Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Memory Bank: The Bigfoot Craze of the 1970s


Growing up in the 1970s was an amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. 

It was especially amazing in terms of the blatant weirdness of some of the pop culture trends.  After all, the disco decade was the era of killer bees, the Bermuda Triangle, and perhaps most memorably, The Bigfoot Craze.

Bigfoot, of course, is a giant ape-like creature believed to inhabit the Pacific-Northwest, and known by the name “Sasquatch” in Native-American lore.  

Today, we are no closer to proving Bigfoot’s existence than we were forty years ago, but the myth of the peaceful, giant creature widely persists.

The Bigfoot Craze spanned the decade of the 1970s, and ultimately infiltrated every aspect of the popular culture from film to television, to children’s television, even to toys.

The 1970s may have been the heyday of the Big Foot Craze in part because of the famous -- or perhaps notorious -- Patterson-Gilmin film of 1967, which purported to capture real raw footage of the hairy beast.

By the early seventies, filmmakers had taken full advantage of speculation about the rarely-spotted “creature” in films such as the popular The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), which is actually one of the few drive-in movie experiences I remember from my childhood.  I vividly recall sitting up in the back-seat of our family’s green, 1969 Plymouth Barracuda when I was supposed to be asleep, and watching the “monster” attack a person who was seated on a toilet.

That film featured not Big Foot, per se, but the Fouke Monster (or rather “Southern Sasquatch") of Arkansas.  Directed by Charles B. Pierce, The Legend of Boggy Creek was an early pseudo-documentary that “re-staged” the reported monster attacks, and became a smash sensation at the box office, grossing over twenty million dollars on a budget of less than two-hundred thousand dollars. It was followed up over the years by several sequels, including Return to Boggy Creek (1977), and Boggy Creek 2 (1985).

After that, the Bigfoot floodgates were open. 

The years 1976 and 1977 brought to cinemas such similarly-named films such as Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1977) directed by Ed Ragozzino, and The Legend of Big Foot (1976) directed by Harry Winer. 

Both efforts featured a kind of grainy, semi-documentary vibe, much like their Boggy Creek predecessors. I have vivid memories of seeing previews on television for Sasquatch in 1978 and being absolutely scared out of my wits. It's not in the trailer I've post below, but I remember a sequence where Bigfoot bursts into a log cabin in the woods, swinging open the door...

The year 1976 also brought one of the decade’s most popular iterations of the Bigfoot story.  The seventeenth episode of The Six Million Dollar Man (1974 – 1978) was titled “The Secret of Bigfoot” and it featured bionic Steve Austin (Lee Majors) battling a robotic Sasquatch (Ted Cassidy) from outer space.  The Bigfoot character proved so popular that he re-appeared on several follow-up episodes of both The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman

Before long, the Bionic Sasquatch was also a hot toy from Kenner.

In 1976, Sid and Marty Krofft included a segment called Bigfoot and Wildboy in their ABC Saturday morning TV series The Krofft Supershow.  It graduated to its own time slot in 1979, and starred Ray Young as Bigfoot and Joseph Butcher as Wildboy.  The episodes pitted the shaggy Bigfoot against vampires, aliens, and even a sinister duplicate of himself

In April of 1977 In Search of (1976 – 1982) devoted its fifth episode to the hunt for Bigfoot, with host Leonard Nimoy recounting astounding and frightening tales of “real life” creature sightings.

Finally, I’ve always wondered if the friendly bear/ape/giant Chewbacca in Star Wars (1977) was, in some small sense, George Lucas’s acknowledgment of the Bigfoot craze that had swept the nation.

So, what was the appeal of Bigfoot, and why did this creature of folklore prove so immensely popular in the 1970s? 

I suspect the beast’s popularity in the disco decade had something to do with the desire to discover something new and different.   Although I love the 1970s, it was a weird and disturbing decade in many ways.  The Hippie movement had turned sour, thanks to the Manson “Family,” America was still embroiled in Vietnam, and trust in government fell to an all-time low thanks to President Nixon and the Watergate Scandal. 

At the same time, we had an Energy Crisis and looming fears about nuclear meltdowns (like Three Mile Island in 1978).  In short, the world just seemed a terrible mess in those days, and so to imagine something new and different roaming the wild forests was, in short, an appealing fantasy.  Bigfoot was a creature untouched by man and therefore corruption.  If he existed, then, indeed, magic and innocence could still exist too.

Below, I offer a number of videos (including the entire In Search Of segment) which document the Great Bigfoot Craze of the 1970s, a strange but entirely awesome spell in American pop culture.














16 comments:

  1. Here in Maryland, we had a creature known as The Sykesville Monster that captured the imagination of us kids in the early 70s. There are still the occasional reports of sightings. Legend of Boggy Creek was pretty mind-blowing for me at the time. That quasi-documentary style, as you put it, played with my head. I knew it was staged, but it looked real at the same time. I really wanted it to be real, but it was frustratingly fake. Therefore, I loved it and hated it. I left the theater completely conflicted.

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    1. Hi Neal,

      I didn't know about the Sykesville Monster, but there is a creature in nearby South Carolina here, called The Pageland Critter. I am planning, someday, to investigate it (perhaps in a mockumentary...).

      I agree with you about Boggy Creek. It's infuriating and fascinating at the same time. You want to believe, but you can't quite believe...

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  2. Anonymous1:26 PM

    John, like you, my boyhood was in the ’70s and I agree that “Growing up in the 1970s was an amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. ” I extremely enjoyed your analysis of the Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti/Abominable Snowman craze of the ‘70s, it was fun. As children we got to enjoy the ‘70s without the negatives of the adult world happening all around us. In the ‘70s it was the mystery of Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Bermuda Triangle and UFOs. I was a fan of both the In Search Of series and the Six Million Dollar Man series. In the ‘70s, I lost count of how many times my friends and I ran in slow motion or made sound effects noises for bionics bending things.

