tdog.blog

Ah, the 80s. Bueller, Indiana Jones, Breakfast Club, Red Dawn (first movie ever with a PG-13 rating!), Madonna, INXS, Peter Gabriel, Space Invaders, Rubik’s Cube, glasnost. What other decade could possibly contain all of these things and the advent of CNN, a black (and cool!) Michael Jackson, Ghostbusters, and leg warmers? It’s a dazzling decade–the pop culture artifacts alone are worthy of quite a few laughs.

Here are a few lessons from the 80s.

• If you fail, try again until you run out of quarters. Can’t save the girl in Donkey Kong? Keep jammin’ in quarters. My dad would watch me play Space Invaders and Asteroids. Every screen was the same, but things just kept going faster and faster. He didn’t understand that the point was to flip the score–go so high on the old 8-bit systems that you turned the bend and came back to zero.
• Australians are pretty cool! Before Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, there was Mel Gibson, INXS, Men at Work, and Crocodile Dundee. Their sense of humor, individual styles, and gusto for life made us all pay attention.
• Labels meant something–i.e., MTV actually played music. I have fond memories of “seeing” favorite songs performed for the very first time–Every Breath You Take, Sledge Hammer, Take on Me. Yes, at first videos could be made by anyone with a video camera following a bunch of goofballs around, but they quickly became an independent artform.
• It’s good to take a day off. I’m talking about the biggest Senior Skip Day ever, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Sometimes you just have to get out of town, recharge, rewind, have a good time.
• Every 99-pound weakling took heart after they saw Karate Kid–the biggest underdog movie of the decade. The sequels were bad, yes (I only watched them to see Ralph Macchio get beat up) but there was something magic about that first one. Like Rocky for the under 20 set.
• Branded clothing became a mania. I remember when the first kid in our neighborhood got a pair of leather Nike athletic shoes. He was also the kid who had a nice pair of Wayfarers. Who would have thought that we cared so much about belonging to the Nike tribe? (But I still don’t understand parachute pants.)
• We all secretly loved the girls with that Madonna look in junior high–tight black clothing, bleached blonde hair, too much makeup, 10 pounds of silver jewelry around her neck. Wow! So different from the demure girls in tight jeans and pink alligator shirts. Second best: any girl who wore her hair like Cyndi Lauper. Third: girls who wore that torn sweatshirt style from Flashdance. Fourth: Brenda who wore the fishnet stockings and torn up miniskirt in 9th grade. But I really digress.
• Haircuts came from the movies and rock stars. Kevin Bacon spiked hair swept the nation. It was so simple once you thought about it. Just cut it short, it always springs up. It always looked like you just rolled out of bed, so no need to mess with it. Except for that kid three rows over, who spent 2 hours getting that look on purpose.
• Kids who could breakdance, even if they were white, were cool. No need to beat the crap out of each other, let’s have a breakdance battle. Nuff said.
• You could add immediate presence with a big wide belt (for women) or really big shoulder pads (men or women).
• DeLoreans could become time machines with just a little bit of creative thinking. Goes to show that even a company that went bankrupt could have its product enter the pop culture hall of fame.
• Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and Eddie Murphy played the kind of funny, ass-kicking guys who could safeguard our communities and lives. Punch a guy’s lights out, say a funny line, then empty your gun’s magazine in 2/10ths of second to dispatch the aforementioned guy’s henchmen. As Eddie Izzard intimates, this kind of snappy dialog and violence combo sells a ton of popcorn.
• ADD and hyperactivity were just being talked about clinically, but we all loved the rock stars who expressed those qualities (think David Lee Roth). Oh, okay, you could argue that we loved him because he dared to wear leopard-print assless chaps and jump around like, well, an ADD chimp on speed. (The best song of the 80s? Hot for Teacher, hands down.) But still, I knew some kids who were just like David Lee Roth, except for the assless chaps.
• Despite all the big hair bands and Van Halen, R.E.M. and U2 redeemed the decade with their smart lyrics and unforgettable rhythms. Lets hear it for differentiation again.
• The 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team proved to us that underdogs could kick ass, if the big bad evil empire’s team got too complacent.
• Prince. That’s all. Thank you, Minneapolis!
• Star Trek: The Next Generation proved that Klingons could be our friends, so why not the Russians? I remember the first time I saw Whorf. I totally identified.
• We roundly rejected colorization of black & white classic movies, and embraced VHS. Who knew you could have so much fun watching a movie on your TV? The first video tape my dad and I rented was Schwarzenegger’s Commando. “Where’s Bennett?” “I dropped him.” Makes me chuckle even as I write this.
• We learned that the premise of most horror movies was ludicrous, but we watched anyway. Listen, if you don’t want Jason to carve you into cutlets, stop having sex in remote lakeside cabins, okay, teenagers? Later on, I suspect, this cynical detachment would start Hollywood on the string of movie spoofs we see today. Back in the day, we just did it with each other while watching. Thank you Mystery Science Theater 3000.