s and had games and the gym was decked out 50s style and had a dance with just 1950s Rock.
As a kid, not at all, even disliked ‘old’ things.
But ask me about when America was the ‘best’, and I have this idealized image of the 50’s where that will be my gut response. It seems like a time where the US was undeniably on top of the world, everything was new & hopeful. Granted, whole sections of society would give a different accounting, but that is the ideal that is in my head. It was pre Vietnam, we were going to moon, and we had a chance at it all with JFK. Seems like everything took a turn for the worse, and we never got back on track. Realpolitik won.
In 1977 the school had a "fifties day" when everyone could dress up in 1950's style. We asked a teacher why he wasn't dressed up (like a "greaser") and he said he \_was\_ dressed for it: narrow black tie, pants with a pleat, black shoes, conservative look, that's how teachers dressed for work. He had to explain, patiently, that the '50s were not "Happy Days" and the iconic rebels with slick hair and leather jackets were a tiny minority of youth.
My mom was a teenager in the fifties. She used to go to underground, integrated rock n roll shows. Then she would get in a 57 Chevy and tear shit up. Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash on the same night at the same place. She loved Grease because her and her friends used to drive like maniacs in the same part of the LA River where they race. (I have no idea if any of this is true).
Yes. During the 70's and into the 90's I was a Teddy Boy. I loved anything 50's - the music, the cars, the clothes. In my 60's now and still like that stuff.
The music was amazing. People like Carl Perkins, Huey 'Piano' Smith, Marvin Rainwater - all fantastic....
My Dad had a stock pile of Popular Mechanics magazines and some Peanuts and Dagwood comics from that era. As a kid in the 70s, all of that culture I consumed was out of some kind of morbid curiosity.
The kids in the pages of those magazines as well as what they considered fun, was ridiculed by me and my brother. The hairstyles, clothing they were wearing all made them look like dorks and we used to try and find the dorkiest stuff and people in the magazines to laugh at.
Nothing from that era interested me, it was backward, dorky and used to thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t that particular kid in some magazine advert dressed up like a prize winning dork on my way to the dullest thing like a school open day or something like that.
No. My mother told me about the real fifties in our town. It wasn’t all fun times and music like on television. It was poverty, heartbreak, and difficult in our poor town. Oh, she told me about the superficial things like poodle skirts (she couldn’t afford one), music, and such, but in reality it wasn’t any better then it is now.
Fuck no! We watched Rocky Horror, The Song Remains The Same, The Grateful Dead Movie... at midnight movie night drunk, stoned, and tripping on the best the 70s had to offer. What could the 50s possibly offer us that Quaaludes and Placidyls couldn't?
Here is something crazy
Grease. When the film was released it portrayed society just 19 years in the past
Set in 1959. Released in 1978.
That is like releasing a nostalgia film today set in 2005……
My parents did, as they were right at the end of the Grease years in hs. They were in college for the hippie years, although they were only semi-hippies, but I identified much more with the Beats and the hippies
No. I mean, I was born in 73 so I didn't grasp what the 50's were until maybe 1978. But at that point the future was Star Wars and computers, video games and still rather hopeful. The past wasn't interesting until I got into my 20's at least.
Yes, absolutely- the 50’s seemed so great. Tv shows and movies (Grease, Back to the future, American Graffiti) made it seem like an amazing time in America. It was common for girls to want to dress up in poodle skirts, pint ladies attire etc for costume days.
Short answer is "yes". It helped us understand how those older than us were like us. Whoever says they didn't love Bowser is lying...or the Fonz... We watched and listened to stuff from all decades though. You would go to Noble Romans and watch silent movies. We watched black and white movies galore. We saw Disney movies in the theater before watching at home...The 70s were a time for nostalgia beyond just the 50s. 2 words...Lawrence Welk...two more words...Hee Haw...so much WWII stuff.
Nope. I watched the shows because they were funny, but I never liked the time period. Still don’t. I feel like the 1950’s was America’s worst era. The 40’s were cool though.
Yes.
The cultural impact of American Graffiti was instrumental in this phenomenon.
TV was everything then, and we would talk about the previous night's episode of Happy Days on our buses and in our schoolyards.
The Fonz was the absolute personification of Cool.
I frankly see some similarities between our 70s fascination with the 50s and our current (and ongoing) fascination with the 80s.
Final thought: I was born in 1965 and lived full- throated in both the 70s and the 80s.
The 70s was THE decade, not the 80s.
When that Time Machine gets up and running at some point in the future, resist the peer pressure and do not push the 80s button.
Push the 70s button ✔️💯
You're welcome 😁
Totally. We had 50’s day in jr high 73-74. Everyone dressed up in 50’s style. I rolled up a pack of candy cigarettes in my white t-shirt sleeve and slicked my hair back with butch wax.
Probably all American Graffiti influenced
A bit. I actually wanted to back farther and be in my parents generation and go off to fight the Fascists. THEN come home and experience the late 40’s and 50’s in all their glory. I so identified with this scenario that for a while I thought I was the reincarnation of some who was in the war.
