SMELLS LIKE GEN X BLOG
Explore the written archive for 70s nostalgia, 80s nostalgia, and 90s nostalgia across music, movies, TV shows, toys, commercials, trends, and the weird pop-culture debris that never fully left your brain.
Use this page as the main written gateway into Smells Like Gen X: start with a decade hub, follow a topic lane, search the archive, or jump straight into the latest post.
Looking for a specific year, song list, movie countdown, TV ranking, or toy post? Search the archive directly instead of scrolling the whole feed.
The blog works best when you use the decade hubs as your map. Start with the 70s, jump into the flagship 80s hub, or head into the expanding 90s archive.
Start here for 70s songs, movies, TV, toys, and the slower, stranger, more analog version of Gen X memory.
Big hooks, bigger movies, iconic toy aisles, prime-time TV, mall culture, and the deepest nostalgia hub on the site.
Alt-rock, sitcom empires, CDs, snack-branding overload, holiday toy panic, and the polished late-era Gen X archive.
These topic lanes route into the main category hubs, so visitors can browse the archive by what they actually care about.
Start here for year-end countdowns, chart rewinds, radio nostalgia, and the songs that permanently colonized your brain.
Dive into year-by-year movie countdowns, box office rewinds, poster-wall nostalgia, and video-store-era comfort watches.
Network giants, sitcom empires, Nielsen-era countdowns, forgotten shows, and the TV memories that still feel weirdly personal.
Holiday toy panic, weird products, year-by-year toy posts, and the kind of childhood plastic that still lives in your head rent-free.
These are the strongest written entry points into the current Smells Like Gen X archive.
The strongest decade page on the site right now, with clear paths into songs, movies, TV, toys, and broader 80s nostalgia.
One of the best category hubs on the site, with dynamic year browsing for top songs of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Peak late-90s network power, Seinfeld fallout, ER dominance, and one of the strongest single-year TV entry points.
Fresh nostalgia, deep cuts, countdowns, and beautifully unnecessary rewinds across the Gen X archive.
The top toys of 1972 feel like the 70s toy box discovering a new trick: not just physical play, but social play. This is the year a card game can sit at the top without the decade losing its analog soul.
Read more →The top toys of 1971 feel like 1970 with a little more wobble, color, and activity-set chaos. The toy box is still deeply analog, but the year starts leaning harder into preschool personality toys, visual creativity, and expand-your-world play patterns.
Read more →The top toys of 1970 feel like the toy box right before the 70s fully mutated into stretch monsters, electronic beeps, and licensed plastic chaos. This was still a hands-on, build-it, throw-it, roll-it era — and the year’s biggest toys tell that story perfectly.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1979 show late-70s television at full network-pop power: ABC floods the board with sitcoms and spin-offs, CBS keeps prestige and staying power in the mix, and prime time starts looking less like a lineup and more like a factory-built entertainment system.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1978 show late-70s television locking into full prime-time machine mode: ABC owns the flash, CBS still has the deeper bench, and the year’s biggest hits reveal a medium shifting from argument to entertainment product.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1977 show ABC taking over prime time with broad sitcoms, glossy action, and network movie events, while older 70s giants fought to hold their ground in a much flashier TV landscape.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1976 capture a major turning point in prime time, where social sitcoms still ruled, ABC surged with glossy action hits, and event television plus prestige miniseries pushed the decade in a bigger, flashier direction.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1975 show the mid-70s TV machine in full swing, with CBS dominating prime time through sharper sitcoms, ensemble comedy, family drama, and urban TV that finally looked like the decade it was living in.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1974 show the 70s fully in control: sharper sitcoms, prestige ensemble comedy, big family drama, slick crime series, and a CBS lineup that practically owned prime time.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1973 prove the 70s TV revolution was fully underway, with socially sharper sitcoms, urban crime drama, event programming, and a much more modern prime-time lineup than just a few years earlier.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1972 are where the decade really starts looking like itself — sharper, louder, more urban, and a lot less interested in pretending the old TV order still ran the whole room.
Read more →The top TV shows of 1971 reveal a prime-time lineup getting more recognizably 70s — with medical dramas, cop shows, star variety, and network movie events taking over the dial.
Read more →DON’T MISS THE REWIND
Countdowns, forgotten media, weird rabbit holes, and peak Gen X nostalgia across every category.