A child born in 1968 slept over at a cousin’s house on a waterbed some weekend, watched a man run in slow motion on television, and owned at least one toy built around a real gyroscope, and none of it felt unusual at the time. It felt like the 1970s. Here is the panel, the dates behind it, and what the market pays for what survived.
The short version
- This is the third entry in the decade series: a 5x5 panel of twenty-five objects, a date for each one, and a market note. The 1980s, 1990s and 2000s follow at one post every other day.
- Several of the twenty-five carry hard dates: Kenner began selling Stretch Armstrong in 1976; Milton Bradley’s Simon debuted at a midnight party at Studio 54 on May 15, 1978; the Treasury unveiled Jack L. Ahr’s Bicentennial quarter design March 7, 1974; the FCC’s own Class D Citizens Band radio service dates to September 1958, nearly two decades before the trucker boom that made it a ’70s object.
- The decade’s best story about who actually gets credit is the mood ring. A Chicago jeweler says he built the first one in January 1975 and never patented it; two New York inventors marketed a competing version the same year and are the two names most retrospectives actually credit.
- Kenner could not get Star Wars figures onto shelves for Christmas 1977, so it sold an empty box with a mail-in coupon instead. The first four figures did not ship until February 1978.
- Every price below is an asking price unless the text says sold or names a published launch figure. Realized-price records for this material are as thin now as they were for the 1950s and 1960s panels.
On this page
The panel: score yourself
Twenty-five squares, five rows of five, the same format as the first two entries in this series, and the panel keeps score. Tap each square you can picture without effort and pass over the ones you can merely name. Anyone who clears twenty was a child before 1980. Anyone who clears twelve grew up around a television that stayed on most of the evening.
25 things only 1970s kids remember
Tap a square for each one you can picture without effort
In the house
In front of the television
In the toy box
Out on the street
At school and at the counter
0 of 25
Tap each square you can picture without effort. The count keeps itself.
- Tap each square you can picture without effort. The count keeps itself.
- A visitor. Most of what you know about this decade arrived secondhand, through reruns and a relative's basement.
- Hand-me-down territory: an older sibling's toy box, a rerun after school, a parent's CB handle.
- You grew up around a television that stayed on most of the evening.
- You were a child before 1980.
- A clean sweep. You were there for all of it, down to the guarantee tag.
In the house: 1 to 5
1. The mood ring, and the credit fight behind it. Chicago jeweler Marvin Wernick says he built the first thermochromic ring in January 1975 after reading about liquid crystals used in medical thermometers, and sold it without ever filing a patent. New York inventors Joshua Reynolds and Maris Ambats brought a competing version to market the same year, marketed as a biofeedback tool rather than a novelty, at $45 in silver and $250 in gold, and it is Reynolds and Ambats who show up as “the inventors” in most retrospectives today. One widely repeated account puts their sales at forty million rings in three months against a year-end total of fifteen million dollars, two figures that do not reconcile at any plausible price, so treat the unit count as an unverified exaggeration and the dollar figure as the better-sourced one. Cheap copies flooded the market within a year and the fad collapsed by 1976.
2. The Crock-Pot, built on a 1940 patent. The mechanism predates the decade by three decades: Irving Naxon patented an electric bean cooker, the Naxon Beanery, granted January 23, 1940. When Naxon retired in 1970 he sold the business to Kansas City’s Rival Manufacturing, which rebranded and relaunched the appliance as the Crock-Pot at Chicago’s 1971 National Housewares Show. Sales went from two million dollars in 1971 to ninety-three million four years later.
3. The waterbed, rejected once before it was patented. Charles Hall, a San Francisco State design student, first tried to patent a water-filled bed in the late 1960s and was turned down: Robert Heinlein had already described therapeutic water beds in science-fiction novels published more than a decade earlier, which counted as prior art. Hall revised the design and received U.S. Patent 3,585,356 in 1971, the same year he founded Innerspace Environments, which grew into the era’s leading waterbed retailer. Ads talked about undisturbed sleep; Hall himself later said customers were shopping for something else entirely.
