Thursday, March 1, 2012

Memories of the Seventies



I’m working on a 1970s board on Pinterest.  In doing so, I ran across this movie trailer for Disco Fever.  It is really hard to find another video that encompasses nearly everything from a decade.  Didn’t everyone have the dream of having a discotheque on an airplane?

Since I was born in 1970, I was unable to acquire an airplane in that seventies. I was only 10 at the close of the decade, after all.  What I did acquire, however, was a tape recorder.  I got it for Christmas in 1977.  Santa Claus apparently went to Radio Shack to hook me up with a state-of-the-art tape recorder.  It looked something like the picture below and I thought I was hot shit.


Source

Having my own tape recorder opened up lots of opportunities.  First and foremost, I could now listen to cassette tapes.  A side story to this is about a year later I asked for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack for my birthday.  Instead my mom got me the Superman soundtrack.  She told me that T.G.& Y. were out of Saturday Night Fever tapes and she figured Superman would be the same.  It wasn’t the same.  IT ISN’T THE SAME, AT ALL! I’m still mad about this gift calamity.  I digress; another perk of having a tape recorder was…recording stuff on tapes.  I would create dramatic, sound only soap operas and listen to them over and over again.  I really did miss a good opportunity to do radio soap operas.  I always had a character named Joshua, because Joshua can be said with full-on drama.  It can be drawn out to like 36 syllables.  The tape recorder also enabled me to tape record “secret” conversations.  If my parents were having a dinner party, I could hide my tape recorder and tape their conversations.  This didn’t last long because I hid the tape recorder once and hit the play and record buttons.  I forgot about it and guests sitting on the couch heard the stop click when the tape ran out. My "super" spy skills were uncovered and I got grounded.  The tapes were also confiscated.  The only evidence I ever uncovered, anyway, was cussing.  This was no big deal because my sister had already taught me all the known cuss words. 

This generation will never understand tape recorders and cassette tapes.  Have fun with your iPods and stuff...but secretly we know you are jealous of our seventies badass technology.

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