More RR 1970's Ad Mania

Seeing how you're looking at RR again, either you're at work bored senseless or suffering from insomnia. How 'bout we kill some time with another batch of absurd old magazine advertisements, like this 1977 ad for the Marantz 2500, the world's most powerful receiver. With a retail price of $1,595, this audio marvel boasted features like a Toroidal Power Transformer, a tunnel "pin fin" heat sink, and full complentary symmetry direct-coupled output. Added to the gooble-dee-gook is the 18 db per octave 15 hz sub-sonic Butterworth low filter and a dual-gate MOS FET FM front end. Wow. Imagine, though, what $1,600 of 1977 stock in Apple would be worth today. We'd prefer that over the Marantz 2500, thank you very much.

This 1975 cigarette ad of a young Farrah Fawcett look-alike, straight faced and trying her hardest to look older than 18 and a half, would surely be banned in 2008. I learned about smoking by trying different cigarettes, it reads. Winston may not be where you start. But when your taste grows up, Winston is for real. Winston sure knew how to attract new consumers from the Charlie's Angels era, eh?

Back when Gerald Ford was President, telephone technology was just beginning to go hi-tech. The phone on the upper left is an ancestor of the modern day cell phone, the Pulsar II Mobile Telephone Control Head for car or boat. Price: $890, not including antenna and transmitter/receiver. Since there were no cell phone towers or even dedicated frequencies for their use, this ad harkens us to the age when communications technology was transitioning between switchboards and operators to the modern era of Blackberries and Skype.

Speaking of hi-tech, look at this car-component Supersystem: the Pioneer KPC 9000. Priced at only $582.70, it comes with a GM-40 20 watt component power amplifier that delivers 10 watts RMS minimum per channel (both channels drive) into 4 ohms from 60 to 20,000 Hz with no more than 0.8% THD. Whatever. It still sounded like shit compared to today's technology. But when you're playing Hall and Oates, what difference does the quality make?

Now here's a clothing item no one admits to ever wearing: the Sears Thumbs Up Couduroy Jeans. With the long-wearing ruggedness of polyester. Perma-prest, too to keep things neat. Fortunately for all of the free world, the Thumbs Up Jeans went extinct as quickly as the Sears Stretcho Waist Jeans.


Another staple of seventies fashion were the boots. And the bigger the heel, the thicker the leather, and the fatter the toe, the better. Check out these embossed American Eagles, yours for only $16.95 (if you enclose a bottom flap from a pack of Camel Filters). Here we see a couple of hikers taking a break along a stream bank, and no doubt the guying wearing the blister-makers is hating life and wishing a pair of Adidas were on his aching dogs instead of these loads.


Speaking of loads, here we see OJ sporting a pair of Dingos.