4. The 8-track tape player, already a decade old by the time it peaked. Richard Kraus built the cartridge mechanism at Bill Lear’s Lear Jet Corporation in 1963, and a consortium of Lear, Ford, Ampex, Motorola and RCA Victor released the Stereo 8 format in 1965. Ford started offering it as a factory option that September on the Mustang, Thunderbird and Lincoln. Sales of 8-track tapes in the United States actually peaked in 1978, deep into the decade this panel covers, then collapsed within five years.
5. The pocket calculator, at a launch price nobody kept paying for long. Texas Instruments introduced its own first consumer calculator, the TI-2500 Datamath, on September 21, 1972, at $149.95: eight red LED digits, four functions, nothing more. It was TI’s first calculator sold directly to the public rather than only the chips inside competitors’ machines, and the price war that followed cut that figure to a fraction of itself before the decade was out.
Hunting any of these? Prowl searches more than twenty vintage marketplaces at once, so you can see the whole range of what is listed before you commit to a price.
In front of the television: 6 to 10
6. The Six Million Dollar Man, and the slow-motion run. A TV movie based on Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg aired March 7, 1973; the series proper premiered on ABC January 18, 1974, with Lee Majors as astronaut-turned-bionic-agent Steve Austin. Character actor Richard Anderson delivered the opening line, “we can rebuild him, we have the technology,” every week, and it outlived the show itself as a stock phrase.
7. Happy Days, a ’70s show about the ’50s. Garry Marshall’s sitcom premiered on ABC January 15, 1974, set in 1950s and early-1960s Milwaukee, which makes it a decade nostalgic for the two decades before it rather than for its own moment. Its most famous stunt aired September 20, 1977, when Fonzie water-skied over a shark, a scene that later lent its name to the phrase for a show past its creative peak, though Happy Days itself stayed the top-rated show on television for years afterward.
8. Charlie’s Angels, before the show had a title cast. A 74-minute TV movie pilot aired on ABC March 21, 1976; the series itself premiered September 22, 1976, at 10 p.m., created by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts and produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg.
9. Schoolhouse Rock, built from one father’s complaint. Advertising executive David McCall noticed that his son could recite pop-song lyrics but not his multiplication tables, and hired jazz musician Bob Dorough to set arithmetic to music. The result, “Three Is a Magic Number,” became the first episode of Schoolhouse Rock, which premiered on ABC January 6, 1973.
10. Saturday Night, before it added “Live.” Lorne Michaels’s sketch show premiered on NBC October 11, 1975, hosted by George Carlin, under the title NBC’s Saturday Night; it did not become Saturday Night Live until 1977, after an unrelated ABC variety show using that exact name had ended its own run.
In the toy box: 11 to 15
11. Weebles, and the slogan that outlasted the toy. Playskool, then a subsidiary of Milton Bradley, introduced the egg-shaped, weighted-bottom figures in 1971. Advertising executive J. Mitchell Reed coined “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down” on Madison Avenue, and the line rode that one sentence through the rest of the decade.
12. Stretch Armstrong, filled with boiled-down corn syrup. Kenner industrial designer Jesse Horowitz built the figure’s stretch effect from a latex skin around a thick, gelled filling, arrived at by repeatedly boiling down Karo corn syrup until it held the right viscosity. Kenner began selling it in 1976.
13. The Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, wound by a real gyroscope. Ideal Toy Company released the toy motorcycle in 1972, timed to the real stuntman’s own jumps: a hand-cranked gyroscopic energizer spun up inside the bike and launched it across a room under its own stored momentum, no batteries involved.
14. Star Wars figures, and the box with nothing in it. Kenner did not seriously pursue the Star Wars toy license until a meeting in February 1977, three months before the movie opened, leaving no time to tool a figure line for that Christmas. Its fix was the Early Bird Certificate Package, $7.99, an empty box holding a mail-in certificate, a diorama stand, stickers and a fan-club card, no figures at all. The first four figures it promised, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Chewbacca and R2-D2, did not ship until February 1978.
