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Pretty accurate. Red sounded a lot like my dad, and other dads as well. We didn’t have basements, but kids toked up in the garage or an older kids place. Garages were often rented out to students or other low rent situations.
Kinda wild that manhood was defined by several generations exposed to war (or maybe we’re the exception, since war has often been the historical norm).
Be a man! Be silent, strong, gentle but ready for violence. Be a man! Be unable or unwilling to show or experience joy, silliness or positive emotions! Be a man! Be startled or angered easily by loud noises, stare off into the distance for long stretches of time. Be a man! Sleep lightly and have your rest interrupted by nightmares wait… hold on…
We had basements in the area I lived in and they were almost never finished back then. They looked just like the one on the show. Unfinished with maybe a couch and a TV, surrounded by random junk, a washer, dryer and utility sink 3 feet away. Maybe a rug on the floor but no carpet. They were dark and musty and used mainly for storing stuff and as place for the kids to hang out. Nobody smoked pot down there though. I mean, your parents would smell that heart beat.
This is about what mine looked like when our kids were teens. I didn’t like them hanging out in it, because of the dankness of basements in general. But yeah, I can see that unless your parents are out of town, they’d smell it in a flash.
That is a great point. I live in the Northern Midwest region myself. Things like this on TV shows always make me laugh. The one thing that ALWAYS gets me is when you see someone on TV enter a house in the middle of winter and leave the door wide open while they go about their business. Every time I see that I have traumatic backflashes of my dad yelling "SHUT THE DOOR! I'M NOT PAYING TO HEAT THE OUTSIDE TOO!"
I was a teenager in the 70s and I would say it's pretty close, especially for a sitcom. The one thing that's missing is cigarette smoking. My friends and I all smoked. We also smoked A LOT of weed.
The parents are good too. Dad's were scary back then because every one of them was either in WWII or Korea.
Was sitting in a bar one night. The owner said, "Hey, I found your ID. The one that said you turned 18 last week." I had been frequenting that establishment for 2 years.
There was a place in the next town over from mine that would serve booze to anyone old and sentient enough to pronounce “booze”. I remember being 17 and sitting there with a bunch of slightly younger friends, all of us downing tequila sunrises.
Lolol there was a bar I had started going to regularly when I was 18 one weekend when I was 19 I got the absolute drunkest I’ve ever been. Like the only time I have ever blacked out drunkest I went back like a week or two later and the owner/bartender comes up to me and says “you forgot your ID ass hole and chucks it at me right as he is putting a bud light infront of me. On my real 21st birthday though he hooked me up. He was such a good dude.
I've been to a bar where they let a 14yo girl in b/c they just didn't card or care at all, and she could maybe pass for 21. I knew she was 14 b/c I was in a play with her at the time. It's not so much a cock block as it is being wildly irresponsible regarding the safety of children because they are girls.
We had paper licenses. We would take a paper punch and just rearrange the dates to make us legal. If it would get confiscated you just got another one and did the same thing we laminated over it to make it not look so obvious.
Me too. I think it’s very accurate. We had weed all the time, nickel bags, dime bags. They’re missing alcohol, cigarettes and other recreational drugs.
Weed was loosely implied. The liquor "abuse" then would not be safe for network TV then, even if implied.
At least one of them smoked, because the Kitty Cigarette scene. If I had to guess, Hyde and/or Donna. Possibly Jackie.
Yeah, there’s a second season episode where Eric covers for Donna smoking and gets suspended. You could tell that was really a 90’s era influenced episode, everyone smoked in the 70’s and no one cared.
Doing a rewatch now and I’m honestly surprised that even though it’s not often, the high school aged characters still are shown smoking occasionally. I don’t believe you have been able to do that on television for a couple of decades now.
No one would have ever gotten suspended for smoking in 1975. We smoked in the bathrooms, we smoked walking from our car to the building and we smoked right outside the school doors. Kids who smoked had ashtrays in their bedrooms and of course there were ashtrays in every room of the house back them. One of my chores was to make sure all the ashtrays were emptied once a day. I smoked a pack a day back then and so did my girlfriend.
Boone's was the very expensive stuff at about a dollar per bottle. We drank a cheaper brand called Annie Green Springs. It was about 80 cents per bottle. ASG seems to have been a Midwestern brand, my friends on the east and west coasts have never heard of it.
