15+ Myths About The 70s That Too Many Believe

New York City was on its way to becoming bankrupt in the 70s. After a series of lay offs and a rise in criminal activity, middle class families fled to the suburbs. Ever since, they have spoken about NYC as if it was apocalyptic. Truthfully, there was a lot of great stuff coming out of the Big Apple in the 70s, notably in the art and music scene.

While the 70s produced several classic sitcoms such as M*A*S*H, SNL, Dallas, Three's Company, All in the Family, CHiPS, and Wonder Woman, it also had its fair share of flops. Some of the awful sitcoms include Me and The Chimp, Donny & Marie, Carter Country, Hee Haw Honeys, and Delta House.

Bookended by the super stylish 60s and 80s, the 70s was the decade that interior design forgot. Talk to any child of the 70s about the home they grew up in and they will recount lots of orange and brown and the distinct smell of second-hand cigarette smoke.

This self-absorbed myth came about in 1976, when Tom Wolfe published the essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Wolfe claimed many topics that we now consider basic human inclinations (such as changing faith, women's rights, and couples having open communication) as being self-absorbed concepts.

We tend to think of the famous 60s hippie movement as having died an instant death on the stroke of January 1, 1970. But this counter-cultural subculture managed to milk their way of living for every last penny. It wasn't really until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, that their peace-driven rallying cry vanished.

Don't assume the 1970s were a quiet decade for technology. Some inventions credited to this era include the personal cassette player, floppy disks, VCRs, digital watches, and the first video games. Motorola engineer and developer Martin Cooper invented a mobile phone and used it to call a competitor at AT&T in 1973. 

The 70s were a progressive time for some and a conservative time for others. Attorney Phyllis Schlafly campaigned for "real rights of women", arguing that the best place for a woman to be was at home as the wife, mother, and caretaker and that the Equal Rights Amendment proposed in 1972 threatened to strip women of their rights.

Sure, if you set a movie in the 70s and include a scene in which characters visit a nightclub, you're going to play disco music in the background. But that genre wasn't the be-all and end-all. The 70s saw the birth of new kinds of rock, including heavy metal, soft rock, folk rock, and punk rock. The late 70s also saw the birth of hip-hop.

New Hollywood was all the rage in the 70s. Suddenly, American movies no longer felt the need to have happy endings, and clean-cut good guys vs bad guys narratives. It was the era of the anti-hero, the era of Steve McQueen. It was also the era, however, of mainstream crowd-pleasers such as Jaws, Grease, and Superman.

Kids and parents of the 70s love to hark on about how safe the decade was. Anybody could go anywhere at any time of day and live to tell the tale. This just isn't true. In Los Angeles alone the homicide rate was 23 per 100,000 population. Between 1970 and 1979, Los Angeles saw an 84.0 increase in homicide.

Taste went to die in the 70s. Popular fashion items at the time included bell bottom pants, frayed jeans, midi skirts, maxi dresses, tie-dye, peasant blouses, and ponchos. These may not have been so bad if they weren't sported by balding men with muttonchops and moustaches.

You would think a scandal like Watergate would've been the nail in the coffin for the Republican party back in 1974. But after seven years after Nixon's resignation, the party was back in control of the country thanks to the popularity of Ronald Reagan. It turned out not a lot of people care about criminal breaches of security.

The 70s did the opposite. It pushed the envelope as far as it would go to make a change. Although the Stonewall Riots that sparked the Gay Rights Movement in America happened in 1969, it gained national prominence in the 1970s as LGBTQ people around the country organized and fought for their rights as human beings and citizens.

After President Nixon announced his support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced an embargo on oil production. As a result, prices surged, gasoline shortages abounded, and a country obsessed with driving everywhere was suddenly ground to a halt. This embargo only lasted six months, however. Not years.

There are very simple reasons why the divorce rate rose in the 1970s, and it had nothing to do with the destruction of the nuclear family. In 1969, California passed the first "no fault" divorce law, and most of the country followed suit shortly after. This gave many women the opportunity to leave abusive or unsatisfactory marriages easily for the first time in history.

People used to wonder how Bubble Yum - released in 1975 - could get so soft? Enter the rumor that spider eggs were included in the recipe. The legend became so widespread, that the manufacturer LifeSavers had to take out an ad in newspapers, including The New York Times, to reassure Americans that their gum was not made of spider eggs.

Not in the way we know now but they did technically exist in the form of the Atari console. Not everybody owned one of these but everybody knew at least one person who did, and they made sure to do everything in their power to win over their affection.

These days, especially with iPads, children can watch cartoons whenever they want, anywhere they want. Cartoons were not as ubiquitous back in the 70s, and certainly not on TV. If you wanted to watch Bugs Bunny or Scooby Doo, you'd have to wait until Saturday morning. If you missed it, you missed it. Tough luck!

Hitchhiking was a lot more accepted than it is today, but that isn't to say it was completely foolproof. There were plenty of cases of people going missing or being murdered after getting into a stranger's car. It's just that you didn't hear about them as much as you would today.

