For those of you who grew up in the 80's, how was it?

I was born in '96 so I didn't get to experience any of it unfortunately. A lot of people look back on that decade with nostalgia, especially some users on this forum.

Style over substance, fantasy over reality - in other words,

awesome.

Although admittedly Glasgow was never quite as glamorous as Miami Vice.

Partly why media was so appealing back then, everything was shit but it offered unabashed romanized escapism you don't much get these days, be it action movies, comedy, adventure or romance or just in general the wildly emotive music.

They had good amounts of animated tv shows back in those days. Transformers, Power Rangers, TMNT(short abbreviation), etc.

Not very much like this live action and cgi infested rookie action.

It was ok. Just like every decade I've lived through. It had its good times and bad times. It was the Regan era. Rode my bicycle a bunch and had a clubhouse with a crazy/stupid dog. Saw a lot of good movies, E.T., Mad Max, The Black Cauldron, The Goonies, The Last Starfighter, etc. etc. However it was by no means a magical decade. I cannot look upon it fondly and with rose colored glasses. It just wasn't all that and there was no bag of chips.

With the 80's came an awareness that all was not fine in my parent's marriage. I also went to a school that had a lot of fighting, a nun deemed my hair too long and tied it up like a girl. It's quite an experience having an entire class laugh at you. I also almost drowned at a Navy beach. Stuff like that.

So that was my experience, pretty much.

I was born in 1985, probably around 89, I did became self aware of what was going on. I watch a few cartoons like He-Man, TMNT, Transformers, (to be honest, Beast Wars was my truer introduction to the Transformers world) and Bucky O'Hare. The late 80's was alright, Awesome movies like Back to the Future was my favorite jam, my parents were working decent careers, it was me and my 2 sisters at the time we had the whole house to ourselves since crime wasn't really bad as it is really bad now today's standards. Truth be told, the 90's was the golden age if you ask me.

The best time of my life.

I was born in 81 my memory is a bit cloudy I can remember some stuff from the late 80's it was awesome tv shows like, In Living Color, The Arsenio Hall show, A-team, Macgyver ect... My best memories where being at my grandparents house it was so comforting there I remember sitting on the carpet next to the fireplace watching movies. The only thing I hate back then is I use to get really bad migraine headaches. But looking back with my nostalgic goggles on it was a magical time mostly because I was innocent and didn't know how F%&ked up the world was back then.

No SJW's. Relatively sane politics. Communism was still considered a bad idea. Trannies weren't a thing. Women were still relatively normal. You didn't need a university degree to get a dishwashing job. The weirdest things people did to themselves was to get a tattoo. Pong. Pac-Man. The original Legend of Zelda.

Good times.

I was born in 1984 so my childhood was more of a 90's one (much, much better than the 80s I might add :D ), I don't remember much of the 80s tbh. I do remember the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Yeah it's not like now where everything wants to remind you or convince you how shitty things are.

I was born in 1971 so I had a great time during the 80’s. Awesome time for heavy metal and hard rock music and music videos. Some excellent cartoons. Some really good times with video games when the NES came out but things really picked up in the early 90’s with the SNES and some amazing arcade games.

Agree 1000 percent, music in my opinion was at it's best. Movies where great too and then you had the Monday night wrestling wars some of the best TV ever. It was also mind blowing to see the jump from 2D to 3D graphics and on top of that you had the beginning of home internet. Windows 95, chatrooms, the start of Napster ect.. so many ground breaking stuff happened in the 90's.

I was born in 86 so I can't really for sure place any memories pre 90s. 90s was pretty dope though Golden era of gaming.

I was born in 1981 and it was great.

Not as good as the 70s or late 60s. Too many hair bands and a lot of terrible music (some good though), too much worrying about style and other associated fluff, worst decade overall for cars, too much self indulgence in society epitomized by the growth of drug fuelled excess especially cocaine. Ending Soviet Russia should have been a great development....sadly it just traded commies for mobsters. Positive developments in tech led to the boom 90s. Killed the cancer that was inflation, effectively saving capitalism. Too much moral majority and cast of nutjobs associated with it. Fundamental positive shift in attitudes towards gay community; but only after major battles. The terrible aids epidemic. NYC a cesspool of cokeheads and crime.

There were no mobile phones or internet. I suppose in a way it was a more innocent time.

I was born in 1987, so my memories aren't very fleshed out. 80s music is the best though.

It was definitely a slower time. I was born in '76 so I remember pretty well from '83 onward, with a few clips of the 1982 Worlds Fair stuck in my noggin.