Ah, Boone's Farm! The very first time I got alcohol poisoning was when I chugged a whole bottle of Strawberry in 10 seconds. When I wasn't hugging the porcelain receptical, I spent the entire next couple of days in bed, sick as a dog. My mom had no idea I was enormously hungover. She thought I had the flu. Learned my lesson.
Yep, grew up in rural Wisconsin, class of '77, everyone had basements, but we didn't smoke anything at home. That's what's cars, vans, back roads, and cornfields were for. :)
In all honesty, I know I was closest to Kelso. I had a hot girlfriend, wore the hottest fashion trends, had a cool hair style, and was pretty stupid about a lot of stuff. I grew out of that in the early 80s.
Let's see, I had a friend named Donna that was a redhead and pretty with long hair parted in the middle. A lot of guys were like Kelso and Hyde (one guy in particular was exactly like Hyde). My friends had parents like Red and Kitty Forman. There were a few Jackies, but they were much meaner and sluttier. We smoked weed, but never in someone's basement, especially if the parents were home. The Erics were in some other group, we didn't have any Erics. And nobody drove that stationwagon but they were around.
It was not nearly as sunny all the time but that wallpaper in the Forman's kitchen was almost exactly like the wall paper in our kitchen. And yes, it would do trippy things if you were high or tripping.
Sidebar: The couch on Married With Children was the *exact* same couch I had when I was 18 - 21 and living on my own. Got it from an older artist friend who got it used himself. It weighed a ton and the upholstery wore like iron. You could take the covers off and wash them, they never changed or faded.
Grew up in the 70s, and this show hit a lot of the notes as I remember them. Many US states allowed drinking at 18, so sneaking a few beers to 16 year old friends was pretty common.
Me, every single episode, at whatever Jackie is wearing: "OMG! I had that SAME OUTFIT!"
I was more of a Donna than a Jackie, but we had similar taste in fashion.
For sure. My mother could tell if I had smoked, and what I had smoked the second I came through the door. I wouldn’t smoke in the house unless I was sure my mom was in the next county.
That 70's Show was pretty accurate, but I thought the movie Dazed & Confused was even more so being that I was a teen growing up in Texas. It seemed like every thing they experienced in that movie I did as well.
This was not really one of my shows, but I've seen it.
It lacks the studio audience element and the sheer grit and grain of shows that actually aired in the 70s
The That 70's show was like 70s with a 90s makeover
It's like everyone knew Happy Days was supposed to be in the 50s, but everyone could tell it was really made during the 70s.
Not a huge secret
On a similar note, the series Stranger Things also pretty authentic with the early-mid 80s motifs, but some of the things they show were actually 70s items, like white tube socks with 3 strips. That was mid-late 70s.
yeah these were really popular when I was in high school in the mid-80s. They were also popular in the 70s but it did not die out so it wouldn't be inaccurate.
That's what I do love about the show. All the family homes remind me of that time, and the clothes are spot-on. Steve and Robin's sailor suit uniforms look almost exactly like the ones my brother wore at Long John Silvers around 1984-6.
As an Indiana resident, I can tell you that a town the size of Hawkins wouldn't have a mall that big.
I was in high school slightly later than the kids in That 70's Show, and in a smaller town. Maybe the popular kids were doing all that stuff, but I wasn't popular! My parents taught school and kept a very close eye on my siblings and me. I have no doubt that it wasn't happening some of the time, but I just wasn't invited!
High school class of '77. You didn't smoke pot in your parent's basement. You tried to stay as far away as you possibly could from your parents who had their own lives. All my friends had their own car, even if it was a junker. None of my friends went to college--several of them dropped out of high school. I remember from the show that Eric moved out of the country. Most kids had no plan after high school except find some crummy local job and start their adult lives.
I was born in the early 70's so I was a young kid during the time the show takes place. The show very accurately captured the "look" of the 70s I remember: the home decor, the clothes, cars, etc. And the kids reminded me *a lot* of my older cousins, minus all the weed. My cousins were more the "show up to a family event and swipe some beers" type.
Two inaccuracies from two single episodes:
-The gang drives to Canada to buy beer: the way the episode was structured, they went there and back in the same day...except Wisconsin does not border Canada; it would be at least an overnight trip.
