By Dan Brown

There’s a calendar from 1975 on my wall.

Each month has a Marvel superhero on it like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor and Captain America.

With this apparent antique pinned to the wall,, it’s easy for me to imagine I’ve travelled back in time to the era of Gerald Ford, Archie Bunker, bell-bottom jeans, and the fall of Saigon.

To be clear, the calendar I’m talking about is actually a re-issue of the Mighty Marvel Calendar from 1975.

As it turns out, some marketing genius figured out that 2025 and 1975 share the same calendar dates. I'm guessing the question then became, “Why not just put out the old one again?”

The resulting calendar is a slick piece of work, fashioned from sturdy cardstock and bound with a plastic spiral.

(Yes, I do have a calendar fetish, I always buy several different ones for home and office.)
I say it’s brilliant marketing because it represents a huge potential return on a minimal investment.

Marvel already owns all the art, plus the characters featured each month have only become more popular in the intervening decades. As well, 1970s nostalgia is all the rage these days.

Aided by the Mighty Marvel Calendar for 1975/2025, let’s imagine it is January 50 years ago, shall we?

So what was going on back then?

Here in the Forest City, Jane Bigelow was the first female mayor of London.

Our nation’s economy was reeling from an ongoing energy crisis.
Nicknamed “gas guzzlers,” cars were the size of boats. Compact, fuel-efficient vehicles looked to be a growth industry, yet these Japanese imports were still the subject of ridicule.

In the early months of 1975, there was talk of how the motion-picture adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-selling Jaws paperback had turned into a troubled production. Besides, who went to movies in the summer anyways?

Speaking of pulpy sensations, people could still not believe that a crime family had been portrayed on the silver screen as people with regular personalities in The Godfather and its 1974 sequel. It was almost like these movies were saying criminals have a lot in common with ordinary human beings, a shocking concept.

A string of dystopian sci-fi flicks mirrored the zeitgeist – when people in 1975 looked into the future, it wasn’t a pretty picture. The Star Trek animated Saturday-morning cartoon from the early 1970s hadn’t done much to spread Gene Roddenberry’s idea of a utopian future society.

On the radio in early 1975, you didn’t hear Elvis Presley much anymore. The airwaves belonged to acts like Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, the born-again Bob Dylan and an upstart by the name of Bruce Springsteen. Could he be the future of rock and roll?

As for comics, well, they were for kids – though creators like Will Eisner insisted comic books should be taken seriously as a form of literature, even with their cheap paper and splotchy colours.

About this time in January of 1975, DC jacked the price of individual comic books up to a quarter from 20 cents.

That summer, Marvel would offer a new team of Uncanny X-Men to readers, including a short Canadian mutant with metal for bones who had originally been the villain in a Hulk storyline.

In the letters columns of those bygone Marvel comics, readers made their desire known: Somehow, sometime, someway, Marvel heroes had to make the jump to the big screen.
Why, one correspondent even argued, Charlton Heston would make a perfect Magneto.
Do you miss the 1970s? Do you wish you had been alive back then? Let me know in the comment box below!

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.