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41 votes
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I've been enjoying a few tropes in 1970s TV shows
I've been watching some TV shows from the 1970s recently. I've noticed a few tropes that I find pretty amusing. One of tropes is how often someone "slips a mickey" to someone else in the show. By...
I've been watching some TV shows from the 1970s recently. I've noticed a few tropes that I find pretty amusing.
One of tropes is how often someone "slips a mickey" to someone else in the show. By this, I mean that someone is given a drink that has a drug in it that causes the character to pass out. There is always a certain way this is portrayed by the director. The screen gets out of focus and then the camera tilts in strange directions.
In the first 3 episodes of The Rockford Files, this scene happens twice. Once it is done by Rockford himself (well, his client does it for him), and the next time it is done to him by one of the other characters.A variation of this is getting hit on the back of the head with something, usually a handgun. This always reliably knocks out the person without long term injury.
Another trope is the scene of a character driving up to a location, getting out, and walking into a building. In a modern show, this would maybe be done in a few seconds just as an establishing shot. But in 1970s television, this shot could last a few minutes. It's very obvious that they are trying to fill some time. These scenes are very noticeable in shows like Columbo when they went to a 90 minute format.
A variation of the "person walking" trope is when we only see the legs and shoes of the person who is walking. This is so that the audience doesn't know the identity of the person walking yet. It usually turns out to be a bad guy and there will be a crime done by the end of the scene. Sometimes we continue looking at the feet while the crime is in progress, and sometimes we zoom out to see who is doing it.
24 votes -
Thirteen minutes of previously unseen footage found of Led Zeppelin's final warm-up show before their historic Knebworth dates, shot in Denmark in 1979
10 votes -
Michel Jonasz - En v'la du slow en v'la (1978)
3 votes -
Alfred Hitchcock clarifies some stories about him on The Dick Cavett Show
9 votes -
Soviet & Socialistic Grooves from 60s-70s / New Year Special by BASIC – L’atelier de Musique Ep006 (2024)
17 votes -
The United States of pizza, mapsplained
17 votes -
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7 votes -
John Denver & The Muppets: A Christmas Together (1979)
10 votes -
Blondie - Heart of Glass (1979)
19 votes -
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16 votes -
Why am I the only person that loves the movie Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band? It's got Beatles music, critique of capitalism, and literal Heartland values.
9 votes -
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at fifty
5 votes -
45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web
8 votes -
When Rob Barrett surveyed one of Norway's largest seabird colonies in the '70s there were too many birds to count – stark before and after photographs reveal sharp decline
13 votes -
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3 votes -
The biggest band in America in 2024 is … Creedence Clearwater Revival
22 votes -
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23 votes -
Lemma Demissew - Astawesalehu (1970s)
4 votes -
Red Lobster | Bankrupt
21 votes -
Science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin made Schrödinger’s cat famous
12 votes -
Eastern Air Lines | Bankrupt
4 votes -
When ABBA was declared the enemy in Sweden – documentary ‘Against the Odds’ sketches the ups and downs that accompanied the band's success
5 votes -
The forged Apple employee badge
25 votes -
The Day Iceland Stood Still | Trailer
8 votes -
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14 votes -
Remembering May 4 (Kent State massacre) - An interview with Devo's Jerry Casale
16 votes -
Fifty years later, this Apollo-era antenna still talks to Voyager 2
14 votes -
ABBA, cabaret and smug marionettes – the 1974 Eurovision song contest reviewed
3 votes -
How The Beverly Hillbillies changed TV
3 votes -
I found Frank Herbert’s Dune script. It’s hard to imagine a weirder film version of Dune than the one David Lynch released in 1984, but Frank Herbert found a way. Dune: Part Two is better.
32 votes -
Miki Matsubara - Stay with Me (1979)
8 votes -
A group of Indigenous women in Greenland has sued Denmark for forcing them to be fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices in the 1960s and 70s
29 votes -
'Copa 71' - the Lost Lionesses and the forgotten 1971 women's World Cup
6 votes -
Moki Cherry blended work and life, embodying a free-spirited 1970s vision – daughter Neneh Cherry, and her granddaughter Naima Karlsson recall her life and work
5 votes -
How Monty Python's Life of Brian moved past culture wars and censorship to become a beloved hit
31 votes -
The Australian scientist who tried to raise the alarm about climate change asks himself "Where did I go wrong?"
17 votes -
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - retrospective and review
8 votes -
Gordon Lightfoot - Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald (1976)
17 votes -
Ghosts of the '72 Miami Dolphins
4 votes -
Why everyone hates this concrete building, and why brutalism dominates US college campuses
18 votes -
The US tried permanent daylight saving time in the ’70s. People hated it.
33 votes -
PM Katrín Jakobsdóttir will take part in Iceland's first full-day womens strike in forty-eight years – calling for pay equality and action on gender-based violence
12 votes -
India’s early electronic music from the ’70s is finally being released
14 votes -
We might have accidentally killed any life we collected in samples on Mars nearly fifty years ago
43 votes -
The history and influence of Columbo - the quirky detective who won our hearts
5 votes -
Earth, Wind & Fire - September (1978)
24 votes -
‘Used as dartboards’: rare British war comic art rescued from bins, skips and floods
9 votes -
The legacy of Star Trek: The Animated Series, fifty years on
15 votes -
How disappearance became a global weapon of psychological control, fifty years on from Chile’s US-backed coup
21 votes