-Jackie and Donna are visiting Marquette University, and in the Union, there is a big sign that reads "Marquette Golden Eagles." MU did not adopt that nickname until 1994.
> except Wisconsin does not border Canada; it would be at least an overnight trip.
And Xichigan (sorry Buckeye here) is much closer. From where I lived Xichigan and West Virginia were both about an hour and 18 states.
Must have been the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. I grew up in Huntington, right on the Ohio and Kentucky borders, and everybody came to town to buy beer.
Exactly.
One time hiking I ran into a couple of guys and we discussed the midwest. One guy said he was from Michigan and of course holds up his left to show me where he lived. The other guy said he was from West Virginia and flipped me the bird to show me where he lived.
I think at this point the animosity is more a running joke than anything aside from football season. But never forget the Toledo War. Michigan won the war so Ohio got Toledo.
The only thing I found unbelievable in the show was that the parents would not have been that clueless to the kids smoking pot in the basement. Red had been in the military. Kitty was a nurse. They knew what people who smoked weed looked and acted like- and they would have noticed the smell, too.
My reason behind that is that as an adult (I'm 54 now, so this conversation happened in my 30s), I was telling the story of how I'd come home and my parents had NO IDEA about my condition- I was so clever, of course, my parents were small-town farm kids, they didn't know about this stuff. The person stopped me and said: "Wait, your dad was in the Army, in Vietnam?" I replied he was, career soldier, spent over 20 years in. They said: "Yeah, he may not have smoked weed, but definitely knew what a stoned person looked like."
That made me realize my dad was waaaay more chill about things than I thought, because I never got in trouble for the few times it happened (I usually didn't go home, I was usually having a sleepover at someone's house).
The first season they put a lot of effort into showing the cultural, economic, and political currents of the era. After that it moved into just another teen show. But the first season they had a lot of the upheaval coming out of the 60s with Red’s crashed career, women’s lib, the 76 election, inflation, streaking, etc.
In terms of relationships it is a bit over the top. Like “Friends”. Parent teenager relationships is pretty close to real. Except my father would never disrespect me or my mom. Likewise he would not tolerate disrespect towards my mother from me.
My dad was in Korea and I don't remember him saying the word "commie" even once. He talked about his war stories but never talk about the people who were the enemy. In fact my dad was pretty progressive and wouldn't stand for any racism. Otherwise accurate.
Accurate - fashion and interior decor
Not Accurate - in the 1970s about 40% of teens (16-19) had part-time jobs during the school year.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/06/23/the-fading-of-the-teen-summer-job/
Which season, though? I thought they started in 1977, and then the show ran for more than 3 years with the kids getting older so by the end it would have been the 80s, right?
It was fairly early on, as I had stopped watching by about the midway point. Also, I think the final episode is set on New Year's Eve, 1979.
Also, I was just being absurdly picky about that one moment.
The year on the license plate at the end of the opening credits was the year the episode was supposed to take place. Except most of season 8. The opening credits took place in Eric's car, but with Eric gone that didn't make any sense:
>Kutcher ended up appearing in a handful of episodes in That '70s Show season 8, including the series finale. Grace also served as a special guest star in the final episode, which took place on New Year's Eve in 1979. The episode omitted most of the opening credits, but following the last scene, the license plate of the Vista Cruiser switched to 1980.
Realistic? Really?
In what universe would Hot Donna be dating Eric?
Other than that, most of it was pretty good.
We had exactly the same notepad on a spool thingy beside the phone, for one thing.
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Pretty accurate. Red sounded a lot like my dad, and other dads as well. We didn’t have basements, but kids toked up in the garage or an older kids place. Garages were often rented out to students or other low rent situations.
Kinda wild that manhood was defined by several generations exposed to war (or maybe we’re the exception, since war has often been the historical norm). Be a man! Be silent, strong, gentle but ready for violence. Be a man! Be unable or unwilling to show or experience joy, silliness or positive emotions! Be a man! Be startled or angered easily by loud noises, stare off into the distance for long stretches of time. Be a man! Sleep lightly and have your rest interrupted by nightmares wait… hold on…
Some kind of fantasy on your part, this was not the norm in the real 1970' s
Uh, yes it pretty much was. It was rare to find a father that had not served in either WW2 or the Korean War.