    SGB

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    1. SGB:

      I agree. My friends and I were always playing Six Million Dollar Man, and battling Bigfoot and/or fembots, and sometimes the Death Probe. Great times.

      In fact, I have a photo I'll post for Halloween with me dressed up as The Six Million Dollar Man in 1976...

      The 70s were an awesome time to be a kid.

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  3. A favorite Bigfoot tangent-An "expert" comes on a show, claims that the walk of the creature in the Patterson/Gimlin film is "totally impossible" for a human to replicate. They then prove this by performing the "totally impossible walk!" Then go "See, a human being can't do that."

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    1. David,

      That is hysterical, and emblematic, I fear, of the hucksterism surrounding the Bigfoot lore. It's a shame that people try to exploit other people's desire to believe in something...but it sure happens a lot...

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  4. The legend was revisited in a fashion during the 4th or 5th season of the wonderfully funny Canadian TV series "Trailer Park Boys", a neat nod to the 70s.

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    1. Tonyt2000,

      I will have to look for that series. I know absolutely nothing about it, but it sounds very interesting...

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  5. 'In Search of'....Now that is a blast from the past and one of my fave shows of the 70's. I even enjoyed the Mitch Pileggi show that also did a show on Bigfoot.

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    1. Hi Trent,

      I loved In Search of. The voice of reason and logic -- Leonard Nimoy -- gave the series an absolute sense of sincerity and authenticity, even if there was a LOT of sensational material involved. I would love to see the whole series on DVD.

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    2. JKM:

      It's funny that you should mention IN SEARCH OF... being on DVD:

      2012:

      In some other news today, we mentioned that our contacts at Visual Entertainment Inc. (VEI) of Toronto were back in the office now, following "some recent travel to sign a couple of deals for other upcoming home video titles." One of these is for USA and Canadian DVD sets of the legendary '70s show starring Leonard Nimoy, In Search Of..., which he took up following his roles on the original Star Trek as "Spock," his addition to Mission: Impossible as "Paris," and his return to playing "Spock" on Star Trek: The Animated Series. Nimoy narrated the program through 146 episodes which examined the scientific, the supernatural, the historical, and the mythical. Topics included "Ancient Aviators," "The Bermuda Triangle," "Bigfoot," "Killer Bees," "Martians," "Nazi Plunder," "Amelia Earhart," "Dracula," "UFOs," "Inca Treasures" and "The Magic of Stonehenge"...and those are just examples from the first season out of six!

      VEI informed me today that they have licensed the North American rights to the complete series of the program, with the only issue being that a pair of episodes have not been fully cleared from a legal standpoint for home video release. One of these episodes is "In Search of... Lee Harvey Oswald," concerning the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy: the famous Zapruder film of the actual shooting would require separate clearance, which VEI is going to look into but - as the deal for the show itself has just been completed! - cannot guarantee yet that they'll be able to affordably do. Time will tell. VEI hopes to have the title out before this year is over, but it's too early to set a solid timeline on it, of course. Even if we have to wait until next year, it's GREAT to know that this highly-wanted program is finally on its way to home video. Want to get even MORE excited about this item? VEI is in talks with Leonard Nimoy to participate in bonus material for the DVDs, which hopefully would include "recent updates" to the topics of each installment, considering that knowledge would have grown in the past 4 decades for much of this. We're VERY excited over here, and we know you are, too! It may be quite a while before we have any, but stay tuned for updates as further developments occur.


      And...

      Six months ago we had the exclusive news that VEI is preparing a long-awaited DVD release for In Search of..., the 1976 series hosted by Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible). Now a pre-order listing at Amazon.ca, the Canadian branch of the e-tailer, informs us that this item will be available starting on October 23rd, for CA$134.99 SRP. Special material included with this release will be a Documentary hosted by Leonard Nimoy! Package art isn't finalized yet, but stay tuned and we'll bring that to you as soon as we can!

      Taken from: http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Search-DVDs-Announced/17414#ixzz25WXIuju2

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  6. I actually just missed this craze, and I'm sorry I didn't watch _Bigfoot & Wildboy_ as a child, as it seems right up my alley. Didn't Andre the Giant also play Bigfoot on the Bionic series?

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  7. If Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things was the most-shown flick on The Ghoul here in Cleveland, then The Legend of Boggy Creek was (a distant) second.

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  8. Hugh,

    I'd love to get my hands on Bigfoot and Wildboy so I could blog it on Saturday mornings. I remember watching the series, but not many specific memories. The best I can tell, Ted Cassidy ALWAYS played Bigfoot on the Bionic programs, and the Andre the Giant credit is absolutely wrong and apocryphal...

    Randal Graves: I think I'd probably take The Legend of Boggy Creek over Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things... :)

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  9. Anonymous8:56 PM

    Hi John,
    I enjoyed your overview of the Bigfoot stories of the 70s. However, I do want to correct you on Ted Cassidy and Andre the Giant playing Bigfoot on The Six Million Dollar Man. I am a huge fan of this show, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, that Andre the Giant played Bigfoot first, on the two part episode, "The Secret of Bigfoot." Ted Cassidy played the part after Andre, on the episodes, "The Return of Bigfoot," and Bigfoot V." I noticed in your book about Superheroes that you only mentioned Ted Cassidy too.
    As a matter of fact, the video clip you have to the scene of Steve Vs. Bigfoot, says Andre the Giant in the heading!
    If you ever review The Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Collection, from Time Life, you will see there is even a segment about Andre The Giant, playing the hairy beast!
    -Thanks,
    Keith

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