Guess you had to be there....

Remember though - at the time, staples of the Seventies weren't immediately recognized. Some perfect examples:

* "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was a huge failure; in fact, Fox almost halted its production completely. Only a handful of people saw its original release, and there were a lot of walkouts. It wasn't until Fox decided to show it alongside other kitsch midnight horror movies that anyone took notice. (Even those familiar with the stage show hated it, because the pacing was completely spoiled by slower songs and drawn-out pauses. And that's WITHOUT 'Once In A While' - check out a copy with that song intact. Any pulse the movie had just stops dead for four minutes.)

* The Bee Gees were, in the mid-Seventies, considered washed-up losers in both England and the US. Everyone had grown tired of their weepy ballads, and Robert Stigwood forced them to scrap an entire album because releasing it would've been a complete waste of time. (That album was "A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight In The Pants" - ironically, widely available in bootleg form, and looked upon as an excellent LP by quite a few fans.) Their first attempt at funk, the "Mr. Natural" album, was a worldwide bomb. It wasn't until "Main Course" came out the next year that America's interest in them suddenly clicked.

* Despite being an obvious product of its time, let's not forget that "Sgt. Pepper" was a MASSIVE DISASTER in 1978, both in the cinemas and in record stores - most copies of the soundtrack were either dumped in a landfill or returned to the distributor. The audience at the New York premiere booed, and Peter Frampton's career was damaged beyond recovery. (Somehow, the Bee Gees escaped unscathed; their biggest album was yet to come, and their true downfall wouldn't come until the death of disco.)

* "Saturday Night Live" had its cancellation predicted almost immediately - initial reviews called the show crude and sophomoric, with no chance of survival. If I recall, even NBC expected it to be off the air within months. Obviously though, by the end of the 1975 season, the entire cast had rocketed to superstardom, and the show became NBC's biggest hit.

* Until the 2005 revival, "Doctor Who" was known in America to a considerably smaller audience who were mainly familiar with the Tom Baker seasons, which became iconic thanks to their oversaturation on PBS. Before ever airing Tom Baker, though, PBS stations first received Jon Pertwee's episodes - and no one was watching them. (After Tom Baker's era took off, though, interest in the previous Doctors grew much larger... though by this time, most of the first two Doctors' episodes had been lost for good.)

* "Saturday Night Fever" received very little promotion and was made on a small budget - the individuals behind the movie felt that it wasn't particularly fantastic, and was probably doomed to fail. Even the Bee Gees felt that the movie was too harsh and profane for its own good. Word of mouth, though, changed the hell out of that.

Gabby_bm, the same about tragedies could be said about any time in modern history. People are going to be nostalgic about their younger years, and for most of us, the bigger picture really didn't matter to our lives as we watched cartoons, played with toys, had friends we haven't seen since, and had no responsibilities.