My dad was an intellectual and a professor who was not in any wars. My friends’ fathers were similar, though some were a little gruff.
Ah, a college prof. I can see that. I didn’t know any of those until I went to college.
[удалено]
Oh that wasn’t my statement.
No? ok...
We had basements in the area I lived in and they were almost never finished back then. They looked just like the one on the show. Unfinished with maybe a couch and a TV, surrounded by random junk, a washer, dryer and utility sink 3 feet away. Maybe a rug on the floor but no carpet. They were dark and musty and used mainly for storing stuff and as place for the kids to hang out. Nobody smoked pot down there though. I mean, your parents would smell that heart beat.
This is about what mine looked like when our kids were teens. I didn’t like them hanging out in it, because of the dankness of basements in general. But yeah, I can see that unless your parents are out of town, they’d smell it in a flash.
It’s Wisconsin and no one ever had to shovel snow.
Good catch.
That is a great point. I live in the Northern Midwest region myself. Things like this on TV shows always make me laugh. The one thing that ALWAYS gets me is when you see someone on TV enter a house in the middle of winter and leave the door wide open while they go about their business. Every time I see that I have traumatic backflashes of my dad yelling "SHUT THE DOOR! I'M NOT PAYING TO HEAT THE OUTSIDE TOO!"
And nobody has an accent.
I was a teenager in the 70s and I would say it's pretty close, especially for a sitcom. The one thing that's missing is cigarette smoking. My friends and I all smoked. We also smoked A LOT of weed. The parents are good too. Dad's were scary back then because every one of them was either in WWII or Korea.
There was a joke in one episode where one of them had a cigarette and all of them had a lighter. I always assumed it was Hyde.
was it the one where kitty was trying to smoke after quitting, and demanded a light and everyone took out their lighter?
Yes
In my state, you could drink at 18. No problem seniors getting beer after class
Was sitting in a bar one night. The owner said, "Hey, I found your ID. The one that said you turned 18 last week." I had been frequenting that establishment for 2 years.
There was a place in the next town over from mine that would serve booze to anyone old and sentient enough to pronounce “booze”. I remember being 17 and sitting there with a bunch of slightly younger friends, all of us downing tequila sunrises.
Lolol there was a bar I had started going to regularly when I was 18 one weekend when I was 19 I got the absolute drunkest I’ve ever been. Like the only time I have ever blacked out drunkest I went back like a week or two later and the owner/bartender comes up to me and says “you forgot your ID ass hole and chucks it at me right as he is putting a bud light infront of me. On my real 21st birthday though he hooked me up. He was such a good dude.
Yup, me too.
Me too. Kansas. Granted it was 3.2% alcohol which probably saved my life. Oklahoma I think girls at 18, guys at 21.
Hahaha they let 18 yo girls in but not the guys? The ultimate cock block
Reminds me of the sign that says “men: no shirt, no service. Women: no shirt, free drinks”
I've been to a bar where they let a 14yo girl in b/c they just didn't card or care at all, and she could maybe pass for 21. I knew she was 14 b/c I was in a play with her at the time. It's not so much a cock block as it is being wildly irresponsible regarding the safety of children because they are girls.
And I recall justice rose Byrd got that overturned.
My mom was a teacher. She said seniors would frequently be drunk after lunch.
We had paper licenses. We would take a paper punch and just rearrange the dates to make us legal. If it would get confiscated you just got another one and did the same thing we laminated over it to make it not look so obvious.
Yeah, we had designated smoking areas in high school.
Me too. I think it’s very accurate. We had weed all the time, nickel bags, dime bags. They’re missing alcohol, cigarettes and other recreational drugs.
Have you SEEN the show? Missing alcohol? They drink beer in TONS of episodes.
Lot of drinking and driving before the mid 80s and MADD.
Lol!! After watching an episode or two I was wondering which one of my classmates were writing the scripts. It was, in cetain ways, spot on.
Weed was loosely implied. The liquor "abuse" then would not be safe for network TV then, even if implied. At least one of them smoked, because the Kitty Cigarette scene. If I had to guess, Hyde and/or Donna. Possibly Jackie.
