Miller dinosaurs–I’ll always love ’em!
I’m prone to nostalgia, and there are many things I miss–like drive-in movies, wax dinosaurs by the Miller Company, half a shelf-full of Andre Norton at the library, the Constitution… But there are also things I don’t miss. True, our culture deteriorates steadily, and its overall condition was better in the past than it is now. Still, here are a few relics which I hope never come back.
1. Jeans commercials. I still break out in a cold sweat if I think I hear You’ve got the look… This was back in the 1970s, and they got chumps to pay exorbitant prices for a pair of jeans, thinking it would make them hip or sexy. The ads generally featured a really skinny couple ogling each other like a pair of gargoyles. One brand was advertised as “dangerous.” Feh!
2. Tony Orlando and Dawn singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” I am well aware that we have music today that makes this piece sound like a Bach cantata. But it struck me as pretty horrible at the time, and it strikes me as pretty horrible now.
3. Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuco. This pair of schlubs rose to prominence a couple decades ago with their vomit-inducing story of sex among hideous orang-utans. Stupid gavone gets involved with idiot young floozy, who shoots his wife so she can have him all to herself… yechh! This case generated I dunno how many made-for-TV movies, plus whole books and an infinity of newspaper and magazine articles. If it ever came back, it would probably cause the end of the world.
4. Hippies. All right, they haven’t really gone away. They grew up to become the Democrat Party and trash the country. So they’re much more harmful now than they ever were. Still, it was mostly the hippie movement that made the 1960s the decade in which America began irretrievably to roll off the cliff. If you are unfamiliar with hippies because you’re too young, just imagine a bunch of Occupy Wall Street-ers who are too lazy to start a riot.
5. “Scientific proof” that you should buy the sponsor’s product. Guys in lab coats with charts showing “the valley of fatigue” and demonstrating the “nasograph.” True, this kind of thing was vastly more harmless than “scientific proof”–that is, false data–that the earth is warming and we’d better give the government huge, undreamed-of powers, plus all our money, so schmucks like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and that golem in the White House can save us from “climate change.”
That’s enough from me. I’m sure you can think of a few cultural icons you rejoice to see no more. Don’t be bashful–tell us about them.
Well, you’re not likely to be eaten or crushed to death by a hippie after all. However, the intellect DOES rise with the earlier bunch.
I had a bunch of those dinosaur characters – I wonder how much the originals are worth on E-Bay? My mom liked “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” Tony Olando has done great work for veterans through the years. I had forgotten all about Amy Fisher – thanks for reminding me 🙂 I liked some of the hippie music and their clothes fad, but the movement went south when the Hells Angels killed a man at the Rolling Stones concert. People are not aware of how high the suicide rate was among hippies.
Those old Miller dinosaurs are very steep on E-Bay.