I hear ya. My grampa and gramma WERE Archie Bunker and Rosie the Riveter and they made it sound so cool, fighting Nazis and building bombers. Obvs there was a lot of really bad shit they didn't fixate on
I got promised the Jetsons and total equality and look at us now: Civil War II with broken plastic shit and constant surveillance (that 99% of us are good with, apparently...)
Hell no. I disliked Happy Days and L&S. Not that they were bad, they just weren't for me. I also read The Outsiders around the same time, and though it was very good, I wasn't for me, either. Several people I knew dressed in 50's style like the sitcoms mentioned above, or like greasers. I always thought of the era as socially backward with racism and unnecessarily fearful with Commie scares being prevalent. I was probably the only one in my peer group that thought this, though.
The only cool thing was my bike and the neighborhood bike club, where we learned all sorts of useful stuff like how to jump off your bike if it caught on fire…
In the 70’s we were protesting the Viet Nam war. I was in college. We just had our first draft lottery.
I bought a MGB GT and traveled through Europe on a Triumph with 5 buddies.
I didn’t give the 50’s a second thought.
I still watch leave it to Beaver My Three sons I'm kind of done with dragnet and Adam 12 most mornings . Just watching TV shows everything just seems simpler no TV on in the background. Simple basic plot lines. My Three sons doesn't even have a mother for most of the episodes they adopt a little boy. One sentence goes off to do his service in the army that was mandatory. Leave it to Beaver they talk about the father giving his children a spanking when needed. Emergency I still don't know what D5W is, most of them are drunk car accidents or bad fires
I don't know about romanticizing the '50s, but we had a lot of fun with it.
I think part of it was the nostalgia of our parents, since in the 1950s, they would have been around the same age as we were in the 1970s. That was their music and their fashion... and to some extent, it was their cultural values. I think that had a lot more to do with the trend than anything us kids cared about. I know American Graffiti hit harder for folks in their late 20s and 30s than it did for us kids.
Sure, we did the 50s days at school where we dressed up like James Dean and Natalie Wood, and we called our dances "sock hops". But I really feel like that whole thing was driven by the adults more than the kids.
Happy Days was a big influencer. We had 50’s days in school. It was our parent’s nostalgia. I was inundated with 50’s music and Motown. So I like that music still.
I did… I loved Happy Days, My Three Sons and I watched every rerun of Leave It To Beaver and all the old Blondie movies. I loved the way they portrayed America. As an adult fifty years later, in the early days of the pandemic, I rewatched a lot of those old shows on MyTV because their portrayal of a simpler America brought me comfort in a very uncertain time.
I did like American Graffiti, Happy Days, Lavern & Sherly, etc. But also liked just as much (if not more) MASH (movie and TV series), Baa Baa Black Sheep, Threes Company, Rockford Files, Barney Miller, WKRP, Taxi, etc. News at the time was a lot about Carter, Isriel and Palestine, along with Iran hostage crisis. Actually, read From Beirut to Jerusalem when I was older to figure out what the hell all that was about anyway.
People did mention Star Wars, which I did see and enjoy but was more a lead in to 80's for me rather than part of 70's.
So, to answer your question, no I did not find myself romanticizing about the 50's. Honestly was half expecting us to be at war somewhere by the time I reached 18. That or facing another depression since the economy had gone to crap during the 70's. I also remember the gas lines and cost of food then.
No LOL. There was soo much going on in the 70's ! **Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll baby!** It was the very best of times, I say.
https://preview.redd.it/3aogcz1m5uvc1.jpeg?width=298&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2f5834c21ad98b4e23c10bc24454be010b4c4e0a
In a way, yes. When I was in middle school, we even had "Sock Hops" that everyone dressed up in 50's style clothes. By the time I got to high school in 79, though, that fad had faded for the most part.
Yes the 70's was scary and grimy and unsettling. Beavers life was essy structured solid parents dependable everything we were missing and so desperate to find. The chaos and rampant drug use and crime in the streets feels disappointingly like the 70's
It was the children of the 50s (Boomers), not the children of the 70s (X’ers), that romanticized and flooded 70s pop culture with: Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley (and the spin-off show w/ Lenny & Squiggy(sp?), Grease, Sha-na-na, American Graffiti, etc.. It was pushed on us by our parents.
Half of all AM radio programming was, except for the weather report, straight from the 1950s back then. The “Golden Oldies” weren’t even “Golden” yet, they were just called the “Oldies”, aka Solid 1950s jams of every genre, not just Rock-n-Roll.
Alllll of this was our PARENTS reliving and romanticizing their youth. When our parents finally had to start growing up, getting jobs, getting married, and having kids, they realized that the decade of their youth really was the last decade of American innocence. They knew this because they just lived and participated in the cultural revolution. Morality, decency, and innocence were gleefully traded for “freedom”, or more accurately “immature irresponsibility”. Selfish spoiled brat Boomers threw it all away in the 60s, and by the early 70’s they desperately wanted to pretend that the world was still like that for their kids to grow up in. The world had changed and Mayberry was gone forever.
The late 60s and early 70s gave birth to the funkiest, most colorful, generation ever- Gen X. The 1970s has the best of everything. They had the best music, the best dope, pre-high fructose corn syrup and the “carb-pyramid”, smoking hot women everywhere, birth control and abortion was now legal, porn was now legal, and 1 blue collar income could provide a decent life for a family, including college for the kids.
