There are certain faces that are so linked to a specific period in time that when that period ends they basically go extinct. I’m not sure if it’s because the faces become so common during that time that people get sick of them and push them to the margins or the facial genes just don’t get passed on, but once their era has passed spotting them onscreen or in the wild is like catching the Loch Ness monster making out with a Frankenstein. The other night I saw a woman with normal hair dressed totally in contemporary clothes, but her face was one of those ultra-chiseled Katherine Hepburn sort of numbers where the chin juts out like a cattle catcher. It looked like she was a time traveler trying to disguise herself.

Here are a few of our favorite era-specific facades that have gone the way of the dinosaur. Just to be clear, hair and general style are not a factor in these choices, it is all purely based on the shape and arrangement of the bones and muscles in the face and how they draw out the surrounding skin. For instance, someone might peg Sonny Bono as a fairly 70s-looking sort of guy, but once you lop off his hair and mustache he would fit right in anytime from the 20s to roughly three days ago. His weird slightly retarded-looking doppelganger who plays the dad in Valley Girl is totally different story.

80s Michael Landon
This face was super-common on paternal tough guys with a gentle edge in the mid 80s (Michael Bolton sported it too), but disappeared when sensitivity broke off from male toughness at the end of the decade (as symbolically depicted by 90210 in the dichotomous relationship between Luke Perry and Jason Priestly). Mel Gibson has a vestigial Landon face, the characteristic broadness and rocky channeling effect are still there but you can observe it softening with time.

Moms that look like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie
This used to be a huge subset of moms in the mid to late 80s, but was slowly edged out by a softer, less hawklike nose and cheekbones combined with a hippier figure and generally short hair (like the mom in My So Called Life) in the early 90s before both were completely subsumed in the Milfification of America.

John Denver
John took his slightly too-tanned Japanese frog vibe along to his watery grave. True story: When I first saw him on the Muppet Show I thought he was just a really fucked-up monster puppet.

Sissy Spacek
Every so often you see this face crop up on a new person, but there’s always something slightly off about it. The skin is either not freckly or not washed-out enough, the eye sockets don’t have that dopey 70s shallowness to them, the nose doesn’t look like the nose on a cartoon skull—I know all these things sound like pluses for us, but Sissy represents a brief moment when America woke up acknowledged that girls with weird, ugly attributes are in fact really hot, and it’s sad to think that time will never come again.

Richard Pryor
This one’s not only limited to a specific era, but I’m pretty sure just a single person. Looking at his face dead-on it’s kind of hard to tell what makes it so distinct to the last dying gasps of soul as hip-hop slowly raised its day-glo head, but when you put him in profile you realize the entire bottom half of his face is set forward a couple inches so that it looks like he’s being hit in the forehead with an extremely sharp breeze. The mustache and long black-guy hair help draw this out.

Annette Funicello
I can see this one being the starting block for your average Italianate aunt, but there’s a squnched quality to the eyes and nose areas that only occurred during the transition from  the teenybopper era to the more drawn-out horselike late 60s. More often than not, if you snoop around their bedroom for old pictures, this is how the Tootsie moms started out.

The male counselor from Sleepaway Camp
His face slightly fits into the Michael Landon mold, but stonier and more Italian. What’s interesting is if you go back to the cast of  Welcome Back Kotter you can see a Darwinian battle playing out between the faces of Epstein, Horseshack, and John Travolta as Vinny Barbarino. Obviously Travolta’s doe-eyed pretty-but-dumb fa√ßade won out over the rest (and was sealed in victory by the rise of teenage Matt Dillon), but it’s been debated which loser received the worst fate: The Epstein, which dwindled into tough-guy character actors like the counselor above and some younger garbage men; or the Horseshack, which somehow transferred over into Tootsie moms.

Wendy O. Williams
Man, where did all these girls go? I had a lesbian gym teacher in grade school who had the exact same busted visage, but if you go to a dyke bar these days it’s all fatties and lipstick types. I have a theory that after the Plasmatics and Rollerderby generated a greater acceptance for tough punkish girls who looked as scary as their male counterparts, life became too easy for this type of girl and they softened into more of a Kim Kelly from Freaks and Geeks sort of vibe.

That guy who moves to Australia in the 7UP movies when he’s 21.
Same as Sleepaway Camp guy’s, but squnchier.

All the girls in the Manson Family
There’s a weird kind of premature aging going on where they look like someone has photoshopped the oldest woman in the world onto the face of a ten-year-old with FAS. Also, if you arrange them in order of who was the worse killer they get progressively more 60s-ish, where Ousich resembles about a million girls I’ve known and Susan Atkins looks like a face someone on acid saw after staring at a tree stump for too long.

ANNE RAMSEY