Does Anyone Miss The 80s? - Not The Terrible Reboot 80s But The Real One

[Maurice Caine]

I was born in the 80s but too late to remember them, however I've always had a fascination with the decade's culture my whole life, I grew up watching so many 80s movies and listening to 80s music that I honestly feel to some degree I did have as much an 80s childhood as a 90s childhood.

There really is something incredibly special about 80s movies, it was without a doubt the best decade for blockbuster filmmaking, a movie like Ghostbusters is just so much more creative than any movie being made today, it's kind of unreal how on fire filmmaking was back then, there really is a special magic to an "80s movie"

It was such a great decade for movies that even it's flops are better than anything today, like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, it's no wonder people have been obsessed with 80s movies for decades.

However the 80s wasn't perfect, it was the best decade for live action movies, it was a good decade for music, it was even a good decade for books, but it wasn't a great decade for animation in the US nor was it a great decade for TV, think cheesy (if fun) stuff like the A-Team, the Dukes of Hazzard, they might have been entertaining but we're hardly talking The Sopranos here.

And animation wise Disney didn't know what the hell they were doing until the end of the decade, TV cartoons were just toy commercials, there are exceptions like the films of Don Bluth and TV cartoons like The Real Ghostbusters or Thundercats but overall the 90s was way, way better for US animation.

And I can certainly accept the idea that actually living in the 80s wasn't so great, that it was just the pop culture that was great, if I were to analyze things though I would say that people back in the 80s generally had better attitudes, more mellow, more fun loving, American culture had a proudness and a confidence in itself that has been lost since, we need to get that back.

come to brazil(tm), it still looks like the same bombed shithole from 1985

 

[Super-Chevy454]

There really is something incredibly special about 80s movies, it was without a doubt the best decade for blockbuster filmmaking, a movie like Ghostbusters is just so much more creative than any movie being made today, it's kind of unreal how on fire filmmaking was back then, there really is a special magic to an "80s movie"

It was such a great decade for movies that even it's flops are better than anything today, like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, it's no wonder people have been obsessed with 80s movies for decades.

However the 80s wasn't perfect, it was the best decade for live action movies, it was a good decade for music, it was even a good decade for books, but it wasn't a great decade for animation in the US nor was it a great decade for TV, think cheesy (if fun) stuff like the A-Team, the Dukes of Hazzard, they might have been entertaining but we're hardly talking The Sopranos here.

I wonder if the movie makers would pull that kind of stunt like that running gag shown in Police Academy movies today?

Don't forget other 80s tv "classics" like The Fall Guy, Simon & Simon, Hill Street Blues, Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, Miami Vice where the theme song hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and when MTV was MTV.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I wonder if the movie makers would pull that kind of stunt like that running gag shown in Police Academy movies today?

Don't forget other 80s tv "classics" like The Fall Guy, Simon & Simon, Hill Street Blues, Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, Miami Vice where the theme song hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and when MTV was MTV.

Miami Vice is one of the few live action 80s TV show that I've seen a handful of episodes of.

It's a solid show, but not spectacular, 80s TV could definitely be solid entertainment, but we're not talking high art, what basically happened is movies and TV switched places, movies went to shit while scripted TV entered a golden age with shows like The Sopranos, now it's TV that has really been on fire but as someone who always way preferred movies to TV I've almost entirely been left out in the cold, I've seen The Sopranos and Dexter (which went to shit after season 4) and not much else live action scripted TV drama wise.

 

[Lone MacReady]

I wasn't alive then, thank God. Too much coke, no internet, Reagan was turning Cali Blue forever with amnesty... bad times for many.

 

[Dom Cruise]

One thing that's cool about 80s movies is that there's an 80s movie on almost every real world kind of topic you can think of, back when a movie would try to be a hit just by being about something interesting and not part of a "franchise"

Like for real, you can name almost any random thing and there's a good chance there's an 80s movie about it, a couple of examples being two Richard Drefuss movies Let it Ride, about gambling on horse racing and Moon Over Parador, a movie about a banana republic.

Or Project X, a movie about experiments on chimpanzees, Summer Rental, a movie about going on vacation to Florida, Funny Farm, a movie about buying a farm, The Wizard, a movie about Nintendo games, Rain Man, a movie about autism, Amadeus, a movie about Mozart, War Games, a movie about computer hacking, Barfly, a movie about drinking at bars, The Right Stuff, a movie about the early days of NASA and The Money Pit, a movie about buying a shitty house.