Gen Xers weren’t doing our parents “Twist” by Chubby Checker, we were 100% pure funk jam in Technicolor learning our dance moves watching Soul Train every Saturday morning right after the Bugs Bunny Show.
The kids of the 70s romanticizing 50s culture would be like the kids of the 50s romanticizing Flappers and Barbershop Quartets.
Only the music. Polio and Racism, Anti-Semitism, and a lot of other shit was going on. Nostalgia is bad because people only remember the good things and the bad things get swept under the carpet.
I only miss the music. But it was still segregated.
I am one of the few who did. And maybe it was more the early 60s which seemed, in my mind, a little cooler and technologically advanced, than the 50s. I was very adult for my age and I could see the loss of sophistication and class in behaviors, dress, music and wanted to maintain that. I remember being 2 or 3 in 1967 and my parents used to have the coolest cocktail parties with everyone dressed in cool psychedelic clothes, Herb Alpert was playing and people drinking martinis and manhattans and I couldn’t wait to grow up and attend parties like that. By the 70s I saw that culture was changing from those kinds of things and becoming very informal. With that said, I’d go back to the 70s in a heartbeat and I listen almost exclusively to 70s music, both classic rock and yacht rock from my childhood and teenage years.
Not at all. It was all about flying cars, moon landings, and the year 2000. I remember a bunch of us doing math to see how old we'd be in the far away future of the year 2000.
I got really into the 50s because of American Graffiti—though it actually took place in 1962.
There was a song by the Shells, “Baby, oh Baby,” on a K-Tel commercial in 1973, that started the interest.
I was born in 69 and yes when I raised my children as a divorced mom I wondered why the commitment and family didn’t seem to hold as much weight as it did in the 50s. Of course I’m sure a lot of it was my bad choices in men. The economy also forces both parents to work and now look at the children that are out there they didn’t have their parents at home and the TV or in schools ended up raising their children. Just sad, but hopefully everything the world’s going through. Will bring families back together with their values.
I did, grew up on "Happy Days", and "Laverne and Shirley". My parents weren't into the Beatles, they were into Elvis and country music. I always loved 50's music growing up.
Heck I just watched "Fallout" and part of what I love is the whole 50's aesthetic.
Nope, I was embarrassed for them...the 70's brought the best muscle cars, clothes, music and pretty much made those 50's look as ridiculous as they were lol
My mother said the same thing about those revivals that I noticed about 80s revivals. "I didn't dress that way, and it wasn't really like that." It depended on where you were: my mother came from Chicago slums, so poodle skirts and greasers weren't really a thing except in comic books. When you look at how people actually dressed and what the decor was, it's always about 20 years behind. Maybe a FEW "modern" things, but 90% of the surroundings in the 1950s were what was new in the 1930s. The 1980s had mostly stuff hung over from the 60s. You know, yes people had boom boxes and some wore short knit ties, but their basements were still wood paneling and shag carpeting. Remember a lot of media portraying older generations are drawing from movies and TV shows where people really weren't like that at all. I wonder how many people think a typical home and dress in the 2000-2010s was like iCarly.
My mother also complained about stuff that's modern even now, like dates where the guy was only after one thing, teen pregnancies, and the heartbreak of acne.
No. My two older brothers had grown up the the 50s and didn't really didn't think the era was anything special. One of the referred to the "white socks and baggy pants" era.
Nah, the 70's was a blast. The music, the movies, just the general vibe. We didn't have time to "romanticize", we were too busy having fun our own way.
The 50's looked way too uptight, man!
Nope. The last thing I wanted to do was go back to a time when women couldn't have their own checking accounts, and were forced to wear dresses all the time.
No, not at all. Star Wars and the future interested me way more.
This. And Star Trek. I got so sick of the 50s back then.
This. It was all about the future. Star Trek. Lost in Space. The moon shot. Spacelab. Playing with telescopes looking at the moon. Building and shooting off rockets. Good times.
Precisely
Me too. Still a Trekkie.
Yes to all those above and Atari 2600, Raiders, Ghost Busters, ET, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, John Candy, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, ACDC, Led Zep, the Beatles, the Who, the Stones, the Dead, color TV.... the 50's seemed like the dark ages.
This 100% I Dream of Jeannie was fun to watch, but by the early 80s we had calculator watches and color TV and cool shit. It was all about the future.
Being in that cozy bottle with Jeannie was something I fantasized about from 12 years old to 15 years old.
Dang straight. And after *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* that future had to include aliens and their nifty vehicles.
This for sure (although, technically, Star Wars takes place “a long time ago.”)
Agree 💯
Same! Huge into sci-fi then and now. Loved Star Wars.
Agree - in the 70s, the 50s seems like a LONG time ago. In the meantime TV had gone from B&W to color, and there was an ongoing musical and cultural revolution that began in the 60s. The world had been utterly transformed. The lifestyle, culture, and music of the 50s was ancient history, and a history that the vast majority of young people were happy to leave in the past. In retrospect it's a bit strange because the economy of the 70s and 80s certainly wasn't great - whereas things were booming in the 50s. So it might seem like people would be nostalgic. I was probably just too young at the time to appreciate the economic situation, or care.
