Hit the floodlights! Blast the news round-up theme music! It’s time for ’70s stories in the news’! Today, we take a look at how Happy Days lost its soul, explore a women’s equality story from August, 1970 and check in with the cast of The Brady Bunch. Heads up. Page down.
Happy Days became one of the biggest hits on TV by selling its soul
Hey, it’s that guy from ‘Eat My Dust and that guy from ‘Lords of Flatbush’!
The Onion’s A.V Club has a highly-readable story up on creator/producer Gary Marshall and how he changed (and saved) Happy Days as it began slipping in the ratings.
A.V. Club Quote:
“Garry Marshall faced a dilemma in the second season of Happy Days. The series, which had initially been an attempt to honestly depict a wistful look back at adolescence, had been a minor Nielsen hit in its first season, but it was sinking like a stone, falling out of the Top 30 and toward certain cancellation. He had one last shot at making the series a success, though it would destroy almost everything he’d set out to create.”
27 August 1970: US women find some advertising offensive, insulting and degrading
Women’s Liberation Movement marches on Fifth Avenue, New York, in 1970. Photograph: John Olson/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image via The Guardian
The Guardian pulls a story from its archives that bears reading. August 27, 1970 and a “Strike for Equality” by the Women’s Liberation Movement. Protesters call for a boycott of products like Silva Thin cigarettes and Cosmopolitan magazine for their “offensive, insulting, and degrading” advertising.
The Guardian Quote:
“The American Tobacco Company which advertises its Silva Thins with the slogan ‘Cigarettes are like women, the better ones are thin and rich,’ understandably was the only one of the four companies to refuse to put forward a public defence.
While the manufacturers were quacking, politicians were climbing the bandwagon. President Nixon issued a proclamation from San Clemente to mark the fiftieth anniversary of female suffrage and promised to sign a pending Constitutional amendment which would guarantee women equal rights.”
‘Brady Bunch’ cast: What is the cast of the seminal blended family sitcom doing now?
Brady Bunch bathroom brawl, November, 1969
The Huffington Post has a “Then & Now” photo gallery up which takes a look at the cast of The Brady Bunch and outlines what the actors have been up to in the years since the show went off the air in 1974.
HuffPost Quote:
“Eve Plumb today: After ‘The Brady Bunch,’ Plumb continued to act, but she also tried her hand at oil painting. She’s painted now for over two decades and her work has appeared in a number of galleries.”
Previously, on 70s stories in the news: 78-yr-old Tony Disco, Thomas Eagleton affair, recent passings