There's many, many more examples and I'm probably forgetting some more good ones, but you get my point, screen writers would find some real world topic that was interesting and base a movie around it, a movie didn't have to sell on name recognition or shared universes or franchises, a movie could sell just by being about interesting subject matter.

But that doesn't just apply to real world things but also just about any kind of fantastical subject matter you can think of too, a funny example of that being no less than two different movies about two different types of killer dolls, 1987's Dolls, about killer antique dolls and 1988's Child's Play, about a more modern killer doll.

The only major exception is I can't think of a single Hollywood movie that's an adaption of a Japanese anime or manga, though they made a few in the 1990s, the closest one being for the 80s The Guyver, which was 1990, close, but not technically the 1980s.

It was just a weirdly prosperous time for filmmaking.

 

[Tad Loaf]

However the 80s wasn't perfect, it was the best decade for live action movies, it was a good decade for music, it was even a good decade for books, but it wasn't a great decade for animation in the US nor was it a great decade for TV, think cheesy (if fun) stuff like the A-Team, the Dukes of Hazzard, they might have been entertaining but we're hardly talking The Sopranos here.

And animation wise Disney didn't know what the hell they were doing until the end of the decade, TV cartoons were just toy commercials, there are exceptions like the films of Don Bluth and TV cartoons like The Real Ghostbusters or Thundercats but overall the 90s was way, way better for US animation.

Ironically Japan's animation scene was going through it's golden age in the late 80s with massive budgets being thrown at any animator with a vision which just happened to start burning out around the time the US's scene began to pick back up.

 

[DumbDude42]

the 80s? fuck no
the 30s and early 40s is where it's at. those were the glory days, it's been downhill ever since

 

[Cool Dog]

Born on the 80s but not nearly old enough to remember anything, tho the early 90s carried on with a lot of mid/late-80s stuff and the culture (music, movies) were still popular

Still the 90s in my country were a hell of a lot better than the 80s which had two hyperinflations, instability, a screwed up currency change that didnt work and two coup attempts that almost toppled the government

But I would argue those 80s where better than whats about to happen here, FML

 

[Drain Todger]

Wasn't born yet. I still miss the 80s.

 

[Ken Barlow]

One thing that's cool about 80s... WORD SALAD

Shut up, Wesley.

 

[Just Another Apocalypse]

Although I was extremely young toward the end of the 80s, I still remember how stuff was. There was no Internet in the 80s, and only pretentious jerks had cell phones. The films were amazing! I'm a huge horror fan, and I believe horror films really peaked during this decade. There were so many new horror genres created during this decade, it was unreal. I would argue that even large cities had this weird rural undertone compared to the shithole the West has become. The malls were new and amazing. Fashion and music were really nice as well. It's strange, I don't really feel connected to the modern era.

I remember all the 80s. It mostly sucked. PC culture became mainstream, the music was generally shit. there were black outs. First half of the decade we were told the bomb could drop at anytime.

However, things from the 80s I did like... Heather Thomas... Erm... Rise by PiL... hang on...

 

[Mariposa Electrique]

Really? Which ones?
All that would play in theaters by the end of the 80s were slasher sequels. If I never see ANOES part 6 again, it'll be too soon.

So many really great ones like the Blob remake, the shinning, nightmare on elm street, poltergeist, from beyond, night of the comet, society, prince of darkness, they live, pet cemetery. There were also a great number of Zombie and body horror films from around the world that were released.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Ironically Japan's animation scene was going through it's golden age in the late 80s with massive budgets being thrown at any animator with a vision which just happened to start burning out around the time the US's scene began to pick back up.

Akira is the most famous example of that, but there's also The Wings of Honnêamise, which the detail of the animation is so great and the level of design so great (everything from an electric fan, to books, to a freakin' popsicle has a unique design to this world compared to the real world) that it's honestly kind of scary to think it would even be possible to make a movie like that, it's literally one of the most impressive movies I've ever seen, anime or otherwise.

Shut up, Wesley.

I rambled a bit but all I was trying to say is there's an 80s movie for almost every topic you can think of, from karate, the US air force, buying a farm, betting on horse racing, going to Florida, and trying to get laid.

Wasn't born yet. I still miss the 80s.