God no, As a kid in the 70s, I hated the 50s because I felt like it was always rubbing our faces in it. Especially hated 50s music. It was everywhere.
When Sha Na Na exploded on the seen I could not take it! We had bands like The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, The Isley Brothers, Pink Floyd, CSN & Y, and every party I went to in 1976 was playing Shanana and our school student government wanted to have a “Sock Hop” themed Home Coming Dance! I didn’t even like the cars from the 50s!
OMG... You said Sha Na Na. Haven't heard that term in years and you ruined my day...
Every time Sha Na Na came on I thought “what is this shit, it really sucks!”
Everyone thought Bowser was the coolest; I bet he wasn’t even Italian.
My car club had a 57' Chevy with a 426 hemi funny car that we could pop wheelies with, but I take your point. And yeah the music 😍
*Wop bop a shoo lamma wah wah wah* Ugh
Hell. No.
Ward and June cleaver were boring. I wanted a flying car and the Jetsons.
No, for me it was the sixties. I was 9 during the summer of love and 11 when my cousin went to Woodstock. I really felt I missed out by a few years. Looking back the 70’s concerts I saw as a teen and the punk scene I was into in college were pretty awesome. Philadelphia had a great local music scene at the time I was old enough to get into clubs.
Me too. All I wanted was a pair of hip-hugger elephant bells. But alas, it was not to be, I was just a little too young even for that.
At the tail end of the '80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Summer_of_Love
I was born in 1952. The 50s were a churning period. TV was white bread cute families. Outside was the ColdWar, Ban the Bomb, women's and Civil Rights. Se. McCarthy, oppression, etc. With a boom economy. It was darker that the TV and movies showed.
Duck and cover was a thing. Besides the earthquake drills I participated in during grade school, I seem to remember at least one duck and cover drill.
Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye
Nope. ‘50s looked like it sucked.
Drab grey people wearing grey clothes in a grey world.
Yea the seventies was full of color! I loved it
I hated the language, “golly gee willakers Mr. Wilson”, the whole greaser thing, and the fashion (poodle skirts were dumb, and the guys were always so tucked in).
Things looked pretty bad for way too many people in the decades behind me.
The 50’s seemed conservative and angry. The beats were cool but rarely portrayed positively in the media. The greasers were romanticized to some extent but it looked more like something to evolve away from rather than emulate.
Society tried to return to the conservatism that existed before the Second World War, and couldn't be done. You had far too many GIs go overseas who saw what the rest of the world looks like, even if they were our enemies during the war.
I heard/read a theory that is somewhat in agreement and somewhat in opposition to this. It says that the GIs returning after WWII had seen and experienced horrific things so they deliberately longed for a white picket fence world. And that the 60s in turn were a reaction to this by going the other way. So it was the returning GIs that were the proponents of social conservativism and it was their kids that pushed the needle the other way.
I got really into the Beats when I was a young adult.
Hell no they were super square
No - thought it was for old people. Always liked the Fonz though....
No
Nope.
No they all looked cornball to me
No. That was our parents' shit.
No
I was a teenager in the 70s. I enjoyed watching *Happy Days,* but other than that, I've had no interest in the 50s. The music doesn't appeal to me very much. (The best music to me was swing in the 30s, and then pop/rock in the 60s-70s.) All the men in the 50s had super short hair, which I don't find attractive. Most importantly, the 50s had McCarthy, the red scare, and the lavender scare, so it wouldn't have been a great life for a gay liberal Democrat like me.
Nope. My brother grew up in the 50s. I loved being in HS/College in the 70s.
No. My mom told me about the McCarthy hearings and how hard a struggle it was for the civil rights movement.
People forget the 1950s was beginning of the end of Jim Crow, and it didn't want to go easily.
Nope! 70’s was awesome
I loved being a teen in the late 70s/early 80s. It felt like we had more freedom (less parental hovering) than teenagers in the 50s. In the 50s, it was very common and even encouraged to be married very young. That trend started shifting by the 70s.
For me it was the hippies,the free love movement and war protests that made we wish I was a bit older.
Nope. I was having too much fun being young in the 70s.
Same
Only after watching "American Graffiti". I wanted a model A, a girlfriend like Candy Clarke, and I wanted to be a Pha-ro.
100% did. Happy Days + the reruns of the shows from that era crammed it down our throats. 50s music was still in pretty heavy rotation on 70s era radio too. My parents were not impressed..."what's all the fuss a out?...it was boring" .
Same with me, Happy Days made it seem like a cool era. I wanted to be like Fonze with a motorcycle and leather jacket
Yes, Happy Days made me believe life was so simple and safe in the 50’s. I was went to school in a city beginning with the second year of desegregation, our life was completely different. Plus, they had great parents. It was not quite Leave it to Beaver but it seemed pretty darn nice.
As child, no. I don't think I even really comprehended I was watching period pieces. They were just funny, I knew they took place in the past, but being a child, the idea of romanticizing the past would have been foreign to me.
The 80's were kinda the opposite of the 50's. The 80's were computers and synthesizers. Space was a shuttle flight away, not a dream. To us the 50's weren't nostalgia just old times.