15. Simon, launched at a nightclub. Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison designed the four-button memory game, reportedly after seeing Atari’s 1976 arcade game Touch Me and deciding the idea deserved better sound. Milton Bradley gave it a midnight release party at Studio 54 on May 15, 1978, priced at $25, roughly $92 today.
Out on the street: 16 to 20
16. The Big Wheel, low, loud and older than it looks. Louis Marx and Company introduced the low-slung plastic tricycle in 1969, manufactured in Girard, Pennsylvania. See the correction below.
17. Skateboard wheels that finally gripped. Frank Nasworthy tested urethane roller-skate wheels on a skateboard in the summer of 1970 at a urethane factory in northern Virginia, then founded Cadillac Wheels in Encinitas, California, in 1971, building demand through free samples and surf-magazine ads before retailers took notice. The wheels rolled smoother and gripped pavement far better than the clay wheels that filled the 1960s panel’s own skateboard entry, and that improvement is most of why skateboarding became a mass sport in this decade rather than staying a fringe hobby in the last one.
18. Platform shoes, several inches off the sidewalk. Thick-soled shoes for men and women became a fixture of disco-era fashion through the middle years of the decade. No single patent or launch date defines the trend the way one does for several other items on this panel; it arrived gradually across footwear brands rather than from one company’s single release.
19. CB radio, and the boom that arrived decades after the service did. The FCC created the modern 27 MHz Class D Citizens Band radio service in September 1958. It sat as a minor hobbyist band for fifteen years until the 1973 oil shock brought a national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit that truckers, paid by the mile, had every reason to talk around: locating fuel, warning each other about speed traps, organizing convoys. C.W. McCall’s novelty song “Convoy” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1976 and pulled the whole subculture into the wider culture, with Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Convoy (1978) following it into theaters.
20. Roller disco, under a mirror ball. Roller rinks paired skating with disco music and nightclub-style lighting in cities across the country through the second half of the decade, an overlap of two separate 1970s fads, skating and disco, rather than an invention with a single date or patent behind it.
Prices move, and a single listing is not the market. Run the term across every marketplace at once and read the whole range.
At school and at the counter: 21 to 25
21. The Pet Rock, sold with a straight face. Advertising man Gary Dahl introduced it at a San Francisco gift trade show in August 1975, priced just under four dollars and packaged with a mock training manual instructing owners how to teach it to “sit” and “roll over.” It sold roughly a million and a half units before the fad faded at the end of that year’s Christmas season.
22. Pop Rocks, invented two decades before it was sold. See the correction below; the short version is that the candy is older than the fad it belongs to.
23. The Bicentennial quarter, struck with the wrong year on purpose. The Treasury opened a nationwide design competition in October 1973, judged by a panel appointed by the National Sculpture Society, and unveiled the winning entries March 7, 1974. Jack L. Ahr’s reverse, a colonial drummer boy beside a small torch ringed by thirteen stars, went on every quarter struck between mid-1975 and mid-1976, all of them dual-dated 1776-1976 instead of the year they were actually made. The Denver mint alone struck more than 860 million of them, and that production run is the whole story behind a coin most people assume is rare: it is instead one of the most common quarters in circulation.
24. Toughskins, with a guarantee printed right on the label. Sears launched its “Tough Jeans Territory” campaign in 1974 around a proprietary tri-blend fabric, Dacron polyester, DuPont nylon and cotton, engineered specifically to outlast a growing child, and promised outright that “children would grow out of their Toughskin jeans before the jeans wore out.”
25. The Stay-Tab can, designed to stop cutting people. Reynolds Metals engineer Daniel Cudzik designed the non-removable “Stay-On-Tab” in 1975, now held in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent design collection, specifically to replace the earlier fully-removable pull-tab that had already been documented as a swallowing hazard and a steady source of roadside litter. A single rivet keeps Cudzik’s tab attached to the can after opening, which is the entire invention.
What this material sells for
The two rules from the first two entries in this series hold again here. Packaging outranks the object, often by a wide margin, and fame runs opposite to scarcity, because the most famous objects on a panel like this were made in the largest numbers, while the plain, disposable ones nobody thought to keep are the ones actually hard to find today.