People were scared of the Soviets, they even sent presenters around to the public schools to make sure you knew how bad the USSR was. They'd show you their toilet paper, the Pravda, tell you if you wanted a car in Russia you had to pay for in 5 years in advance, etc.

Just say no. Can't forget that. Actually encouraged a lot of us to smoke so we could just say yes.

FM radio was the thing and everyone had a favorite station with all the stickers, caps, shirts, etc. You knew the DJs on your favorite station by name and sometimes even called them to make a request.

Lots and lots of places to shop. Some specialty stores, some general stores, a lots of shoe stores. K-Mart was as big as it got unless you opted for the mall.

Yeah...fucking malls. For a few years they were popping up everywhere, even where they had no reason to be. I never was a mall-rat, though. You'll have to get those stories from someone else. If my family were at the mall for any reason, I was in Alladin's, dropping quarters into the loudest, most flashy games that caught my attention.

@br0kenrabbit: Alladin's Castle. Totally forgot about it. Memories...

I still have some tokens. They're like holy relics at this point.

Looking forward to that new Icel mass shooter Joker movie that will possibly implode the world?

Haha, na that movie does look good, but there is definitely a cynicism there that didn't exist in the 80's.

The 80's had a fine balance where something could be stupid and cheesy, but equally cool as hell, Miami Vice and alot of action movies like Commando and Rocky IV personified that idea very rarely get these days.

Yeah you didn't hear about every single little thing that happened in the world. Some kid could shoot up a school and you wouldn't hear about it. Some kids would drink detergent as a dare and you wouldn't hear about it. Some random politician you didn't know existed said something outrageous and you didn't hear about. Save that shit was for the local paper.

There is something to be said about, well, not ignorance...but just not being told about every single little scary thing that was going on far far far away from you. Journalists actually had to write and research and put in work instead of just googling "What scary shit happened today?" and then writing about it.

The world was a lot larger back then, too; nowadays, it's incredibly small.

As convenient and great as technology is most of the time, I often miss my pre-cell phone days.

Hell if I leave my house without my phone I almost get a little panic. Then I remind myself I lived my first 20 years of life without it.

More or less the same.

The 1980's was great. But Nuclear war seemed around the corner. Videogames almost died in 1983. Nintendo NES ruled from October 18th 1985 until August 14th 1989. The coin operated arcade was huge during the 80's. There was Ronald Reagan as president. Chernobyl Nuclear power plant melted down. The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed. Atari 2600 was going strong at the beginning of the decade. While Sega Genesis closed out the decade bringing the 16 bit Generation to happy videogame players.

Ugh I know im feeding the troll here......

All of those things/ideas for those things were in the 80's.....

It's almost like he wasn't even there...

I wouldn't say I "grew up" in the 80's as I tend to use that term for basically when a person was in middle school to high school and became an adult, which for me was mid-90's ( born in '78 ).

That being said, I have great memories of being a kid in the 80's. Benefit of being a kid is you mostly are only exposed to the shinny side of things and not the bad shit that went down.

I remember getting cable TV and watching mtv thinking it was sooo cool but didn't really follow the whole music scene as I was young and mostly didn't care. My parents got their first computer ( ti-99/4 ) and so I loved playing on that. I finally got a NES for xmas in 88 after my best friend had one for like 2 years. Summer was awesome riding bikes around the neighborhood and feeling a sense of freedom. Obviously this is tainted w/ nostalgia because it was childhood.

I vaguely remember some "adult" things happening, like the whole Iran-contra scandal going down and of course the challenge blowing up ( they announced it on my school's loudspeaker ) but I was mostly blind to that kind of stuff.

It was ok? I was so young that I wasn’t even cognizant enough to really appreciate it. Mostly I remember the great TV (Thundercats, Knight Rider) and some movies and a blur of schooling.

GOONIES!!

The 80's were great. Arcades were everywhere. Transformers and GI Joe ruled after school cartoons. Hair Metal was on the radio and malls were the place to be on weekends.

On the flip side though, this is what the ladies wanted in the 80's.

Daisy dukes on men. WTF people?

I loved the 80's!.....it was right smack dab in my wheelhouse.

In other words, I was 18 when the decade began and 28 when it ended. Prime time.

We did not have to concern ourselves with PC's (PC's were not mainstream then) and social media crap, we had tons of fun dance clubs where you met and talked to new people (rather than just gather with your facebook buddies) face to face, vastly underrated music (80's had music for everyone, and plenty of bands played real instruments). If you were a PC junkie you were considered a bit of a nerd back then (not sure if the word geek was mainstream yet, perhaps at the end of the decade) though. You could see both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on the big screen upon release, many other classic movies. MTV played interesting music videos constantly (particularly with 120 minutes which started in middle of decade), though certain artists dominated. The U.S. was at the very peak of its greatness and we were highly respected worldwide.

