9 things that are better now than in the ’70s and ’80s, Pt. 1

If you’re new to Doofus Dad and start perusing my articles, you’ll probably notice a GOM (grumpy old man) thread that tends to permeate my stuff. That’s fair. Most people believe that the decade(s) of their formative years are the best and the current times, well … suck. I’m no different. This is human nature and we’re all guilty of it. It turns out, though, that in my case — I grew up in some of the 1960s, all of the ’70s, and a good chunk of the ’80s — I’m correct in this belief, human nature or not. This period is objectively the best, and it’s not even close. My apologies to all the other decades out there. I’m sure somebody likes you, even if they’re wrong.

It’s fun to be snarky about current times. There is so much low-hanging fruit, it’s hard to choose which limb to pick from when writing an article like this. But because I’m a fair-minded individual and it’s probably in my best interest to offset my GOM reputation to a certain extent, I’ve decided to make a list of 9 things, in order of least-to-most impactful, that are better now, in 2026, than they were back when I was growing up. Let me know if you agree or disagree. Feel free to add something, too.

And in case you’re wondering, I would’ve made it an even 10, but I literally couldn’t think of another.

I’m going to break this story into two parts. Here are the first four items on my list. Enjoy!

9. The reality of stunts in TV shows.

Yes, that’s oddly specific, but bear with me.

It’s funny how humanity is programmed based upon what it is presented with. In the ’70s, the entire TV-watching world was wired to believe that the worst thing that could happen to you in life was to be thrown across the room or through a plate-glass window.

(We also thought that you could be swallowed by quicksand, but that’s another topic.)

Take one of my favorite TV shows, The Incredible Hulk. After the crooks bullied poor, gentle David Banner enough, Hulk-mode was activated. His eyes turned lime green and his bursting muscles made mincemeat of all of his clothing except, oddly, the top part of his pants and underwear. (Seems like Banner’s socks should’ve survived this transformation, but I guess the Hulk running around in socks would’ve ruined the effect.)

The first thing the Hulk always did was to squat into a crouch, flex his muscles, and roar at the Bad Guys, none of whom had the presence of mind to simply shoot him right then and be done with it. Bad guys in 70s TV shows seemed either badly unprepared or exceedingly dumb.

Next, the Hulk would grab the nearest Bad Guy and throw him across the room into either: A) a set of laboratory shelving that would fall over, dramatically spilling all its lethal contents; B) some type of furniture clearly made of balsa wood; or C) out a window, and never higher than the first floor.

This action would either knock the dude out cold or cause him to exclaim something to his cohorts like “Let’s get out of here! This guy is bad news!” and run off into the arms of the now approaching police.

(Yes, I watched a Hulk clip and this dialogue was actually uttered.)

Nothing the Hulk did resulted in any obvious injury, and of course, was never fatal. Then, the Hulk would escape in slow motion into the forest to a soundtrack of dramatic and sad music.

And the entire TV-watching world thought this was awesome!

Same for Wonder Woman, my other favorite show during the mid-70s. Go back and watch any Wonder Woman episode on YouTube. To a person of the 2020s, these appear to have been produced by a middle-school drama club using their Papaw’s old camcorder. Wonder Woman simply throws and shoves people around the room in slow motion, leaps over stuff (you never see the unedited leap from start to finish, only the takeoff and landing), and tosses her golden truth lasso over Bad Guys who always seem to be dressed for business meetings and clearly need to spend more time in the gym.

Why did this work? Why did we buy this? Well, if you were a prepubescent, hormone-driven boy, there were two big reasons, and they both had to do with Lynda Carter.

Moving on.

Today? Folks are practically being murdered for real on network TV, complete with spurting blood and compound fractures. People are thrown out of penthouse suite windows. They are stuffed into woodchippers and flattened by steamrollers.

And how do we react to this? Total indifference. No cringing, no hiding our faces in pillows. We have become so thoroughly desensitized to Hollywood violence that, if the stunts don’t appear 100% accurate, we scoff and turn the channel to something more exciting, like the Great British Baking Show.

