Jesse Singer articles

A surprising number of songs Baby Boomers loved in the 70s are still getting played by Millennials today. Not because they’re trying to be retro. Not because their dad left the radio on. Because some songs are just too good to age out.

There was a time when forgetting these women seemed impossible. They fought villains, took over movie and television screens and ended up on more than a few bedroom walls. Yet today, many of their names barely register. How many do you remember?

For eight seasons, Andy Griffith made Mayberry feel like the safest place in America. Sheriff Taylor was patient, decent and almost impossible to rattle—the kind of man viewers trusted before he even opened his mouth. But away from the cameras, well...that was a different story.

The 80s loved a private investigator. Give somebody a mustache, a sports car, a houseboat, or one deeply questionable trench coat, and suddenly they had an office and a weekly mystery. A few became classics. The rest vanished so completely that remembering five might actually be impressive.

Network television in the 70s loved a catchphrase almost as much as it loved a laugh track. Give a character one odd line, repeat it every week, and somebody in a suit probably started planning the lunchbox. Sure, some of those catchphrases were “Dy-no-mite!” and caught on like wildfire. Others, however, had their fires put out pretty quickly.

Some great albums were made for less than the price of a used car. Not these. The albums on this list cost as much as a bunch of used cars, a whole lot of brand-new cars, houses, private jets, and, for some, a small island or two.

These movies came out swinging. For a few minutes—sometimes even 10 or 20—everything worked, and it looked like you were in for something great. Then the rest of the movie happened...

Some of these soaps disappeared within months. Others ran for years and produced thousands of episodes—which makes the fact that almost nobody talks about them anymore even stranger. Seriously, how many do you remember?

Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg: Both became comedy legends one strange sentence at a time. So forget the career statistics for now. Let the one-liners do the talking.