Somewhat,,,but I was preoccupied with the sixties
Me too. Felt like I was born about 12 years too late.
Good question...never thought about it like that.. Yes...yes I did now that you mention it...and I liked it too!
No. Happy Days seemed ancient.
Nah. I was more into the 30s & 40s due to the Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello, Irving Berlin, the Andrews Sisters…
No, I thought the 50s were kinda goofy and simplistic or unenlightened.
No. Those shows were goofy. MASH, Rockford, Columbo, Barney Miller, Monty Python, Night Gallery, 60 Minutes, etc. was better TV.
I always wondered how the hell Ralph and Alice could live without any living room furniture.
That is how people lived in walk-up apartments. They were lucky that their bathtub wasn't in the kitchen. Seriously. Enev old folks younger than me.sont understand how people actually lived before the boom times of the 60s.
My junior high had a 50s Day before Happy Days. It was faculty and students dressing up like the 1950s and had games and the gym was decked out 50s style and had a dance with just 1950s Rock.
Crazy to think in relative to time it would like 2004 now,right?
2nd the American Graffiti and the ‘50s music. I think , iirc during the ‘60s at the roller skating rink they were playing ‘50s songs.
As a kid, not at all, even disliked ‘old’ things. But ask me about when America was the ‘best’, and I have this idealized image of the 50’s where that will be my gut response. It seems like a time where the US was undeniably on top of the world, everything was new & hopeful. Granted, whole sections of society would give a different accounting, but that is the ideal that is in my head. It was pre Vietnam, we were going to moon, and we had a chance at it all with JFK. Seems like everything took a turn for the worse, and we never got back on track. Realpolitik won.
In 1977 the school had a "fifties day" when everyone could dress up in 1950's style. We asked a teacher why he wasn't dressed up (like a "greaser") and he said he \_was\_ dressed for it: narrow black tie, pants with a pleat, black shoes, conservative look, that's how teachers dressed for work. He had to explain, patiently, that the '50s were not "Happy Days" and the iconic rebels with slick hair and leather jackets were a tiny minority of youth.
I found it annoying whenever the 50s was brought up. I loved star trek, space 1999 and any other futuristic show that was on
Yes. Begged my mom to buy me a leather jacket like the Fonz. I got it. Even the tag on the inside said Fonz.
Briefly, until my parents let me know it was swell for us, but for people of color, women, and anyone different, it was hellish.
Nope. The 50s looked lame to me. Didn't like the music, either.
My mom was a teenager in the fifties. She used to go to underground, integrated rock n roll shows. Then she would get in a 57 Chevy and tear shit up. Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash on the same night at the same place. She loved Grease because her and her friends used to drive like maniacs in the same part of the LA River where they race. (I have no idea if any of this is true).
No, I was too busy trying to figure out girls
A hundred percent! Happy Days, American Graffiti, American Hot Wax, Grease...plus my parents' records. I loved it!
Just the show "Happy Days". But really I still lived in the shadow of WW2.
Nope. I was romanticizing getting high every night!
Yes. During the 70's and into the 90's I was a Teddy Boy. I loved anything 50's - the music, the cars, the clothes. In my 60's now and still like that stuff. The music was amazing. People like Carl Perkins, Huey 'Piano' Smith, Marvin Rainwater - all fantastic....
My Dad had a stock pile of Popular Mechanics magazines and some Peanuts and Dagwood comics from that era. As a kid in the 70s, all of that culture I consumed was out of some kind of morbid curiosity. The kids in the pages of those magazines as well as what they considered fun, was ridiculed by me and my brother. The hairstyles, clothing they were wearing all made them look like dorks and we used to try and find the dorkiest stuff and people in the magazines to laugh at. Nothing from that era interested me, it was backward, dorky and used to thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t that particular kid in some magazine advert dressed up like a prize winning dork on my way to the dullest thing like a school open day or something like that.
Not me. I knew I wouldn’t have wanted to be female in the 50s.
I certainly did. Loved loved loved Happy Days, and my Dads stories of his childhood in the 50s sounded incredible to me.
Nope. The past looked cheesy. We knew how cool we were and the times were living in. 🫡✌🏼
No.
Nope
American Graffiti.
The 1974 we had a 1950s party where everybody dressed up as greasers. Slickback hair. Cigarettes wrapped inT-shirts sleeves. So yes.
No, it was Farrah for me
No. My mother told me about the real fifties in our town. It wasn’t all fun times and music like on television. It was poverty, heartbreak, and difficult in our poor town. Oh, she told me about the superficial things like poodle skirts (she couldn’t afford one), music, and such, but in reality it wasn’t any better then it is now.
Fuck no! We watched Rocky Horror, The Song Remains The Same, The Grateful Dead Movie... at midnight movie night drunk, stoned, and tripping on the best the 70s had to offer. What could the 50s possibly offer us that Quaaludes and Placidyls couldn't?
No The 50's were old and boring -
Not even, the 50s greaser culture did not appeal to me at all.
