What was life like in the 1980's?

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19 Mar 2018, 11:50 am

A lot more shows on TV were "family-friendly", and it was common for families to all sit together and watch the same shows. Of course, many households still only had one TV so it wasn't like you could always choose what you wanted to watch.

Animated movies were always rated G except for Disney's The Black Cauldron, and PG movies got away with a lot more before the PG-13 rating was created. Movies like Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and Gremlins basically were what got them to create the PG-13 rating.

Jelly beans became more popular in the US because they were apparently the president's favorite candy and kept a jar of them on his desk.

McDonald's hamburgers used to come in little Styrofoam containers that were incredibly bad for the environment, which I liked because I could open it up and put my fries in the other half of the container, and sometimes I'd clean it out and make it into a hand puppet afterwards.

We weren't as concerned about the environment back then. No recycling, you just took your garbage out, the garbage men would collect it, and that would be it. Although if you bought a crate of pop in small glass bottles you could take the empty bottles back to be refilled.

As a kid I would get Dr. Seuss books and Highlights for Children magazines delivered to me in the mail. It was always so cool to get something like that with my name on the address and everything.

It was still perfectly okay to smoke in public or even around your own kids.

AIDS was really terrifying. The media made it sound like we were all going to be dead from it in a few years and there were a lot of myths and ignorance going on about the disease. My mother didn't think she could get it because she wasn't gay. As a preteen I was afraid I could give it to my dentist from my own spit or from my brother if he used my toothbrush. :oops: And whenever a famous person died people would say it was from AIDS, even if it was reported to be something else. And then there was that disturbing PSA in I would see Archie comics. So education is the solution to dealing with AIDS, Mr. Weatherbee? But what do you mean by "education"?

When I was around 13 I got my picture taken for the newspaper after winning a contest where I made a poster for dental health month. This was great, but the article with my photo was above a headline that said in big letters, AIDS: A MODERN-DAY PLAGUE. I didn't like it one bit.

Ichinin
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19 Mar 2018, 12:48 pm

LegoMaster2149 wrote:

What were politics like during this time period?

The words: "we could be incinerated by nuclear fire at any moment" describes what i felt as a kid, same as now after the start of the second cold war.

There were proxy wars that "just happened" to have military advisors from either block (Nato or Warsaw pact), The enemy of my enemy is my friend was a popular opinion and rather cringeworthy alliances were created. Most of central America were military dictatorships (El Salvador) or the extreme opposite (Red waving flags in Nicaragua). It was never as relaxed as it is today with large economical trading blocks and widespread democracy, but there may be a return to that since Russia has started to b***h around on the international scene.

China was largely uninterested in international relations unlike today when they are building a carrier fleet for power projection, most of the time they sat quietly and told people to "mind their own business", but there was a large backlash against China when the Tiananmen massacre happened. I could barely believe my eyes when i saw it live on TV.

Europe was divided and there were political terrorism from the East operating in the west, like the red army faction (Baader-Meinhof) that were financed by the soviet union, there were political killings of political dissidents and defectors - just like today, and there were even KGB sponsored terrorists like Carlos the Jackal (See the movie "The Assignment" for more. Do NOT watch the crap version with Bruce Willis).

Soviet made a brutal invasion of Afghanistan and some Arab states, the US - and surprisingly Israel channeled funds and equipment to Afghanistan via Pakistan to make Soviet bleed and turn Afghanistan into Soviets "vietnam". After that defeat the Soviet union started to crack and eventually fell apart, it wasn't the only reason, but it was gigantic punch in the face to their national pride (Another great movie to see here: "Charlie Wilsons War")

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19 Mar 2018, 12:53 pm

lostonearth35 wrote:

Lots of TV shows were pure crap, regardless of where it was produced. The only one from the Us that was REALLY popular over here was "Married with children" since it was a more down to earth - and actually funny! I visited my mom a few days ago and watched TV, MwC is still going strong on one channel - timeless classic.

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20 Mar 2018, 7:58 am

I was just thinking today, not necessarily an '80s thing, but one thing I really miss about the past was that most American products were only in English. I'm not talking about xenophobia, most of the time it's a penny-pinching thing companies do so they can ship the same product to Canada and Mexico without needing to package it three different ways. I can't even look at a box of cereal without information overload, trying to get my brain to filter out all of the extra info so I can find the English I'm actually looking for...which my brain doesn't want to do, so I see "English/French/Spanish" as one big weird word instead of the same word in three languages.

Video games don't even have descriptions on the back anymore (are we supposed to just -know- what the game is??), and manuals/documentations are either super thick, or they are cheap, indecipherable pictographs, or if the company is -really- cheap, there's nothing there at all. I almost destroyed my computer's CPU once because the instruction pictures caused me to install the heatsink completely wrong.

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20 Mar 2018, 7:51 pm

I remember job hunting and just walking right into offices and dropping off my resume.

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20 Mar 2018, 8:00 pm

When I got the job I got now in 1980, I didn't have to submit a resume. I just filled out the application.