So yes, the stunts are better now, and it makes me wonder what’s coming next. In 20 years, actors might be climbing through our holographic TV screens and actually beating us up on our own couches as a further improvement.

(Lynda Carter, however, has most certainly not been improved upon.)

8. The fitness and clothing of pro golfers

In the ’70s, being sentenced to watch a golf tournament with your dad on Sunday afternoon was the kiss of death-by-boredom. Not only was there no physical contact or risk of bodily injury in golf — which was the litmus test of interest for a 1970s boy whose hero was Evel Knievel — but the players all looked like the guy who came over to your house and did your parents’ taxes around the kitchen table. They were middle-aged and either skinny, pudgy, or downright overweight. Nobody had muscle definition or appeared remotely powerful — with the possible exception of Jack Nicklaus — and they all wore clothes that were reminiscent of plaid Easter eggs with the addition of giant floppy collars. They went hatless, had terrible ’70s haircuts, and often wore prescription glasses that automatically tinted in the sunshine, the kind that every math or computer nerd wore.

But today? The pro golfers of 2026 are generally in the 20s and 30s, athletic, and wear tight-fitting, customized, athletic clothing and, almost without fail, some type of cap. Several are referred to by my wife as “Hunky Hunkersons.” I doubt that the same terminology would’ve been used by women in the 1970s when referring to a pro golfer.

Golfing fitness and fashion has clearly improved, but given the option, I’d still rather watch Evel Knievel crash his rocket into Snake River Canyon on live TV.

7. Movie theater seating

If you are 15 or younger, you probably think that movie theaters have always featured, at best, push-button recliners or, at worst, comfortable leather rockers. You would be mistaken.

It was around 2015 that I first encountered recliner seating at my local theater. For someone who grew up watching movies while crammed into flip-up, stadium-style seats covered in electric yellow, orange, and blue geometric shapes that matched the mall carpeting, the concept of big, fat, leather recliners in a movie theater was unthinkable. It would have sounded like absurd luxury.

They’ve even made the armrests better. In the ’80s, someone had to establish dominance over the thin, hard-plastic, cup-holderless arm rest, which was awkward when sitting beside a total stranger. In many cases, you were both too shy to claim the arm rest, so you both sat uncomfortably with your arms in your laps for two hours, sipping your cherry Coke like a T-Rex would, were a T-Rex somehow seated in a movie theater.

Legroom was also a problem. If you were taller than, say, 5’11”, you were doomed to either have your knees squished against the seat in front of you, or if there was no one using that seat, you propped your feet on those armrests as if you were a member of a rowdy, drunken street gang, soon to be tossed into laboratory shelving by the Hulk.

Comfort was not in the vocabulary of the movie theater owners. They just wanted to cram as many butts as possible in there, comfort be damned. Again, we didn’t know the difference because why would we?

Today, though? Everyone has their own home recliner replete with a cushy armrest and a dedicated cup holder. Each row is divided by a panel of plexiglass, with plenty of room to stretch out my 6’6” frame. Even now, I’m excited to go to the movies simply because of this fancy, first-class seating, despite that fact that the movie probably itself isn’t worth watching and the popcorn is apparently sprinkled in gold dust.

But the seating? WAY better.

6. Access to music

It’s a fact of modern life that if you own a phone (which you do) and can think of a song (which you can), you can immediately listen to it, whether through Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, or some other platform. This was not the case in the ’70s and ’80s. Back then, we had to work for our music, sometimes quite literally.

You usually discovered a favorite song entirely by accident. The radio would be on, usually in the car as your mom was driving you to soccer practice or a birthday party, and some glorious piece of music would magically and unexpectedly find its way into your life. Imagine hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Hotel California” or “Carry On, Wayward Son” along with the rest of the world for the first time! In that instant, life was enhanced, heightened, and somehow better than just a few minutes ago.

You listened carefully, hoping the DJ would mention the artist and song name at the end so you could try to remember the name. Keep in mind that these songs weren’t yet part of the collective culture and the term “classic rock” wasn’t even coined yet. It was all brand new.