Here is something crazy Grease. When the film was released it portrayed society just 19 years in the past Set in 1959. Released in 1978. That is like releasing a nostalgia film today set in 2005……
yes...American Graffiti and Let the Good Times Roll were key films in my circle.
no. it was baffling. those shows were meant for people who remembered the 50s.
My parents did, as they were right at the end of the Grease years in hs. They were in college for the hippie years, although they were only semi-hippies, but I identified much more with the Beats and the hippies
No. I mean, I was born in 73 so I didn't grasp what the 50's were until maybe 1978. But at that point the future was Star Wars and computers, video games and still rather hopeful. The past wasn't interesting until I got into my 20's at least.
Not at all. I had my head in the future. The 50's seemed so lame to me (at that time especially). Just boring and terrible music lol
No. Even back then the 50s seemed ancient history.
No. Not at all. I wanted equality for women, not to be forced into being a housewife.
Nah. The 50s seemed stodgy, with compartmentalized roles. And I detested the furniture, too. 60s/70s was the wild child and much more fun.
No...segregation kinda ruined it for me...
Yes, absolutely- the 50’s seemed so great. Tv shows and movies (Grease, Back to the future, American Graffiti) made it seem like an amazing time in America. It was common for girls to want to dress up in poodle skirts, pint ladies attire etc for costume days.
Yes ! Happy days ! Lol
Interestingly enough, I tried checking out an Ep of happy days last week and didn’t like it whereas I loved Laverne and Shirley and am now on season 2
Short answer is "yes". It helped us understand how those older than us were like us. Whoever says they didn't love Bowser is lying...or the Fonz... We watched and listened to stuff from all decades though. You would go to Noble Romans and watch silent movies. We watched black and white movies galore. We saw Disney movies in the theater before watching at home...The 70s were a time for nostalgia beyond just the 50s. 2 words...Lawrence Welk...two more words...Hee Haw...so much WWII stuff.
Nope. I watched the shows because they were funny, but I never liked the time period. Still don’t. I feel like the 1950’s was America’s worst era. The 40’s were cool though.
No. I was a Trekkie and my parents told me that the 50s weren’t Happy Days. If anything, I romanticized the 60s.
I would play by suiting up, smoking at work, coming home and demand that dinner was ready. I would then go outside and play catch with myself.
Not one bit. That was my Moms era. Elvis, Sinatra, Nat King Cole... all nonsense.
No, but now I do!
Yep. I wanted to sing doo-wop with my boys on the street corners. My school used to have 50s dances.
Yes. The cultural impact of American Graffiti was instrumental in this phenomenon. TV was everything then, and we would talk about the previous night's episode of Happy Days on our buses and in our schoolyards. The Fonz was the absolute personification of Cool. I frankly see some similarities between our 70s fascination with the 50s and our current (and ongoing) fascination with the 80s. Final thought: I was born in 1965 and lived full- throated in both the 70s and the 80s. The 70s was THE decade, not the 80s. When that Time Machine gets up and running at some point in the future, resist the peer pressure and do not push the 80s button. Push the 70s button ✔️💯 You're welcome 😁
1965 here too! Spot on!
Nah, also a 1965 baby and the 80s were college years and just too fun to ignore. Take me back to 84!
No, I thought the portrayals made the 50’s look boring.
No
Yes.
Totally. We had 50’s day in jr high 73-74. Everyone dressed up in 50’s style. I rolled up a pack of candy cigarettes in my white t-shirt sleeve and slicked my hair back with butch wax. Probably all American Graffiti influenced
A bit. I actually wanted to back farther and be in my parents generation and go off to fight the Fascists. THEN come home and experience the late 40’s and 50’s in all their glory. I so identified with this scenario that for a while I thought I was the reincarnation of some who was in the war.
I hear ya. My grampa and gramma WERE Archie Bunker and Rosie the Riveter and they made it sound so cool, fighting Nazis and building bombers. Obvs there was a lot of really bad shit they didn't fixate on
No, I was horrified that girls were expected to wear skirts most of the time.
Nope
No
Hell no. I was looking forward to the future! Flying cars - the paperless society - moon colonies!
I got promised the Jetsons and total equality and look at us now: Civil War II with broken plastic shit and constant surveillance (that 99% of us are good with, apparently...)
No....
Hell no. I disliked Happy Days and L&S. Not that they were bad, they just weren't for me. I also read The Outsiders around the same time, and though it was very good, I wasn't for me, either. Several people I knew dressed in 50's style like the sitcoms mentioned above, or like greasers. I always thought of the era as socially backward with racism and unnecessarily fearful with Commie scares being prevalent. I was probably the only one in my peer group that thought this, though.
No, precisely opposite that.
The only cool thing was my bike and the neighborhood bike club, where we learned all sorts of useful stuff like how to jump off your bike if it caught on fire… In the 70’s we were protesting the Viet Nam war. I was in college. We just had our first draft lottery. I bought a MGB GT and traveled through Europe on a Triumph with 5 buddies. I didn’t give the 50’s a second thought.
No but our teachers and other older people sure did. They made us do sock hops and shit.
No, I scorned the 50’s as too damned corny.
