1973 vs. 1962

I saw the movie in 1973, and 1962 was like thousands of light years away from '73. Things and styles changed rapidly in 10 years back then; today, there is not much difference at all. You could make a "nostalgia" movie in 2014 about 2003, and nothing would be changed, except that more people are holding cell phones everywhere they are.

The social differences in those 10 years were astounding. Even less than 10 years: the late 60s were NOTHING like the early 60s. And by 1973 there was nostalgia for just a few years ago. The rock group Sha Na Na cashed in on it too.

Get the facts first - you can distort them later!

I just honestly feel that if one compares even youth culture between 1962 and 1973 there were things 100% different alongside things 100% similar. Some teens in 1973 looked like hippies, others still had the clean cut look with checkered shirts on guys and on girls skirts even though often they were miniskirts (though there were the longer ones, too). There was hard or psychedelic rock in 1973 but there were still artists like Bloodstone and Johnny Rivers for instance (I'm a hit vinyl record collector). My point is that the late 1960s to early 1980s was as mixed bag a time as a cultural period can get. My brother in law grew up in Los Angeles County near Pasadena in the 70s and early 80s and he said to me the 50s culture was absolutely still a part of things. At 6 years old in 1973 and 1974 if he walked 3 miles away from home by himself and made new friends along the way it was no deal at all, that's how much safer the world was then. At 16 in 1983 he had to work very hard to earn his first car, every young guy did so when they got it they were so proud of it and fixed it up really nicely and cruised the streets listening to music, meeting up with friends, and looking for and meeting girls. Sorry to burst your bubble but even then the American Graffitti culture was by no means dead. My uncle reminisced to me recently about 1967 just 6 years before this movie came out telling me what a fantastic time to be alive it was, when every restaurant had jukeboxes some tabletop, some large, and he would hear the current hit Tell It Like It Is by Aaron Neville playing constantly, and how he and his friends and classmates would have dance parties including dance contests in home basements. So this movie did come about surprisingly very early. That said, what separated the late 60s and 70s from just before that included the escalation and seeming endlessness of the Vietnam War, the presence of hippies and drugs, hippie influence on varying degrees of culture and people, some far more than others who were untouched by it. Perhaps this movie was meant to capture that aspect of culture and glorify it in the face of daily turbulent news issues, psychedelia, women's lib, the first albeit relatively small gasps of gay rights riots and protests, hippies in communes, anarchistic yippies, Harry Krishna followers, funk, Afro hair, bell bottoms, lava lamps, and the draft with news of soldiers dying. It was a mix of the old and drastically different new. But 1965 was to put it bluntly culturally still the '50s, so a bit later, something had to stay, you know?

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I see you were born in 1977 as I just read your other post, and in many ways you could relate to this movie still at age 13. As a poster on a different thread pointed out, part of this movie's commercial success lie in the fact that it appealed both to kids and their parents in 1973. It showed a side of culture still absolutely relevant and relateable to youth even though it had been there since the '50s when their parents had been that same age. At the same time, the heavy presence of the very liberated, hippie-influenced side of the 1973 spectrum allowed people to view those things with a certain lens of appreciation or affection. In addition, the chosen year of 1962 probably had a lot to do with It being George Lucas' graduation year, as it was kind of a self-documentary of himself and his friends and their being tossed into an uncertain future, kind of an allegory. Still this movie gets better with time. And from a technical standpoint it was so ahead of its time.