To contrast 80s movies about real world things there's live action 80s fantasy, adventure and sci fi movies, all of which have a special magic, movies like E.T., Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Back to The Future, Gremlins and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The formula was usually the fantastical colliding with the mundane and the everyday, ie an average teenager hops in a time machine and goes back in time, to contrast with something like Star Wars, which was entirely it's own universe and while I've always loved Star Wars, I'm more fascinated by the fantastical happening in our world.

These movies also had very catchy, high concept premises ie "what if there were exterminators for ghosts?" or "what if cartoons were real?" but it wasn't just all about the story either, these movies also took time to create characters that we liked spending time with, for as great a premise as Ghostbusters is, it works so well because we like spending time with the Ghostbusters character themselves, same deal with Marty McFly, Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit.

In other words movies back then had more humanity to them, there needs to be a ghost in the machine, back then the special effects served the story, now the story serves the special effects and characters are just one dimensional stereotypes who check off some box on some "diversity" quota and that's it, no character traits, nothing that makes them feel human.

Rey in Disney Star Wars is a perfect example of characters today, there's nothing to her other than "is female" and "is strong", we don't enjoy spending time with her, she's not funny or interesting and she's not allowed to be sexy, contrast her with Leia who is interesting, has a personality ("Will someone get this walking carpet out of way?") and is allowed to be sexy with the slave bikini.

It's crazy how high the creativity was in 80s movies and how steep the drop off was, the early 90s still had a lot of hold over in the early part of the decade with movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park (which was the last movie of that zeitgeist) but then things fell off hard, the only movie in that vein from the rest of the 90s that is on the same level is Galaxy Quest and maybe Starship Troopers.

 

[Massa's Little Buckie]

I was born in the late 80s so no.

 

[Tardar the Barbarian]

When you watch old 80's movies, even in Asia, you'd be amazed how much they hold up to a modern audience.

 

[Dom Cruise]

When you watch old 80's movies, even in Asia, you'd be amazed how much they hold up to a modern audience.

Even cheesy movies like The Delta Force and Death Wish 4 are more entertaining than movies today, they just really knew how to make an entertaining flick back then.

Even the really bad stuff is almost always fun to laugh at.

There's just something special about movies and the culture back then, I'm sure life had it's struggles back then too but people were lucky enough to have a magical culture.

Everything 80s really does have a certain mystique to it even if it's bad or even if there's lots of other cool stuff from other decades too, but there's just a special "vibe" to the 80s that is unique to the 80s.

I think a big part of what we're talking about and what made the 80s what it was is a distinct lack of cynicism and irony, a special earnestness, a willingness to just go for it and not fear mockery.

It was an attitude of "go big or go home", for a random example of that there's Playboy magazine of the decade, look at the centerfold's and there's a special kind of sexy, a gusto to finding the biggest (but natural) breasted women they could find, it was an era of big, big hair, big breasts, big blockbuster films and so on.

It was also a very down to Earth culture, not pretentious or full of shit, it was more honest.

It was in many ways an echo of 1950s American culture, it was like the edgy 1950s, that earnestness of the 50s but now coupled with more of a willingness to have sex and violence in the media.

There really was something special to it and I think where we strayed is we overdosed on cynicism and irony, think Joss Whedon and everything he and people like him represent.

It really disappoints me that I have no personal memories of the decade, I wish I had just one, but I was only alive for the last handful of months, maybe it's being born then but not being able to remember them is why it has such mythical status to me, maybe it's because it's the decade that I was conceived and entered this universe in, so that's why I feel a personal connection to it.

There's many reasons, some of them more personal than I can really go into, I'll just say I've lived my whole life in the shadow of that decade and I take pride in that fact.

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

I wasn't old enough to remember the 80s but I kind of wish I had been alive and old enough to go see

1. Lassiter - Feb 17th
2. Children of the Corn - March 9th
3. Tank - March 16th
4. Police Academy - March 23rd
5. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter & Iceman - April 13th
6. The Bounty - May 4th
7. Firestarter - May 11th
8. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - May 23rd
9. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock & Once Upon a Time in America - June 1st
10. Ghostbusters & Gremlins June 8th
11. The Karate Kid - June 22nd
12. Conan the Destroyer - June 29th
13. The Last Starfighter - July 13th
14. The NeverEnding Story - July 20th
15. The Philadelphia Experiment - Aug 3rd
16. Red Dawn - Aug 10th
17. Dreamscape - Aug 15th
18. Tightrope - Aug 17th
19. Flashpoint & C.H.U.D. - Aug 31st
20. The Terminator - Oct 26th
21. The Killing Fields - Nov 2nd
22. Beverly Hills Cop - Dec 5th
23. 2010 - Dec 7th
24. Dune & 1984 - Dec 14th