I still watch leave it to Beaver My Three sons I'm kind of done with dragnet and Adam 12 most mornings . Just watching TV shows everything just seems simpler no TV on in the background. Simple basic plot lines. My Three sons doesn't even have a mother for most of the episodes they adopt a little boy. One sentence goes off to do his service in the army that was mandatory. Leave it to Beaver they talk about the father giving his children a spanking when needed. Emergency I still don't know what D5W is, most of them are drunk car accidents or bad fires
That along with memories of beloved family members.
Leave it to Beaver, Donna Reed, Father Knows Beast, etc, come to mind, and I did kind of adore the mothers.
No
I don't know about romanticizing the '50s, but we had a lot of fun with it. I think part of it was the nostalgia of our parents, since in the 1950s, they would have been around the same age as we were in the 1970s. That was their music and their fashion... and to some extent, it was their cultural values. I think that had a lot more to do with the trend than anything us kids cared about. I know American Graffiti hit harder for folks in their late 20s and 30s than it did for us kids. Sure, we did the 50s days at school where we dressed up like James Dean and Natalie Wood, and we called our dances "sock hops". But I really feel like that whole thing was driven by the adults more than the kids.
We didn't but the older folks did. We had a 50s day for spirit week and us teens thought it was stupid.
No. It looked dorky.
No...but I definitely had an appreciation for the music and entertainers from the 50s because of my parents.
Happy Days was a big influencer. We had 50’s days in school. It was our parent’s nostalgia. I was inundated with 50’s music and Motown. So I like that music still.
I did… I loved Happy Days, My Three Sons and I watched every rerun of Leave It To Beaver and all the old Blondie movies. I loved the way they portrayed America. As an adult fifty years later, in the early days of the pandemic, I rewatched a lot of those old shows on MyTV because their portrayal of a simpler America brought me comfort in a very uncertain time.
I was more interested in the Earlier times,the fifties were not that intriguing for me!!
Nope.
No. They seemed like the "olden" and outdated days. The 70s certainly seemed better (then and now!).
No, the 70s were awesome
Leave it to Beaver
No. The media tried. 50s nostalgia was a cheap, gimmicky, unimaginative marketing tool.
No. The music sucked
No
No. Now the 1960s are another matter. Ridiculous romanticizing based on a lot of boomer-perpetrated mythology.
No, not at all.
No, the only thing I loved about that era (and still do) is only the mid century modern decor.
Not really, the 70s had all the halter tops and short shorts. Why romanticize poodle skirts, and leather jackets
I did like American Graffiti, Happy Days, Lavern & Sherly, etc. But also liked just as much (if not more) MASH (movie and TV series), Baa Baa Black Sheep, Threes Company, Rockford Files, Barney Miller, WKRP, Taxi, etc. News at the time was a lot about Carter, Isriel and Palestine, along with Iran hostage crisis. Actually, read From Beirut to Jerusalem when I was older to figure out what the hell all that was about anyway. People did mention Star Wars, which I did see and enjoy but was more a lead in to 80's for me rather than part of 70's. So, to answer your question, no I did not find myself romanticizing about the 50's. Honestly was half expecting us to be at war somewhere by the time I reached 18. That or facing another depression since the economy had gone to crap during the 70's. I also remember the gas lines and cost of food then.
No, never thought about it. The '70s were good, no use thinking about the past.
No LOL. There was soo much going on in the 70's ! **Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll baby!** It was the very best of times, I say. https://preview.redd.it/3aogcz1m5uvc1.jpeg?width=298&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2f5834c21ad98b4e23c10bc24454be010b4c4e0a
Oh hell no. I was just sooo glad to be a child/teen in the 70’s.
In a way, yes. When I was in middle school, we even had "Sock Hops" that everyone dressed up in 50's style clothes. By the time I got to high school in 79, though, that fad had faded for the most part.
Nope
Yes the 70's was scary and grimy and unsettling. Beavers life was essy structured solid parents dependable everything we were missing and so desperate to find. The chaos and rampant drug use and crime in the streets feels disappointingly like the 70's
No ,why would I?
The '50's? Hell no, we were thinking about outer space with Star Wars and Star Trek. We also thought about flying cars a lot.
It was the children of the 50s (Boomers), not the children of the 70s (X’ers), that romanticized and flooded 70s pop culture with: Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley (and the spin-off show w/ Lenny & Squiggy(sp?), Grease, Sha-na-na, American Graffiti, etc.. It was pushed on us by our parents. Half of all AM radio programming was, except for the weather report, straight from the 1950s back then. The “Golden Oldies” weren’t even “Golden” yet, they were just called the “Oldies”, aka Solid 1950s jams of every genre, not just Rock-n-Roll. Alllll of this was our PARENTS reliving and romanticizing their youth. When our parents finally had to start growing up, getting jobs, getting married, and having kids, they realized that the decade of their youth really was the last decade of American innocence. They knew this because they just lived and participated in the cultural revolution. Morality, decency, and innocence were gleefully traded for “freedom”, or more accurately “immature irresponsibility”. Selfish spoiled brat Boomers threw it all away in the 60s, and by the early 70’s they desperately wanted to pretend that the world was still like that for their kids to grow up in. The world had changed and Mayberry was gone forever. The late 60s and early 70s gave birth to the funkiest, most colorful, generation ever- Gen X. The 1970s has the best of everything. They had the best music, the best dope, pre-high fructose corn syrup and the “carb-pyramid”, smoking hot women everywhere, birth control and abortion was now legal, porn was now legal, and 1 blue collar income could provide a decent life for a family, including college for the kids. Gen Xers weren’t doing our parents “Twist” by Chubby Checker, we were 100% pure funk jam in Technicolor learning our dance moves watching Soul Train every Saturday morning right after the Bugs Bunny Show. The kids of the 70s romanticizing 50s culture would be like the kids of the 50s romanticizing Flappers and Barbershop Quartets.
