Those films may have aired on local TV stations, and I recall specific scenes from those films, but for the most part the cultural landscape I inhabited didn't often include Blaxploitation films.Pahonu wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 6:08 pm I guess it has to do with who we hang around with. One of my best friends in elementary and middle school was black and I remember being at his house his father watching some of them at the time. So I was aware of them in the 70’s and early 80’s. I kind of forgot about them in high school but in college, a different friend and I started to talk about them randomly one time and he was surprised I knew of many. I’ve probably seen at least 30 films of the genre and have a couple in my DVR right now.
A more recent film I would highly recommend is called Baadasssss! and it stars Mario Van Peebles playing his father Melvin. It’s about his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which started the genre.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baadasssss!
I also recommend Across 110th Street, which almost no one seems to remembers.
I was bused (bussed?) to a predominantly Black middle school, and even those kids had no clue as to Blaxploitation's existence. In fact, if something didn't happen within a week's time, they didn't want to know about it! I still wince (and then chuckle) at how some Black kids had zero interest in old music or movies and only cared about the very latest anything. It was a bizarre phenomenon that later gave way to the now oft-used term "old school whatever (fill in the blank)."
To give you an idea of how ancient the early '70s felt to a kid like me growing up in Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" era, an episode of The Brady Bunch seemed just as "long ago and far away" as an episode of Leave it to Beaver. The early '70s were such a crazy, trasitional period that vanished around 1975. Everything that came after it was like a totally different world. However, those shows and films aired all the time on TV, so I was just as familiar with those as I was with anything contemporary.
I'm interested in whatever it is I obsess over at any given time. I've seen the lights go out in the eyes of people to whom I've spoken over they years because they didn't share my "boring" interests.
