In 1929, "Tip-Toe Through the Tulips with Me" topped the charts, The Broadway Melody packed theaters, a stamp cost 2¢, the average home went for about $7,700.
🎵 Top songs of 1929
"Tip-Toe Through the Tulips with Me" — Nick Lucas
"Singin' in the Rain" — Cliff Edwards
"Ain't Misbehavin'" — Fats Waller
🎬 In theaters
The Broadway Melody
Gold Diggers of Broadway
Sunny Side Up
What things cost in 1929
$0.21
Gallon of gas
2¢
Postage stamp
$0.35
Movie ticket
$0.58
Gallon of milk
$7,700
Average home
$525
New car
$1,475
Household income
A $0.21 gallon of gas in 1929 has the buying power of roughly $4.10 today. A 2¢ stamp is about 39¢, and a 35¢ movie ticket about $6.85.
The biggest moments of 1929
The first Academy Awards were handed out in May 1929 at a Hollywood banquet that lasted about 15 minutes.
Popeye the Sailor made his first appearance in the Thimble Theatre comic strip in January.
The German airship Graf Zeppelin circled the globe in August, thrilling newspaper readers everywhere.
The Museum of Modern Art opened in Manhattan on November 7, 1929, just days after the stock market crash.
Commander Richard Byrd and his crew made the first flight over the South Pole in November 1929.
New York watched a skyscraper duel as the Chrysler Building secretly assembled a spire inside its crown to steal the height record from 40 Wall Street.
Toys, TV & trends of 1929
Amos 'n' Andy went nationwide on NBC radio, and millions arranged their evenings around the broadcast.
The futuristic Buck Rogers comic strip launched in January, sparking America's love affair with science fiction.
A new lemon-lime soda later known as 7-Up went on sale just weeks before the stock market crash.
Variety's crash headline "Wall Street Lays an Egg" instantly entered the national vocabulary.
Toy salesman Edwin Lowe discovered a carnival game called "beano" in 1929 — he would soon rechristen it Bingo.
Tom Thumb miniature golf courses were popping up on rooftops and vacant lots as a putting craze took hold.
The music scene
Radio minted its first singing heartthrob in 1929 when Rudy Vallée, megaphone in hand, began hosting the Fleischmann Hour — the variety-show format the whole industry would copy. On New Year's Eve, Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians broadcast from New York's Roosevelt Hotel, beginning the "Auld Lang Syne" midnight tradition that lasted half a century. Record sales rode high all year, blissfully unaware of the hard times about to hit the industry.
At the movies
At that first Academy Awards banquet, the suspense was minimal — winners had been announced three months earlier — and Janet Gaynor took the first Best Actress prize for three films combined. With sound conquering all, studios flooded theaters with "all talking! all singing! all dancing!" musicals. The Marx Brothers arrived from Broadway in The Cocoanuts, filmed by day in New York while they performed a different show onstage each night.
Cartoons kids loved
Disney's The Skeleton Dance launched the Silly Symphonies series
Mickey Mouse spoke his first words in The Karnival Kid
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts
The Skeleton Dance flipped the cartoon formula: instead of pasting sound onto finished gags, Disney built the entire film around Edvard Grieg-inspired music, letting the animation dance to the score. Rival studios raced to add sound, and within two years the silent cartoon — king for two decades — was effectively extinct.
The world in 1929
World population: about 2 billion
U.S. President: Herbert Hoover (inaugurated March 1929)
The stock market crashed in October 1929, marking the end of the Roaring Twenties and the start of the Great Depression.
The Lateran Treaty of February 1929 created Vatican City as an independent state, ending decades of dispute between Italy and the papacy.
A young Belgian cartoonist named Hergé introduced boy reporter Tintin in a children's newspaper supplement in January 1929.
The first Monaco Grand Prix sent race cars roaring through the streets of Monte Carlo in April 1929.
1929 birthday questions
How old is someone born in 1929?
Someone born in 1929 turns 97 in 2026 (96 if their birthday has not come round yet).
What was the number one song in 1929?
"Tip-Toe Through the Tulips with Me" by Nick Lucas was among the biggest hits of 1929.
What movie came out in 1929?
The Broadway Melody was one of the films packing theaters in 1929.
How much did gas cost in 1929?
A gallon of gas ran about $0.21 in 1929, and a postage stamp cost 2¢.
How much did a house cost in 1929?
The average home went for roughly $7,700 in 1929, against a typical household income of about $1,475.