Retro Spirits of ’76

They say stress will age a person fast. But for anyone who was in high school back in 1976, the sobering realization that the kids who play the teenagers on Fox’s new sitcom “That ‘70s Show” weren’t even born when the country celebrated its bicentennial will age you faster than a 1,000-point dip in the Dow.

As they read the scripts each week, these six young actors--the youngest of whom wasn’t born until 1983--gaze puzzled at many of the cultural references the show’s writing staff takes for granted. “What was ‘Police Woman’ or ‘The $20,000 Pyramid’?” they ask. “Was Nipsy Russell some football player or what?” “Why would we have President Gerald Ford falling down?” “What was Chico and who was the Man?”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m doing ‘Miss Jane Pittman,’ ” said Bonnie Turner, who, with husband Terry Turner and Mark Brazill, created and produces the series. “I feel awfully old. Way back in 1976, I tell them, people actually got their news from the paper.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of weird sometimes,” said Laura Prepon, who plays the show’s tomboy and wasn’t born until 1980. “We’re hanging out in the basement on the show watching TV, and we never know what we’re watching.”

For the most part, however, all six of the young stars declare that teenagers are teenagers, no matter the era, with the same urges, needs, conflicts with their parents and pangs of love. It’s not much of a stretch to depict the teenage melodramas they themselves staged for real in their own lives just a few months back.

What’s difficult is squeezing their lithe bodies into the way-too-tight bell-bottoms.

“They’re always asking, ‘How did you people even sit down in these things?’ ” Terry Turner said, chuckling.

Still, Mila Kunis, the show’s youngest member at 15, admitted that much of the fashion is hot again with kids today--just not quite as unforgivingly snug. “Bell-bottoms are happening now in the ‘90s,” she said. “It’s scary but, yeah, I would wear some of the stuff I see on the show. The ‘70s are big right now.”

“And we’re going to kill that fad,” interrupted Topher Grace, 20, who plays the high school junior at the center of the sitcom and who is dumbfounded that people willingly wore those polyester leisure suits and gigantic open collars. “That’s our promise to you. Even though my clothes aren’t too out there compared to some of the other guys, they aren’t any fun for me at all.”

Reliving the Tortuous Age of Blow Dryers

Nor are the boys’ long hair styles. Both Grace and co-star Ashton Kutcher, also 20, had fairly short hair when they won their roles last spring.

“They really don’t care for that--Topher particularly,” Terry Turner said. “He can’t get it to lay down properly. That was the age of blow dryers. I remember torturing myself with the blow dryer every morning. It takes a lot of maintenance. I don’t know what we were thinking.”

“Sometimes these kids just look at me like I’m from another planet with some of the goofy stuff we depict from that time,” co-creator and producer Brazill said of the series, which is based in large part on his own high school years growing up in a small New York town.

“The ‘70s Show” actors say the most pleasant surprise in immersing themselves in this odd world has been the music. Before the series, nearly all of them believed that the ‘70s meant one thing only: disco. And though Sunday’s show includes a trip to a disco and songs by the Bee Gees and ABBA, the majority of the music the series uses is 1970s rock--KISS, Bad Company, Todd Rundgren.

“I always thought it was all about disco, the whole decade,” said Danny Masterson, who at 22 is the oldest of the show’s six stars. “But I love the rock ‘n’ roll.”

Most of the actors say they didn’t do much research into the tenor of the times before going to work, other than watching some of the big movies--”Rocky,” “The Omen,” “Jaws” and “Carrie”--that were likely to have made an impact on teens of the day.

Kunis, who plays the richest and most spoiled of the kids on the show and thus wears some of the fanciest and more outrageous clothes and hairstyles, said she busied herself with reruns on Nick at Nite and lots of issues of old Cosmopolitans. And Kutcher forced himself to leaf through old yearbooks and sit through reels of TV commercials from what seemed to him that distant past.

“That was creepy,” he said. “Today everything is so slick and perfect-looking and filled with special effects, and back then TV was just so raw, almost primitive. It was almost scary. And it’s almost funny to sit there in a time when kids didn’t have video games or CD players. There was no call waiting, no beepers, no voicemail, all these things we take for granted. Back then, playing Pong was the most happening thing in the neighborhood.”

“You think of the ‘60s and ‘70s as this wild, anything-goes era, but in truth I’m finding out that it was a much more innocent time,” Masterson said. “We’ve done scenes where we sit around acting stupid after smoking pot, but I think teenagers today are forced to see life in a more ugly way. Crack cocaine hadn’t been invented yet, and a whole other level of violence has come around with drugs since then. You have shootings in school, AIDS. It’s a much rougher world now.”

Though the show premiered last August, it has been preempted in recent weeks because of Fox’s coverage of the baseball playoffs and World Series. But ratings for its early outings in the cushy time period between “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files” were decent enough for the network to order a full season of 22 episodes.

All of the actors, including Wilmer Valderrama, an 18-year-old senior at Taft High School in Woodland Hills who plays a foreign exchange student, gushed that reaction from adults who lived through the time has been incredibly enthusiastic.

“People come running up to me all the time saying, ‘Oh my God, I was you in 1976,’ ” Masterson said. “Or ‘That was my brother’ or ‘I knew a girl exactly like that,’ which is the best compliment and the most gratifying thing I could hear. It means it’s real for them. It’s not just a bunch of sitcom stuff.”

“The only drawback,” Kunis said, “is now my parents are willing to share incessantly what happened to them back in the ‘70s. They talk about how they did this and that, I’m suddenly someone who knows and experienced all the same things.”

* “That ‘70s Show” airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. on Fox.