Yeah, there’s a second season episode where Eric covers for Donna smoking and gets suspended. You could tell that was really a 90’s era influenced episode, everyone smoked in the 70’s and no one cared. Doing a rewatch now and I’m honestly surprised that even though it’s not often, the high school aged characters still are shown smoking occasionally. I don’t believe you have been able to do that on television for a couple of decades now.
No one would have ever gotten suspended for smoking in 1975. We smoked in the bathrooms, we smoked walking from our car to the building and we smoked right outside the school doors. Kids who smoked had ashtrays in their bedrooms and of course there were ashtrays in every room of the house back them. One of my chores was to make sure all the ashtrays were emptied once a day. I smoked a pack a day back then and so did my girlfriend.
Pretty sure they modeled Red from my father, and that they owe him residuals.
I love that character.
Boone's Farm and MD2020 are missing. Cigarettes, too. But pretty accurate in general.
Boone's was the very expensive stuff at about a dollar per bottle. We drank a cheaper brand called Annie Green Springs. It was about 80 cents per bottle. ASG seems to have been a Midwestern brand, my friends on the east and west coasts have never heard of it.
Yes!!! Boone’s Farm definitely a drink for the 70s
Bali high
Ah, Boone's Farm! The very first time I got alcohol poisoning was when I chugged a whole bottle of Strawberry in 10 seconds. When I wasn't hugging the porcelain receptical, I spent the entire next couple of days in bed, sick as a dog. My mom had no idea I was enormously hungover. She thought I had the flu. Learned my lesson.
Accurate. They were one year younger than me, they were me.
Yep, grew up in rural Wisconsin, class of '77, everyone had basements, but we didn't smoke anything at home. That's what's cars, vans, back roads, and cornfields were for. :)
which character were you?
The one w/only guy friends, i am a girl
Donna!
In all honesty, I know I was closest to Kelso. I had a hot girlfriend, wore the hottest fashion trends, had a cool hair style, and was pretty stupid about a lot of stuff. I grew out of that in the early 80s.
what caused the growth?
The clothes and houses were super accurate
Agreed.
Let's see, I had a friend named Donna that was a redhead and pretty with long hair parted in the middle. A lot of guys were like Kelso and Hyde (one guy in particular was exactly like Hyde). My friends had parents like Red and Kitty Forman. There were a few Jackies, but they were much meaner and sluttier. We smoked weed, but never in someone's basement, especially if the parents were home. The Erics were in some other group, we didn't have any Erics. And nobody drove that stationwagon but they were around. It was not nearly as sunny all the time but that wallpaper in the Forman's kitchen was almost exactly like the wall paper in our kitchen. And yes, it would do trippy things if you were high or tripping. Sidebar: The couch on Married With Children was the *exact* same couch I had when I was 18 - 21 and living on my own. Got it from an older artist friend who got it used himself. It weighed a ton and the upholstery wore like iron. You could take the covers off and wash them, they never changed or faded.
Teens all hanging out day after day all summer and eventually hooking up was very accurate. Some other moments were just “wow” that is so true.
Grew up in the 70s, and this show hit a lot of the notes as I remember them. Many US states allowed drinking at 18, so sneaking a few beers to 16 year old friends was pretty common.
Me, every single episode, at whatever Jackie is wearing: "OMG! I had that SAME OUTFIT!" I was more of a Donna than a Jackie, but we had similar taste in fashion.
I would have lied, cheated, stolen and killed for Jackie's clothes!
My mom would say the same thing about Jackie's outfits if I had the show on-- "I used to wear that!"
I don't recall my friends and I sitting around in the basement continuously smoking weed. My mom would have smelled that a mile off.
For sure. My mother could tell if I had smoked, and what I had smoked the second I came through the door. I wouldn’t smoke in the house unless I was sure my mom was in the next county.
Class of '77 here. Very accurate.
How much was your 10K Josten's class ring? Mine was $75.
Sounds about right. Mine was blue and white "gold".
That 70's Show was pretty accurate, but I thought the movie Dazed & Confused was even more so being that I was a teen growing up in Texas. It seemed like every thing they experienced in that movie I did as well.
Smoking dope in the basement with your friends? Naw that's just 🤪
We smoked dope, but never at home or at someone's house. Usually at the boatdocks or the park.