Then, for weeks after, you obsessively listened to the same station, hoping to hear that tune again.

If you were of working age and loved a song from the radio, you could go down to the record store and buy it if you had the dough. This was a Big Deal. An album might cost $8 or more, which represented at least two hours of bagging groceries, in my case. So over a year’s time, you might only be able to purchase three or four albums or 8-track tapes, along with fuel for your car, movie tickets, and the occasional pizza date for you and your girlfriend.

But each album purchase was so memorable, that day stuck with you forever. You finally made it home and scurried into the house with the Sam Goody’s bag tucked carefully under your arm like that guy with the singing “Hello, My Darling” frog in Looney Tunes. Then, you literally spent hours with it, playing it over and over as you poured through the liner notes and studied the photos.

There was a way to get around paying for music, and this was usually in the ’80s after boom boxes were invented. You had a blank cassette tape in the machine and, finger hovering over the red record button, listened day after day to the radio for your anticipated song. (Some of us had a lot of free time.) If you were lucky, the DJ teased the song so you knew it was coming. More often, though, your reflexes were a little off and your recorded version began some three seconds in. (And hopefully, that stupid DJ didn’t speak over the beginning or end of it.) You made entire tapes of music without full beginnings, with DJ chatter over each end, or fades that blended into the beginning of the next song. In a sense, you created an entirely unique recording that was distinctively yours.

The fact that — especially in the ’70s — the only way to really see our rock gods was to attend their concerts added another level of mystic wonder and value to musicians. In some cases, like the Steve Miller Band, for example, we didn’t even have photos of them on their albums. If you got really lucky, you might catch them on The Midnight Special TV show or something similar but remember: you probably couldn’t record that — video recorders weren’t really a thing yet. The performance came and went in real time, only to disappear into the atmosphere forever. (Or so we thought.)

So, how did you see your music heroes? You had to pony up the money, buy concert tickets, devote the better part of a day to driving and/or waiting in line, and then commit the entire experience to memory. No videos. Probably no photos.

Today, access is a snap. A quick search, a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, and you’re listening within seconds. Want to see your band playing live? Open YouTube. Convenient, yes, free, yes. But unfortunately, the value we once held in music and musicians is no more. And I mean that quite literally. Investing substantial time and money into music and musicians is something our culture has moved on from and will probably never return to. When something becomes easy, it usually becomes cheap. Sadly, this is reflected in the quality of much (not all) of the music that is being produced today, as well. Cheap experience, cheap product.

5. TVs are less expensive … and lighter

One of the first TVs I can remember us having as a kid in the early 70s was a monstrosity. The electronics were housed in an enormous piece of solid wood that sat on the floor and was probably moved into our home by piano movers or, perhaps, the Pittsburg Steelers. The screen was around 35” and we could watch a total of four glorious channels — ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS — brought to us with varying degrees of static snow courtesy of a rabbit-ear antennae.

I just did some quick research and found that the typical console TV in the early ’70s cost around $700, which would be in the $4K range in today’s money. How did anybody afford this?!

As the decades progressed, the screens got larger, the consoles went away, but, until the early-2010s, the TVs were equally as heavy. When we moved to our current home twelve years ago, our main television had roughly a 50” screen and weighed approximately the same as a VW Beetle. This was just around the time that flat-screen models were becoming common, so I gave that monolith away to the first poor sap who agreed to come lug it out of our house. If I recall correctly, that TV set us back around $1,200. No apps, no 4K, no hardwood frame.

Today? You can buy an 80” 4K smart TV for as little as $400. It’s about three inches wide, gets 972 channels (only 10 of which you’ll watch) and can be safely carried up three flights of stairs by a couple of middle-school cheerleaders. (I haven’t actually tested that claim, but I feel like it’s reasonable.)

And why would you need an 80” TV? You don’t. Nobody does. But you certainly want one, especially if you’re a Tennessee Titans fan and desire to experience your team being humiliated year after year via a 4K Crystal Processor with Motion Xcelerator and a Samsung sound bar.

Part 2 coming soon.