The 70s were home to something truly rare: a clothing item that was universally accepted by both men and women. Short shorts (paired with tube socks) were all the rage once upon a time. All you have to do is watch any movie from the era you'll see men with their pins on full display.

These days, we are extra vigilant when it comes to sun exposure, always applying sunscreen when we feel it may affect us or our children. Back in the 70s, sunscreen may as well have not been invented. Nobody cared about burns or heat stroke or skin cancer!

Everybody battened down the hatches with the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 but in the end, America decided to stick with feet, pounds, and quarts. Children were shown pro-metric films in school introducing them to a world of meters, liters, and grams that they would never actually inhabit.

Children and playgrounds in the 70s were as good a combination as baths and toasters. Monkey bars were made of cold steel that could break bones in nanoseconds. Vertigo-inducing slides and seesaws ruled the roost, while merry-go-rounds functioned as a kind of NASA training for kids.

The hearsay around Jaws and its effect on the American public was real. When this summer blockbuster hit cinemas in 1975, audiences weren't just afraid to go into the ocean. They were afraid to take baths. They were afraid of bottled water. Anything to do with water was out.

Back in the days when smallpox vaccines were given out like there was no tomorrow, every kid had the same familiar scar on their upper arm, caused by the two-pronged needle that punctured their skin like a staple gun. It blew, but smallpox was eradicated in the end.

Schools may as well have been untouched since the days of Johannes Gutenberg. Any worksheet or homework assignment passed out to students in a 70s classroom was likely created using either a ditto or mimeograph machine. Remember how they would leave purple ink on your fingers? Remember that smell?

Nope. The bowl cut lived to tell the tale from the 60s into the 70s. ICYMI, a bowl cut is exactly what you think it is. It's a haircut, made around a bowl placed on the head of a poor, undeserving child who is never going to look back at pictures of themselves in the future and think, "Wow, I looked cool!"

Rumor had it that Mikey, the picky eater in the Life cereal commercial - despite the warnings of his friends - had consumed the deadly combo of Coca-Cola and Pop Rocks, and the carbon dioxide had caused his stomach to inflate and explode. Naturally, this rumor was completely false.

You may have thought the 70s had ditched the long-established typewriter in favor for some flashy prototype computer. Nope! The humble typewriter remained the norm throughout the decade, much to the chagrin of anyone who worked in an office. We certainly don't miss this one, regardless of the fun sound.

Selfies as we know them now didn't exist, sure. The smartphone didn't exist. But they did exist in the form of photo booths. It was common for people to seek out one of these booths, throw coins into them and take a number of personal photos either alone or with friends.

As Outkast reminded us in their 2003 hit Hey Ya! the 70s taught us how to shake it like a Polaroid picture! Only the whole thing was a wind-up. In 2004, decades after the fact, Polaroid helpfully explained, "shaking or waving has no effect." Most of us still do it, though. Don't we?

I don't know where people got the idea from that bicycle helmets were mandatory in the 70s, because the truth couldn't have been further from it. Only unless you were recovering from a serious cranial injury would you be caught wearing a helmet on a bicycle. Even kids didn't wear them!

Two heavy acrylic balls attached to a string was all a lot of kids needed in the 70s. You know the two balls together as fast as you could. That was it. No more, no less. Sadly, clackermania went too far and the balls began shattering and causing shrapnel-related injuries. They were eventually pulled from stores.

One 1976 New York Times report remarked that a large percentage of beach injuries "were due to cuts inflicted by discarded pop tabs." That tells you everything you need to know. Pop tabs were found on the tops of aluminium cans. With a little twist, they came right off. And what were people going to do? Dispose of them properly? Pfff.

Bean bags are not just a cliche fed to us from films and shows set in the 70s. They really were all the rage at one point. To a degree, they still are, but only because they're taken by people who sat down on them in 1975 and haven't been able to get up since.

Why were there so many cars in the 70s made with wood and why did so many people love them? The truth is, they weren't made with wood. The wood texture, more often than not, was just vinyl siding. That didn't seem to bother all the women and men who paid good money to buy one.

When the makers of Tang marketed their instant beverage, which tasted vaguely of oranges, as the nutrition of choice for astronauts everywhere, the public went temporarily ape for this stuff. It turned out Tang wasn't all that. Even Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, famously declared he wasn't a fan of the drink.

Plastic? In the 70s? Not a chance. People kept things in leather or metal. Kids even had metal lunch boxes. Remember those? Metal lunch boxes were eventually banned in the 1980s as some school children had begun using them as weapons. Thanks a lot, guys!

False. Everyone had an ottoman. These pieces of furniture became popular during the 70s and were meant as foot stools. But any kid growing up in that decade remembers them as a toy. They were something to lie on stomach-first and pretend you were flying like Superman.

Lava lamps may be synonmous with the 1970s (and the 1990s for that matter) but they aren't an invention of the Me Decade. These funky ambient lights were actually invented and became popular in the 1960s. But that's okay - the 60s had enough things to be proud of.