The figures below are drawn from published retail prices where documented, and from current marketplace listings otherwise. Treat every marketplace figure as an asking price, not a sale.
| Item | Figure | Verified or reported |
|---|---|---|
| TI-2500 Datamath calculator, new, September 1972 | 149.95 dollars | Published launch price |
| Simon, new, 1978 | 25 dollars | Published launch price, roughly 92 dollars today |
| Star Wars Early Bird Certificate Package, new, 1977 | 7.99 dollars | Published launch price for an empty box and a mail-in certificate |
| Pet Rock, new, 1975 | just under 4 dollars | Published launch price; roughly 1.5 million sold |
| Loose Star Wars figure, common secondary character | 15 to 40 dollars | Reported collector price-guide range, not a specific sale |
| The same figure, mint on its original card | 150 to 400 dollars | Reported collector price-guide range; a five- to tenfold packaging premium, the same shape of rule the 1960s panel found with Hot Wheels |
We have left this table shorter than the panel on purpose. Filling in a number for all twenty-five would mean inventing figures for categories with no realized-price record behind them, and an invented range is worse than an admitted gap.
Where the nostalgia gets the date wrong
Five things connected to this panel are routinely mis-dated, and knowing which is which is worth more to a seller than any single price.
- The Big Wheel is a 1969 object. Louis Marx and Company put it into production the year before this decade started. It defined 1970s driveways, but the tricycle itself predates the decade it is remembered for.
- Pop Rocks were invented in 1956, not the mid-1970s. General Foods chemist William Mitchell built the carbonation process while trying to invent an instant soda, and patented it in 1961 (U.S. Patent 3,012,893). The candy itself was not test-marketed until 1974, in Canada, and did not reach American shelves until 1976, nearly two decades after the underlying invention.
- Most Star Wars figures a child got “for Christmas 1977” actually arrived in 1978. What went under the tree that December was, in most cases, an empty box and a mail-in certificate. The figures themselves shipped starting in February.
- CB radio is a 1958 federal radio service, not a 1970s invention. The FCC created the Class D Citizens Band nearly fifteen years before the trucker boom. What belongs to this decade is the fuel-crisis-driven craze, not the technology underneath it.
- The Rubik’s Cube belongs to the next decade, not this one. Erno Rubik built it in Hungary in 1974 and filed a Hungarian patent the following year, but it did not reach toy shops outside Hungary until 1980, at toy fairs in London, Paris, Nuremberg and New York. A “70s kids” nostalgia list that includes it is describing an early-1980s childhood instead.
About the pictures
This guide runs on a panel we built rather than photographs, the same choice the 1950s and 1960s entries made. Most of what is on this panel is a copyrighted character, a trademarked product still in commerce, or a period photograph we could not clear the rights to, and we do not publish images we cannot license. The one photograph in this post is different: it is a U.S. Mint coin design, a public-domain U.S. government work, and it happens to also be item 23 on the panel itself rather than a purely decorative illustration.
The rest of the decades
This is the third panel in the series, following the 1950s entry and the 1960s entry. The 1980s, 1990s and 2000s follow from here, one decade at a time, each with its own grid and its own market note.
The pattern that held for the first two panels holds again: the object a child remembers best is rarely the expensive one. It is the cheap consumable, the empty box with a coupon inside, the coin nobody thought twice about spending, and those are exactly the items a market has to piece back together afterward from whatever a household happened not to throw away.
More from the Field Guides: our Speak & Spell guide, for a toy that arrived right at the end of this decade in 1978, and our Sony Walkman guide, for the object that closed it out in 1979. Our lava lamp guide covers a fixture of this decade’s decor even though its real trademark date lands one decade earlier. Everything we have written sits in the Field Guides index.
Owl and Twig Vintage is a Michigan estate and vintage shop. Prowl is the free sourcing tool we built for our own hunting and opened up to everyone.
Sources
- Mood ring, Wikipedia, and Upworthy, “The mood ring’s mysterious history” — Marvin Wernick’s January 1975 origin, Joshua Reynolds and Maris Ambats’ competing version, and the disputed sales figures.