Come out all in one year: 1984. I think it was the best year ever in the total number of good movies, which there are a lot of so-so movies on my list but just look at all the ones you know. That's a lot of memorable movies all in one year.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I wasn't old enough to remember the 80s but I kind of wish I had been alive and old enough to go see

1. Lassiter - Feb 17th
2. Children of the Corn - March 9th
3. Tank - March 16th
4. Police Academy - March 23rd
5. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter & Iceman - April 13th
6. The Bounty - May 4th
7. Firestarter - May 11th
8. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - May 23rd
9. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock & Once Upon a Time in America - June 1st
10. Ghostbusters & Gremlins June 8th
11. The Karate Kid - June 22nd
12. Conan the Destroyer - June 29th
13. The Last Starfighter - July 13th
14. The NeverEnding Story - July 20th
15. The Philadelphia Experiment - Aug 3rd
16. Red Dawn - Aug 10th
17. Dreamscape - Aug 15th
18. Tightrope - Aug 17th
19. Flashpoint & C.H.U.D. - Aug 31st
20. The Terminator - Oct 26th
21. The Killing Fields - Nov 2nd
22. Beverly Hills Cop - Dec 5th
23. 2010 - Dec 7th
24. Dune & 1984 - Dec 14th

Come out all in one year: 1984. I think it was the best year ever in the total number of good movies, which there are a lot of so-so movies on my list but just look at all the ones you know. That's a lot of memorable movies all in one year.

Yeah, 1984 is legendary for movies.

Dreamscape is underrated, I forgot about that one.

 

[Piggy Pot Pie]

I very much miss the following:

waterbeds and frilly daybeds

“clay art” masks on the walls

art deco revival home furnishings

large, solid cars leftover from the ’70s

how exciting microwave popcorn was

teen girls’ bedrooms with white wicker furniture

Pierrot clown decor

the sensual allure of jaccuzis

brown kitchen cabinets, tile and lots of houseplants

eyeshadow that goes all the way up to the brow paired with large hair, shoulder pads and huge earrings

the way “le” used as a prefix really classed it up: Le Car, Le Pen, Le Chef Food Processor, Le Tigre

But the thing I miss most is not having cameras and recording devices EVERYWHERE

 

[GloryHole Stalker]

I never got to experience the Cold War. Did you 80’s kids actually have to duck and cover in school or was all that paranoia about nuclear war starting to simmer down by then? It must have been strange living in a world where global capitalism wasn’t the only ideology left on the table but I have a feeling people kind of knew which way the wind was blowing after the wall came down and the first McDonalds opened in the USSR. Still for anyone growing up after the 1980’s to try and imagine the world split down those lines and how that influenced the broader culture as well is interesting. Horror films are often influenced by politics and the things that drive our real world fears. I think of John Carpenter’s movie The Thing it’s almost like a fear of who is the secret communist, those trying to spread among us and attack from within. And then the other film They Live not horror but more of a social commentary where Rodney Piper puts on the glasses and sees all of the true underlying messages in society and finds out the aliens
are already here and secretly running in all the circles of power and influence behind the facade of freedom and democracy.

I was in grade school in the 80's. To answer your first question, I have a vague recollection that we did some sort of a nuke preparedness drill. I can't remember the details anymore, but much like fire drills, they had some sort of plan if things started to get toasty. Fear of nuclear annihilation was real, and the media was certainly pushing it hard. there was a TV movie that came out at the time (Nov 1983) called The Day After. There was a MASSIVE press buildup to it. pre show hype via radio and TV was telling everyone how horrible and traumatizing viewing this would be, especially to kids my age. I was hyped to see it. the night it came on there was also TV specials commemorating the 20th anniversary of JFK's shooting. So we got to see JFK get his head blown off, then it was time for the main event. The movie was utter garbage. When the movie ended there was flashed on the screen a phone number to speak with a grief counselor. If I had called, it would have been only to tell them to lick my prepubescent balls. The whole thing was a waste of time, much like the rest of the decade, lol.