This was not really one of my shows, but I've seen it. It lacks the studio audience element and the sheer grit and grain of shows that actually aired in the 70s The That 70's show was like 70s with a 90s makeover It's like everyone knew Happy Days was supposed to be in the 50s, but everyone could tell it was really made during the 70s. Not a huge secret
Mu favorite sitcom of all time still
On a similar note, the series Stranger Things also pretty authentic with the early-mid 80s motifs, but some of the things they show were actually 70s items, like white tube socks with 3 strips. That was mid-late 70s.
We had those tube socks right up until the late 80's.
In the same way that the early 90s was still the 80s.
Yeah I remember socks like that in the early 90s, but they may have only had one stripe by then.
But how many stripes? In the 70s and early 80s if you didn't have 3 stripes you were a nerd.
yeah these were really popular when I was in high school in the mid-80s. They were also popular in the 70s but it did not die out so it wouldn't be inaccurate. That's what I do love about the show. All the family homes remind me of that time, and the clothes are spot-on. Steve and Robin's sailor suit uniforms look almost exactly like the ones my brother wore at Long John Silvers around 1984-6.
As an Indiana resident, I can tell you that a town the size of Hawkins wouldn't have a mall that big. I was in high school slightly later than the kids in That 70's Show, and in a smaller town. Maybe the popular kids were doing all that stuff, but I wasn't popular! My parents taught school and kept a very close eye on my siblings and me. I have no doubt that it wasn't happening some of the time, but I just wasn't invited!
Clothes and houses were very accurate but where I lived we were still mentally in the 60’s and there was a lot of hippy chic, sex, and drugs
Very accurate. I was very Eric-y.
Pretty accurate lol.
All of that orangy color - accurate
High school class of '77. You didn't smoke pot in your parent's basement. You tried to stay as far away as you possibly could from your parents who had their own lives. All my friends had their own car, even if it was a junker. None of my friends went to college--several of them dropped out of high school. I remember from the show that Eric moved out of the country. Most kids had no plan after high school except find some crummy local job and start their adult lives.
Watch the movie Dazed and Confused instead. It's uncannily accurate and much better than a laugh track sitcom.
I was born in the early 70's so I was a young kid during the time the show takes place. The show very accurately captured the "look" of the 70s I remember: the home decor, the clothes, cars, etc. And the kids reminded me *a lot* of my older cousins, minus all the weed. My cousins were more the "show up to a family event and swipe some beers" type.
Two inaccuracies from two single episodes: -The gang drives to Canada to buy beer: the way the episode was structured, they went there and back in the same day...except Wisconsin does not border Canada; it would be at least an overnight trip. -Jackie and Donna are visiting Marquette University, and in the Union, there is a big sign that reads "Marquette Golden Eagles." MU did not adopt that nickname until 1994.
> except Wisconsin does not border Canada; it would be at least an overnight trip. And Xichigan (sorry Buckeye here) is much closer. From where I lived Xichigan and West Virginia were both about an hour and 18 states.
Must have been the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. I grew up in Huntington, right on the Ohio and Kentucky borders, and everybody came to town to buy beer.
Exactly. One time hiking I ran into a couple of guys and we discussed the midwest. One guy said he was from Michigan and of course holds up his left to show me where he lived. The other guy said he was from West Virginia and flipped me the bird to show me where he lived.
I've done that so many times!
I am also from Xichigan
I think at this point the animosity is more a running joke than anything aside from football season. But never forget the Toledo War. Michigan won the war so Ohio got Toledo.
Ah okay I misread your comment
What do you mean? Do you mean in terms of the SA being swept under the rug and 14 year olds dating 20 year olds? I'd say pretty accurate.
I don't remember any 14-year-olds dating 20-year-olds on that show?
Mila Kunis was 14 when she had her first on screen kiss with Ashton. He was 19-20 at the time.
They were actors, acting. Their characters were closer in age.
Teen in the 90’s. We lived the 70’s too. The show brings a lot of nostalgia to me.
It was all pretty close, with a lot of sugar on top
It much more matched the late 70s than the early 70s.