Life was quite a bit more simple but lots of fun if you delved into it. Plenty of arcades and video games.

Even with a bias removed I still think the 80's were the best decade to enjoy life in the U.S. since WW2. I personally did wish I grew up as a 60's hippie as a teenager, but the 80's won me over. I was born in 1961 from a generation between Boomers and GenX (similar to Xennials between X and Millenials) often called Generation Jones.

Say what you will, but the 80's was a lot of fun for me, and this ain't nostalgia we are talking about.

The music of that decade is criminally underrated as well, such variety. Loved the dance clubs back then.

I was not born in the '80s but from the movies, music and cultural impact compared to today it does seem like the '80s and '90s was a lot more "safe" and better than what we saw in the '00s or see now in the10´s

Movies seemed better, Actors I mean who today have the same skill as Pacino, Connery, DeNiro, Nicholson, Whoopi, Midler, Hoffman, and all the rest.

Music , well compared to the 60s, 70s it was different but at least the artists could actually sing kinda and weren´t autotuned.

Games, well I have played a few games from that era and they were basic but for some reason, I have had more fun with games like Lode runner, Ghost´n´Goblins than games like Division or Breakpoint.

Tv, it also seemed more relaxed and easy-going and no one got offended easily and the best thing no reality or SJW.

@SUD123456: @Archangel3371: @AFBrat77:

What were the 70's like?

During our time, the only console that I know was Atari 2600!

Now almost all games has online counterpart, even Foosball!

@PSP107:

I liked the 80's much more than the 1970's, Cable TV including HBO, MTV, and ESPN were up and running, music was much more diverse, the 80's were an amazing decade for sports, with a lot of legends playing like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Dr. J, Wayne Gretsky, Mario Lemieux, Joe Montana, Jon Elway, Dan Marino, Walter Payton, etc. Only baseball was underwhelming with the steroids era. PC's were up and running in the 80's but not everyone had them. And NO FREAKIN' SMART PHONES!

Life was simpler but harder in the 1970's, we were still in Vietnam early on, Watergate forever stained our trust in politicians, jobs were hard to come by in the late 70's when we entered the work force, Disco sucked (but Soul music in the 1970's was at it's pinnacle) I did enjoy TV with Happy Days, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels (Jaclyn Smith!) and Saturday Night Live with John Belushi and the original cast. Baseball was still America's sport in the first half of the 70's, but the late 70's presented a changing of the guard as football stepped up to the top spot. Free-agency hurt baseball's popularity, no longer would your favorite player be guaranteed (mostly) to stay on your team very long.

Loved drive-in theatres then and going to the arcades. VHS and Betamax (remember that?) were new recording forms that were becoming mainstream. Aids had not yet happened in America yet in the 1970's so sex was still rather carefree ala the 60's. Cars were mostly American sprinkled with some European, but Japanese cars were nowhere to be seen, least I don't remember them. Plenty of classic Volkswagen Beetles in the early 70's.

But the thing I remember best about the 1970's is how safe it was to go out and play with your friends all day in the summer and weekends without any worries. Mom and dad had no worries, we got together with friends all day and played army, kickball, baseball, football, catch salamanders and crayfish in the creek....sometimes all in the same day, and often far from home. No worries, even without cel phones to call mom. Ok, now I'm wondering what happened to all my young friends.

Just for fun I thought I'd add this beautiful song from 1970 that's been in the Microsoft Surface commercials recently and the end of Jordan Peele's movie "Us". Minnie Ripperton had an amazing 5 1/2 octave voice, too bad breast cancer took her in 1979 at the age of 31. For a while it looked like she was gonna make it thru it :( . This song still has a very hippie 60's aura to it. Enjoy!

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Don't know all about that but I grew up on GameSpot. So I have seen quite a bit. I remember when GameSpot had a BB code lol. We created all types of signatures lol and had Unions etc lol Some of you might remember that. Too bad those old posts dont remain they were classic and true works of art.

80's South Africa was a very strange place. Lots of political upheaval and a very right wing government that was struggling to hold on to what they had created.
Because SA was essentially ostracized from the world, we had to create much of our own media and films. Big international releases didn't really come to SA, so most TV shows and movies were locally produced. Honestly they created some amazing entertainment and products!

I was too young to really understand what was happening politically, but I do remember the 'feeling' of a country being on the brink of huge social change, and nobody being quite certain what was gonna happen.

Sorry folks, but this is a 1 month old thread that past it's 30 days with no replay. Feel free to make a fresh thread if anyone wants to continue this discussion.

Locked for Necro Thread.