I went to high school from 1980 to 1983. My school featured radically different demographics and a somewhat different locale. But I watch that movie and it brings back a lot of my own memories. Pretty much every main character had an equivalent in my hs world. Either he set it up that way or most high schools have a lot more in common than we realize.
I was in high school from 1975-79, in the outer ‘burbs of Houston, Texas, near the same schools Dazed director Richard Linklater attended (Huntsville H.S. and Bellaire H.S.). Trust me, much of it is uncannily accurate.
I was starting middle school in 1976, then called junior high. I tell people DAZED & CONFUSED is very faithful to my memory of the older kids, as is FREAKS & GEEKS, which is more specifically my demo. THAT '70S SHOW is not.
Yes. I graduated in 1987 but everything depicted in that movie was pretty universal probably up until the early 90's. People forget that there really wasn't a ton of change in the world in most of the last half of the 20th century. 3 TV channels and no cell phones or computers was the norm for a long time.
I should contact some of my former classmates. That was not the crowd I hung with. There were certain kids that looked very much like those in the movie. I was quite shy back then. I usually listened to records and played my guitar.
There were a lot of accurate issues portrayed in the film but one individual's experience can differ from others depending on where they grew up, whether they were in a poor neighborhood, affluent neighborhood, blue-collar or white-collar community, rural, urban or suburban, or many other factors too numerous to get into. If you want a fairly realistic depiction of growing up in 70s suburbia, I would recommend Over the Edge, which was made in the 70s so there is no romanticizing the past or historical revisionism.
As I said, some. While my larger, more suburban school didn't have any sort of hazing thing going on between upperclassmen and freshmen, I did meet kids in college who experienced that kind of thing in high school. It's telling that most of them came from much smaller, more rural Texas towns, so I'm guessing it was still a tradition holdover in those communities from earlier times.
I’m sure some areas of the US progressed at different speeds. In my area of South Florida, everything was like the mid-1970s until around 1981. A few miles South in Miami, things had already drastically changed. In my area, things became more like Fast Times At Ridgemont High in 1981.
True that! When I moved from NJ to Columbus, OH in 79, Columbus was about "5 years behind the times of NJ" (skateboarding caught up to Columbus about 5 years later and "in general" I think "trends" started on east and west coasts and slowly migrated inland. There are more than likely places that probably took longer (Im thinking states like Oklahoma, North Dakota, etc). Now with the internet, social media, and the ability to get pretty much whatever you want yesterday, the lag time is more than likely non-existant, or a few months max.
Yes. My high-school days were late 70s/early 80s with two siblings graduating in 1978 and one in 1980. Note perfect in terms of how the kids looked, acted, dressed and spoke. Music was dead-on, too, save I understand including Led Zep and Pink Floyd (omniscient at the time) songs in the soundtrack would have been cost prohibitive. You should understand about the movie, too, that's it's a very specific day and night in time: the last day of school before summer vacation, and the spontaneous beer bash that breaks out that night at the water tower after the aborted blow-out at a popular rich-kid stoner's house. I'd say the only debatable aspect is lack of Texas accents among the kids. At least some would have had them! Much like Roland Stone, Freaks and Geeks spoke directly to my era and was similarly on target. A shame it got axed before the kids had a few seasons to grow through their high-school years.
Having gone through high school at the same general time and place as Linklater did, I think his screenplay, while admirably faithful to much of what high school life was like in the mid 1970s, especially for White, middle class suburban kids in Texas, passed over (for the sake of a story that would resonate widely) many aspects of the local culture that made for interesting times in a rapidly changing part of what was then being referred to as "The New South." The boom in the petrochemical business sector during the 1970s brought tens of thousands of families to the Houston metro area from other parts of the U.S., including many from places markedly more socially progressive than those across the deep south. As the population exploded, new subdivisions, schools, shopping malls, etc. began springing up, seemingly overnight, where cattle ranches and quiet farming communities were the norm. The culture clash between the increasingly-in-the-minority rural farm kids and new (many of us "Yankee") suburban arrivals (think Skoal-dipping cowboys vs. pot-toking hippies) created a very unique dynamic within our high school culture. Add to that the presence of marginalized Black and Hispanic students just a few years into school desegregation (I recall a number of overtly racist teachers and school administrators), and you have a somewhat fuller picture of the kind of places Linklater probably drew inspiration from. While most of what I've briefly described certainly wasn't necessary for inclusion in Dazed - after all, it was intended to be a nostalgic American Graffiti-style look back at '70s high school life - it's good to remember that like most of our memories, the sweet ones tend to obscure the less savory. edit: Btw, any paddling at my high school was the exclusive realm of the vice-principal. Something I became all too familiar with for a time.
Last days of the high school year tended to be pretty wild, but if my memory still holds up, I recall similar events occurring several times a year during my junior and senior years!