That's the way it was throughout most of the 1980s, basically.

I would fill out applications for temp work, then I would take the clerical tests, then I would be sent out on jobs. No resume.

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21 Mar 2018, 12:48 am

Ichinin wrote:

I used to watch the Cosby show in the 80s but now can't see it without thinking about the nearly 500 hours Cosby spent raping unconscious women

Last edited by cyberdad on 21 Mar 2018, 1:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

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21 Mar 2018, 12:50 am

even then I thought that guy was SO FULL of himself.

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21 Mar 2018, 1:05 am

"Hey hey hey!" it's raping Bill

auntblabby
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21 Mar 2018, 1:16 am

bill had the bad fortune to not die as quickly as jimmy saville.

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22 Mar 2018, 2:06 am

Saville might have a worse time in hell given his targets were children

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24 Mar 2018, 2:31 am

WLIR doc, ‘New Wave: Dare to Be Different,’ chronicles rise, fall of the coolest ‘80s radio station

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The legend of WLIR, the small, but influential Hempstead radio station that helped bring British new wave to America in the ’80s, is about to grow much, much bigger.

“New Wave: Dare to Be Different,” Plainview native Ellen Goldfarb’s documentary about the station’s rise and eventual fall in 1987, due to a licensing dispute with the FCC, will get a national audience, starting Friday, March 30, at 8 p.m. on Showtime.

“It was great to see how the New York crowd reacted to it — it’s about their home,” says Goldfarb, who premiered the movie at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. “But in other places, people were cheering along. . . . There was a woman from St. Petersburg who came up to me and said, ‘I didn’t grow up on Long Island, but I wish I diD

New Wave: Dare to Be Different” chronicles the era when Long Island, not New York City, had the coolest radio station. In one telling clip, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes talks about the British rockers’ first trip to New York and the angst they felt about seeing the Manhattan skyline they dreamed about get smaller because they were on their way to Hempstead.

“[Program director] Denis McNamara at ’LIR had a real vision,” Rhodes says. “That was the thing that changed radio — the vision.”

McNamara, who is semi-retired from radio and lives in Northport, says he has been surprised by the response to the documentary. “I’ve just been knocked out by the way people respond,” said McNamara, who still has a weekly radio show on WUSB at 10 a.m. Fridays. “There’s just so many people thanking us.”

For him, it has put a happy ending on a traumatic part of his career. “When it ended, we felt like failures,” McNamara said. “We never knew the impact we had with the listeners or even the artists. We were just fighting against all odds and working never to let on how hard it was behind the scenes. Now, we can look back with a great sense of pride.”

Larry “The Duck” Dunn, WLIR’s music director, said he got emotional watching the documentary and seeing how the station affected its listeners’ lives. “It really was the quality of the audience that made it work,” said Dunn, now a DJ on SiriusXM’s First Wave channel. “We would never have been able to generate that kind of excitement without them. I remember being in a tuxedo in the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Massapequa on New Year’s Eve and asking people to show up. And they did. They are an important part of the story, and Ellen captured it.”

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26 Mar 2018, 9:39 am

What were some of the low points in this decade?

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26 Mar 2018, 10:35 am

LegoMaster2149 wrote:

What were some of the low points in this decade?

Prime minister of Sweden getting shot in 1986 and one of the worlds longest, if not THE longest police investigations started - and still running today. Even today after 30 years new details pop up, fake evidence produced by police to get one guy that was pointed out as the murderer, but later on cleared of charges - that was the most recently revelation, and in a day or two there is more theories being revealed from a separate 15 year old investigation that some non police organisation have been running in parallel.

There is simply too many tracks to follow, KGB, South Africa, NATO Stay Behind movement, Extremists in the police/military, PKK, Turkey, CIA, rightwing extremists, political enemies, certain individuals (etc). Not to mention the parallel investigation of some law enforcement officials who purchased illegal monitoring equipment and got caught with their pants down - stuff that were illegal then, but legal today.

The prime minister then (Olof Palme) was an apparent socialist leader, but he was ex intelligence and had deep ties to NATO and the US back then. The official policy were "Condemn Usa officially for the Vietnam war, but thank then in secret". Later on during the 90's we got confirmation of this close relationship when a bag that no one knew of turned up in a diplomatic vault in Washington filled with Swedish war continuity plans...

My personal favourite theory is that it was an organised assassination by a foreign state, and i don't think it will ever be solved. The "golden hour" has passed by over 30 years and the case is frozen solid, some witnesses has even died of old age.

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26 Mar 2018, 11:03 am

LegoMaster2149 wrote:

What were some of the low points in this decade?

Free Base cocaine morphing into the crack epidemic.
Hair Metal
Nuclear War fears

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26 Mar 2018, 12:48 pm

LegoMaster2149 wrote:

What were some of the low points in this decade?

james watt, Ronald raygun, ed meese, oliver north, fawn hall.

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