A boxing belt sold for $6.18 million. Not a car, not a house. A belt. The WBC awarded it to Muhammad Ali for beating George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle and handed it over two years later, in 1976. It is one of only two WBC belts like it known to exist. That is the kind of money the 1970s can pull today.
Andy Warhol’s 1973 painting of Mao Zedong went for $3.65 million at Heritage in December 2024. Grand View Research puts the global collectibles market at about $320 billion in 2025, and a big chunk of that cash is chasing stuff that used to be completely ordinary.
Most of us do not own a Warhol. But plenty of people are sitting on a small fortune and have no idea, boxed up in a garage or shoved under a bed. The 1970s sit in a sweet spot: old enough to be genuinely rare, recent enough that the kids who grew up with the stuff now have money to chase it. Here are the things from that decade that collectors will scrap over now.
Those Weird Old Sneakers
A pair of Nike sneakers sold for $437,500 at Sotheby’s in 2019. They are called the Moon Shoes, and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman built them by hand for runners at the 1972 Olympic Trials. The soles have a strange waffle pattern, because Bowerman was chasing a grippier, tougher running shoe. They look nothing like the sneakers on store shelves today.
The price makes sense once you hear the number that matters. Only about 12 pairs were ever made. Twelve. When something is that rare and it carries the name of the man who helped build one of the biggest sneaker brands on the planet, collectors lose their minds.
Most old sneakers are just old sneakers. These are the exception, and they show how a single name and a tiny production run can be worth a fortune decades later.
The Star Wars Toy That Never Made It to Stores
Kenner designed a Boba Fett action figure with a spring-loaded rocket that actually fired out of his backpack. Then Mattel’s missile-firing Battlestar Galactica toys were flagged as a choking risk, and Kenner killed its own rocket in early 1979, before the toy reached mass production. Only a handful of prototypes survived. One of them sold for $1.34 million at Goldin in 2024.
You did not need a rare prototype to cash in. A sealed 1979 Boba Fett, still on its original card, sold for $84,375 at Heritage in 2024. Cut it off the card and the same figure is a couple of hundred dollars on a good day. Read that again. The cardboard and the plastic bubble it came in are worth hundreds of times the toy inside.
Collectors treat the original Kenner run, 1978 to 1985, as one of the hottest corners of the whole toy world, and sealed versus opened can swing the value by hundreds of percent. Even the plain early figures still move. If your mom tossed those guys in the trash years ago, this stings a little.
A Bottle of Wine Forgotten in a Basement
Mark Paulson bought a 3-liter Jeroboam bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche in the 1970s. He paid $250 for it. Then he set it in his basement and never found the right night to pop it open. It sat there for decades.
Wine like that does not just get older. It gets rarer, because other people drink theirs. After Paulson heard that a similar bottle had sold for $81,250 in 2022, he decided to auction his. It went for $106,250 at Bonhams Skinner in April 2023.
Think about that math. A $250 purchase turned into six figures because a guy could not decide it was a special enough occasion. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do with a collectible is nothing at all.
An Old Apple Computer Priced at $666.66
The Apple-1 was the very first computer the company ever sold. Steve Wozniak designed it in 1975 so he could play games and get onto the ARPANET, the network the internet grew out of, then he and Steve Jobs turned it into a product. It shipped in 1976 as a bare circuit board. You had to give it a home yourself, plug in your own keyboard, and hook it to a television. The price tag was an odd $666.66.
Roughly 200 were built and, by Wozniak’s own count, 175 assembled and sold. One went on eBay for about $340,000 in 2022. Another brought $905,000 at Bonhams in 2014, bought by the Henry Ford Museum.
Apple gear holds this pull like almost no other brand. Even a first-generation iPhone, still sealed in its box, sold for about $190,000 in 2023. The lesson keeps repeating itself: hang onto the box, hang onto the receipt, and do not open the thing.
The Regular Stuff Gathering Dust in Your Attic
Not everything from the ’70s is a million-dollar unicorn. A lot of it is the plain furniture of everyday American life, and it still sells for real money.
Start with Pyrex. Four mixing bowls in the Cinderella shape, the ones with the flared pouring rim, list around $125, and a matched run of the dotted 400-series bowls is asked at close to $500. Corning sold those dots one bowl at a time, so a full set is somebody’s patient work. Your grandmother’s casserole bowls might be worth more than your microwave. Lava lamps from Lava Lite are listed anywhere from $75 to $375, with the rare colors and odd base shapes at the top of that range.
The first Sony Walkman went on sale in Japan in July 1979 and reached America the next summer, badged the Soundabout. It changed how people carried their music around. A clean working TPS-L2 took $491 at RR Auction in March 2024. The Polaroid SX-70, the fold-flat instant camera that hit stores in 1972, still pulls a couple hundred dollars from film fans who love the look of a real Polaroid photo.
Old electronics from that decade are having a moment too. Atari did not get there first, the Magnavox Odyssey did in 1972, but the VCS is the console that made home video games a habit. It arrived in 1977, was renamed the Atari 2600 in 1982, and a well-preserved one gets listed for well over $600. Even typewriters cash in. A serviced Smith-Corona Galaxie 12 from 1976 has drawn a $400 asking price from people who still like the clack of real keys.
Toys are where it gets fun. Simon, the light-up memory game from 1978, lists at $30 or $40 loose. Still sealed in the box? Over $100. Stretch Armstrong, the rubbery muscle man from 1976, sells for $700 to $900 boxed with his instructions, and the four-figure asks you see online are usually for factory molds rather than the toy. Talking Busy Barbie, the 1972 doll whose hands could actually grip her tiny phone, took $210 at auction in 2017 even with the talking part long dead. A Charlie’s Angels lunch box, Aladdin’s metal one from 1978, gets listed around $170, and the scarcer character boxes from the decade run into the hundreds.
Then there are baseball cards. If you saved a shoebox of them, dig it out tonight. A 1971 Topps Johnny Bench graded PSA 9, one of eight and none higher, sold for $42,000 at Heritage in 2022. The catch with that one is the black borders, which chip if you so much as breathe on them, so only near-flawless copies bring the top dollar.
The Records, Comics and Watches Worth a Second Look
Vinyl and comics from the decade can carry serious tags. A copy of David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs carrying the withdrawn sleeve sold for $16,250 at Heritage in 2022. RCA shipped Guy Peellaert’s gatefold, then pulled it and airbrushed the dog’s genitals out, so the money is in the copies that escaped the recall rather than in first pressings generally. Batman #227 from 1970, with Neal Adams’ cover homage to Detective Comics #31 from 1939, has sold for $19,200 in CGC 9.8, and a pedigreed copy at that same grade went far higher.
Watches belong here too. A 1979 Rolex Sea-Dweller nicknamed the Great White, for the all-white dial text that replaced the earlier red, sold for $23,750 at Heritage in 2018.
Even old paper has value. A 1970 Frank Zappa concert poster showing him posed as the Mona Lisa sold for $10,313 at Heritage, back when a poster stapled to a pole was how you found out about a show. And a sealed 1970 Donruss Odder Odd Rods wax box, packed with 24 packs of goofy hot-rod trading cards, sold for $7,200.
The pattern behind all of it is boring but true. Condition and the original packaging matter more than the item itself. That loose Boba Fett is pocket money. The sealed one is a down payment on a car. Before you drag the old boxes to the curb, take one more look at what is inside.
