I could count on Saturday afternoons being full of Creature Features on the TV, and every few months WABC's famous "4:30 Movie" would run Monster Week, with at least one Gamera movie and an off-brand kaiju flick like Monster from a Prehistoric Planet or Yongary: Monster from the Deep. Monster movies were a huge part of my life back then. The second part, as just about anyone who was a 9-year-old boy in 1976 could tell you, was taken over by King Kong. As a nation, we spent colossal amounts of money on embarrassingly tacky souvenirs, all of which began to lose their charm at 12:01 AM on July 5. The first half of 1976 marked a moment when the country rallied from a decade of uncertainty, and did what it has always done following a crisis: it went shopping. Heaven knows the country needed an excuse to feel good about itself: the Vietnam War was finally over the raw wound of Watergate was no longer throbbing quite as painfully the first great Energy Crisis had passed and American moviegoers had gone from an Exorcist-inspired dread of demons in their bedroom closet, to the far more rational terror of sharks in the municipal swimming pool. It was one of the last times when Americans of all ages, backgrounds and political beliefs could put aside their differences, however briefly, and come together in a joyous, unabashed and un-ironic display of patriotism.
But part of the joy of having been a white suburban middle-class male child in 1976 was having the luxury of not knowing how privileged I was to be a white suburban middle-class male child in 1976).įor the entire first half of the year, the whole country was wrapped up in the celebration of the U.S.
1976 was a great year to be a 9-year-old American boy (All right - to be entirely accurate, it was a great time to be a white suburban middle-class American boy.
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