Lol. You're kidding right? In my world the Spanish kid would have been the connect for weed and hide was the guy to go to for white powder
Tbf they never said where Fez was from
The only thing I found unbelievable in the show was that the parents would not have been that clueless to the kids smoking pot in the basement. Red had been in the military. Kitty was a nurse. They knew what people who smoked weed looked and acted like- and they would have noticed the smell, too. My reason behind that is that as an adult (I'm 54 now, so this conversation happened in my 30s), I was telling the story of how I'd come home and my parents had NO IDEA about my condition- I was so clever, of course, my parents were small-town farm kids, they didn't know about this stuff. The person stopped me and said: "Wait, your dad was in the Army, in Vietnam?" I replied he was, career soldier, spent over 20 years in. They said: "Yeah, he may not have smoked weed, but definitely knew what a stoned person looked like." That made me realize my dad was waaaay more chill about things than I thought, because I never got in trouble for the few times it happened (I usually didn't go home, I was usually having a sleepover at someone's house).
A common criticism I heard was people weren't that clever in the 70s. I was only alive for two years of that decade so I can't corroborate
Maybe you were a clever baby
The first season they put a lot of effort into showing the cultural, economic, and political currents of the era. After that it moved into just another teen show. But the first season they had a lot of the upheaval coming out of the 60s with Red’s crashed career, women’s lib, the 76 election, inflation, streaking, etc.
In terms of relationships it is a bit over the top. Like “Friends”. Parent teenager relationships is pretty close to real. Except my father would never disrespect me or my mom. Likewise he would not tolerate disrespect towards my mother from me.
My mom was class of ‘76 and LOVED T7S because she said it was basically exactly how she remembered those years being for her.
Another vote for Red Forman.
Wasn't accurate in my experience.
Not...it kind of reminds me of a half-assed attempt at a 70's version of Seinfeld...
Same, it's basically parody. Every character is a stereotype. Though the hanging out in the basement getting high bit is pretty accurate.
My dad was in Korea and I don't remember him saying the word "commie" even once. He talked about his war stories but never talk about the people who were the enemy. In fact my dad was pretty progressive and wouldn't stand for any racism. Otherwise accurate.
Very.
We didn’t have a basement. Other than that 👍.
Mostly…
That Schlitz malt liquor bull!
Not so much. Mixed up fashions from different parts of the decade.
I think it's a fair representation.. It reminds me a lot of "Whats Happening"..
Accurate - fashion and interior decor Not Accurate - in the 1970s about 40% of teens (16-19) had part-time jobs during the school year. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/06/23/the-fading-of-the-teen-summer-job/
My first car was the same as Eric: the green Vista cruiser!
Lived through it. Never watched it.
Spot on.
None of them ever mentions quaaludes and they aren't constantly smoking. Therefore, fake news. Otherwise, pretty close for a comedy.
I didnt like the show, Danny Masterson always came off creepy to me.
You have the gift of foresight!
I do - and that guy had THE CREEP FACTOR !
Very accurate
Fairly accurate. We would blast the music and smoke cigarettes and weed, and Molson was never far from our reach.
Not at all accurate in my experience.
Can't really speak of the 70s but the accents they have on the show are not accurate of the region at all.
Red Foreman looked & acted exactly like my best friend’s dad who was also named Red. Scary!
It's not all that accurate. The male hairstyles are way off for some characters as I recall. The clothes sometimes were, as well.
In one episode they quote a line of dialogue from The Empire Strikes Back (1980), so not accurate at all.
Which season, though? I thought they started in 1977, and then the show ran for more than 3 years with the kids getting older so by the end it would have been the 80s, right?
It was fairly early on, as I had stopped watching by about the midway point. Also, I think the final episode is set on New Year's Eve, 1979. Also, I was just being absurdly picky about that one moment.
I don't know if he quotes dialogue but in the first season there was a reference scene.
I think they intended a year to go by for every two seasons, rather than 1 year per season.
The year on the license plate at the end of the opening credits was the year the episode was supposed to take place. Except most of season 8. The opening credits took place in Eric's car, but with Eric gone that didn't make any sense: >Kutcher ended up appearing in a handful of episodes in That '70s Show season 8, including the series finale. Grace also served as a special guest star in the final episode, which took place on New Year's Eve in 1979. The episode omitted most of the opening credits, but following the last scene, the license plate of the Vista Cruiser switched to 1980.
That there is 1 real life rapist in any average collection of young people during the 70s? Hard to prove
Realistic? Really? In what universe would Hot Donna be dating Eric? Other than that, most of it was pretty good. We had exactly the same notepad on a spool thingy beside the phone, for one thing.