- Smithsonian Magazine, “A Brief History of the Crock Pot” — the 1940 Naxon Beanery patent, the 1970 sale to Rival, and the 1971 Crock-Pot rebrand and sales figures.
- Waterbed, Wikipedia, and Core77 — Charles Hall’s rejected early patent application, U.S. Patent 3,585,356, and Innerspace Environments.
- 8-track cartridge, Wikipedia — Richard Kraus’ 1963 cartridge design at Lear Jet, the 1965 Stereo 8 release, Ford’s 1966-model factory option, and the format’s 1978 sales peak.
- EDN, “TI enters calculator market, September 21, 1972” — the TI-2500 Datamath launch date and $149.95 price.
- The Six Million Dollar Man, Wikipedia — the March 1973 TV movie, the January 1974 series premiere, and the source novel Cyborg.
- Happy Days, Wikipedia — the January 1974 premiere, its 1950s Milwaukee setting, and the September 1977 water-ski episode.
- Charlie’s Angels, Wikipedia — the March 1976 pilot movie and the September 1976 series premiere.
- Schoolhouse Rock!, Wikipedia — David McCall’s origin story, Bob Dorough’s composing credit, and the January 1973 premiere.
- HISTORY, “Saturday Night Live debuts” — the October 11, 1975 premiere, George Carlin as first host, and the show’s original NBC’s Saturday Night title.
- Weeble, Wikipedia — the 1971 Playskool introduction and the J. Mitchell Reed slogan.
- Stretch Armstrong, Wikipedia — Jesse Horowitz’s design, the corn-syrup filling, and the 1976 Kenner release.
- The History Of The Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle Toy Line, Vintage Toy Emporium — Ideal’s 1972 release and the gyroscopic energizer mechanism.
- Kenner Star Wars action figures, Wikipedia, and Rebelscum.com, Early Bird Certificate — Kenner’s February 1977 licensing meeting, the $7.99 Early Bird Certificate Package, and the February 1978 figure shipments.
- Smithsonian Institution, Simon Electronic Game, 1978, and Mental Floss, “7 Things You Might Not Know About the Game Simon” — Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison’s design, the Studio 54 launch, and the $25 price.
- Big Wheel (tricycle), Wikipedia — Louis Marx and Company’s 1969 introduction.
- Smithsonian Lemelson Center, “How Frank ‘Captain Cadillac’ Nasworthy Re-invented the Wheel” — the 1970 first test and the 1971 founding of Cadillac Wheels.
- Citizens band radio, Wikipedia — the FCC’s 1958 creation of Class D CB, the 1973 oil shock and 55-mph speed limit, and “Convoy” reaching No. 1 in January 1976.
- Pet Rock, Wikipedia — Gary Dahl’s August 1975 launch, the under-four-dollar price, and roughly 1.5 million units sold.
- Pop Rocks, Wikipedia, and William A. Mitchell, Wikipedia — the 1956 invention, U.S. Patent 3,012,893 (1961), the 1974 Canadian test market, and the 1976 U.S. release.
- CoinWeek, 1976-D Bicentennial Quarter — the October 1973 design competition, Jack L. Ahr’s reverse, the March 1974 unveiling, and Denver mint production figures.
- Toughskins, Wikipedia — the 1974 “Tough Jeans Territory” campaign, the tri-blend fabric, and the durability guarantee.
- Museum of Modern Art, Daniel F. Cudzik, Beverage Can with Non-removable Pull-Tab Opener (“Stay-on Tab”), 1975, and Tedium, on the aluminum can opener — Cudzik’s 1975 design and the swallowing and littering hazards of the earlier removable pull-tab.
- Rubik’s Cube, Wikipedia — Erno Rubik’s 1974 invention in Hungary and the puzzle’s 1980 international release.
- Bicentennial quarter reverse, via Wikimedia Commons, for the coin figure in this guide.
- Appraisily, “Old Star Wars Figures Value” — reported collector price-guide ranges for loose versus mint-on-card figures.
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