The Sensational 70s

Originally released as a series of 10 standalone videos (one for each year of the 1970s), this collection promotes itself as a “scrapbook”—which is fitting, since it is mostly scraps of old news footage pasted together without much rhyme or reason. Many of the obvious highlights of the 1970s are present—the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the celebration of the Bicentennial—as well as the deaths of Pablo Picasso and Charles Lindbergh, and some rather unlikely news highlights, such as the popularity of mud wrestling and RVs. Unlike the VH1 series I Love the 70s, with its snarky tributes to the excessiveness of ‘70s kitsch (of which there was no shortage!), this collection focuses on dramatic and often tragic events such as the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease, the Three Mile Island environmental disaster, the hysteria over religious cults that followed the Jonestown suicides, etc. But to be perfectly frank, this quarter-century old series is literally a compilation of news clips, minus any truly insightful analysis. Still, The Sensational 70s presents scads of original source material at an affordable price, and that's reason enough to make this a strong optional purchase. Aud: J, H, C, P. (P. Hall)