almost an hour of 1970s tv commercials - and yes, the crying indian is in there

70s TV Ads

i started watching this collection of commercials from the 1970s and i actually sort of tranced out on it and watched the whole hour of it!part of it was basic nostalgia i guess since they cover - roughly - my first ten years on earth, but there was a little more. i thought about a few different things while i zombied out on these ads.

while so much of it is sheer cornball, some of the fashions and furniture is surprisingly up to date. i couldn't help noticing that allot of major unthinkably unbreakable "rules" of today are blithely ignored, seat belts, car seats, cigarettes, alcohol, sexism, crazy processed food-stuffs - and everything chugged along with a cheery, upbeat and optimistically mellow soundtrack. amazingly we survived all these nowadays no-nos.

they also made me remember that answering machines, dvds, vhs, cell phones, computers, the internet, cable tv - almost everything i use for entertainment didn't even exist at all. but then on the other hand neither did any of those bills: netflix, comcast cable, comcast internet, att cell. i had also forgotten that tv simply stopped broadcasting during the late night all together.

it was also hard for me to remember the concept of making a phone call without the assumption that it would necessarily go through - either to the person or to their voicemail but that most of the time when you made a call back then it just rang and rang and rang, or else you got the busy signal sometimes for an hour or more. no messages. no phone in your pocket for "emergencies", no coming home to a bunch of messages to sort through and deal with and no being interrupted when you were out and about getting stuff done or spending time with actual real life people. emails and txt goes without saying.

it made me wonder what my day to day life would be like right now and why i can't really remember what it was that we did with all of our time before?