Retro Hell: Life in the '70s and '80s, from Afros to Zotz

by Darby Romeo, Ben is Dead Magazine, Bruce Elliott (Introduction)

Valley girls. Quaaludes. Howard Cosell. K-tel Records. In today's pop -culture spin cycle, the seventies and eighties rule -- as evidenced by everything from reruns on Nickelodeon and VH-1 to Brady Bunch movies and New Wave theme parties.Now, at last, there's Retro Hell -- a sassy, knowing travelogue through the best and worst of these unforgettable decades. Orchestrated by the editor of Ben Is Dead, winner of the Firecracker Alternative Book Awards 1995 Best 'Zine of the Year, Retro Hell both sends up and celebrates the cultural landscape of our misspent youth. Thirty Ben Is Dead writers and hundreds of readers helped assemble the nearly 1,000 sharply opinionated alphabetical entries and loopily authoritative sidebars. The icons, the eccentricities, the excesses, the kitsch -- it's all here, from alligator shirts, breakdancing, Earth Shoes, and Farrah Fawcett to bumper stickers, eight-tracks, Schoolhouse Rock, and John Travolta.

Illustrated throughout with 100 black-and-white photographs and illustrations, Retro Hell is the definitive compendium of recent pop-culture arcana -- a fresh, funny look back for everyone who survived the seventies and eighties.

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

Reviews

[CHAD HADEN · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book as a 17 year old and love it even more as a 44 year old

[HeavyReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I get really depressed, I read this book. It reminds me of being a kid. That doesn't always make me feel happy, but it does distract me.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super Super fun encyclopedia of pop culture from late 60's to late 80's. Even more fun if you remember the old 'zine it came from "Ben is Dead"

[Wesley Hyatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Retro Hell is basically a look back at what GenXers experienced in their childhood and teen years. Now, looking back at Retro Hell nearly 30 years after it came out, it confirms to me the reasons why I didn't buy it in 1997 even though I'm part of the demographic. This book is a very mixed bag. I ended up liking it more than hating it, but the parts that don't work are a real drawback.

Author/editor Darby Romeo went through comments from dozens of contributors of her zine Ben is Dead to compile this encyclopedia of the good, bad and ugly parts of pop culture during the two decades. Not surprisingly, the amount of voices involved resulted in contributions that ranged from awesome to awful. Many entries jogged some fond memories or interested me to learn more, but too often they consisted of people making indulgent remembrances that fail to pay off at the end.

The shortcomings lie largely with Romeo. There's an obvious Los Angeles bias to what's here, where Romeo was based. Even worse, several entries just meander needlessly. Devoting nearly a page to Atari and four and a half pages to section on hand games is a waste. Some parts are just lists such as “Breakin’ Moves” and “Bumper Stickers,” and they're tedious to read, being separated only by semicolons. Indeed, it's sometimes a challenge to peruse because each entry is written as one paragraph, and with several contributors chiming in as the text flows sometimes beyond a page, you wonder, "When is this part going to end?"

There's a lot of imbalance here. The X section is useless, just two entries with a sentence devoted to each. Other times, the subject chosen are questionable. The Y section has seven entries, yet I can think of seven better topics devoted to Yes (the group with several 1970s and 1980s hits), yo-yos that light up, yogurt, “You Light Up My Life” (the irritating yet big chart topper of 1977), The Young and the Restless (it began in 1973) and Yugos.

Also, errors abound throughout. Yes, this was written prior to the internet exploding, but based on the books cited as references, Romeo should've caught them. Here's a sample. The Great Gazoo alien character from The Flintstones is listed as “Kazoo” in the K section. The TV series Dark Shadows ran from 1966-1971 and Dance Fever ran from 1979-1987, not “mid-70s” as claimed for both. The movie The Poseidon Adventure was rated PG, not R as listed. Somehow the comedy-variety series Laugh-In was included under Sitcom Catch Phrases. The Fifth Dimension didn’t have a summer replacement TV series (the contributor probably meant the group’s former members, the husband-and-wife duo of Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.). Marvin Hamlisch didn’t write “The Entertainer," Scott Joplin did. And the long-running soap opera Knots Landing had its title misspelled.

Now, I did like finding more about some obscurities, and some subject are still viable today, such as Weird Al, so it's fun to read the mid-1990s perspective on them. The photos and illustrations are also excellent. And some of the reminiscences are quite amusing as well as insightful.

But then I get to things such as "Top 20 Worst Retro Hell Songs" and one of the works cited as being bad is “Take on Me.” Yes, the same "Take on Me" that more than 40 years later has Spotify numbers of more than 2.5 billion. Talk about takes that aged badly. I think it shows exactly what I think about Retro Hell overall. It's a somewhat interesting curiosity to review, but with more care and consideration, it could have (and should have) been better.

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt like there were so many books like this in the late 90's that informed my obsession with Gen X stuff that I was waaaaaaaay too young to actually remember. I blame Ben is Dead and Sassy for infecting me with false nostalgia and desire for things I don't know about like Blythe dolls.

[Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Retro Hell is a series of reprints from an old Zine, full of the pop culture, trends and ephemera of the '70s and '80s, amusingly cataloged. In some ways it is quite dated, though, as the book was published in 1997, and in some ways it's yesterday's news, since shows like the I Love The series have thoroughly and completely mined much of the material. It might also be best read by women of the age to remember both decades, as a lot of the focus is on fashions and style, and quite a bit more of the early 1980s and 1970s are covered than the mid-1980s to late-1980s. Still, brought back a lot of memories and was an amusing quick read.

[Craig Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are between the ages of 20-sometihng and 40, go get this now or you will be poked in the eye.

For real.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super cute dictionary of pop cultural references. Done with humor, though it might be a little too flip and insider. It almost seems written for the clique of people who wrote it.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

An A to Z of pop culture for old fart Gen Xers, culled from the much missed “Ben Is Dead” magazine. This book always cracks me up, even if it never got over the prom.