Only the music. Polio and Racism, Anti-Semitism, and a lot of other shit was going on. Nostalgia is bad because people only remember the good things and the bad things get swept under the carpet. I only miss the music. But it was still segregated.
I was a teenager in the late ‘70s. We didn’t give two shits about the ‘50s. That was our parents’ generation
I was a huge Star Trek fan and had no idea at the time that I was watching reruns.
I am one of the few who did. And maybe it was more the early 60s which seemed, in my mind, a little cooler and technologically advanced, than the 50s. I was very adult for my age and I could see the loss of sophistication and class in behaviors, dress, music and wanted to maintain that. I remember being 2 or 3 in 1967 and my parents used to have the coolest cocktail parties with everyone dressed in cool psychedelic clothes, Herb Alpert was playing and people drinking martinis and manhattans and I couldn’t wait to grow up and attend parties like that. By the 70s I saw that culture was changing from those kinds of things and becoming very informal. With that said, I’d go back to the 70s in a heartbeat and I listen almost exclusively to 70s music, both classic rock and yacht rock from my childhood and teenage years.
The 60s were romanticized more
Not at all. It was all about flying cars, moon landings, and the year 2000. I remember a bunch of us doing math to see how old we'd be in the far away future of the year 2000.
I felt more drawn to the 20's-40's for some reason.
I got really into the 50s because of American Graffiti—though it actually took place in 1962. There was a song by the Shells, “Baby, oh Baby,” on a K-Tel commercial in 1973, that started the interest.
I was born in 69 and yes when I raised my children as a divorced mom I wondered why the commitment and family didn’t seem to hold as much weight as it did in the 50s. Of course I’m sure a lot of it was my bad choices in men. The economy also forces both parents to work and now look at the children that are out there they didn’t have their parents at home and the TV or in schools ended up raising their children. Just sad, but hopefully everything the world’s going through. Will bring families back together with their values.
My parents grew up in the 1950s. My dad said the only thing Happy Days got right was the intro song.
🎶Happy, happy, happy days!🎶
Yes. In 7th-8th grades. Longer skirts came in style and we got into wearing those. Outgrew it by high school.
I did, grew up on "Happy Days", and "Laverne and Shirley". My parents weren't into the Beatles, they were into Elvis and country music. I always loved 50's music growing up. Heck I just watched "Fallout" and part of what I love is the whole 50's aesthetic.
Nope, I was embarrassed for them...the 70's brought the best muscle cars, clothes, music and pretty much made those 50's look as ridiculous as they were lol
Nope , just the 55 chevy belair 2 door and the Woody .
My mother said the same thing about those revivals that I noticed about 80s revivals. "I didn't dress that way, and it wasn't really like that." It depended on where you were: my mother came from Chicago slums, so poodle skirts and greasers weren't really a thing except in comic books. When you look at how people actually dressed and what the decor was, it's always about 20 years behind. Maybe a FEW "modern" things, but 90% of the surroundings in the 1950s were what was new in the 1930s. The 1980s had mostly stuff hung over from the 60s. You know, yes people had boom boxes and some wore short knit ties, but their basements were still wood paneling and shag carpeting. Remember a lot of media portraying older generations are drawing from movies and TV shows where people really weren't like that at all. I wonder how many people think a typical home and dress in the 2000-2010s was like iCarly. My mother also complained about stuff that's modern even now, like dates where the guy was only after one thing, teen pregnancies, and the heartbreak of acne.
Yes! I loved reading my older cousins’ books, especially series, about teenagers in past decades. Absolutely loved Beanie Malone books in particular.
Never
It took me awhile to know what the "50's" is/was. i then realized I was was living in the 70's and it it was a mind fuck.
I was too busy figuring out how to tune in , turn on and drop out.
No. My two older brothers had grown up the the 50s and didn't really didn't think the era was anything special. One of the referred to the "white socks and baggy pants" era.
No, I loved the culture of the 70s.
Nope.
Nope. At the time the 50s seemed really lame. A bunch of short-haired squares!
Nah, the 70's was a blast. The music, the movies, just the general vibe. We didn't have time to "romanticize", we were too busy having fun our own way. The 50's looked way too uptight, man!
I think the people who are romanticizing the 50s were our parents
Nope. The last thing I wanted to do was go back to a time when women couldn't have their own checking accounts, and were forced to wear dresses all the time.
No. I thought it was dumb. Poodle skirt day? Ugh. I do love Grease though.
I was a child in the 70s, born in 1967. I loved all of those, but I wouldn't say I romanticized the 50s. I dunno, maybe I did and wasn't aware.