What's wrong with the 80's? Everyone makes remarks about the 1980's, and those remarks either poke fun at the big hair decade or scorn the "greed is good" mentality many had, but, hey! I loved the Eighties.What Happened in the Eighties
That decade brought us the rise of romance novels, the first Star Wars movies, Alf on TV, the collapse of communism, the birth of the home computer, some of the best music ever (Cyndi Lauper, Hall & Oates, Springsteen, Don Henley, Wham! Blondie, The Cars, Aerosmith–just to name a few), the end of the cold war, Hill Street Blues, Cheers, Cagney and Lacey, MacGuyver, Family Ties, The Weather Channel, CNN, and my kids! *g*
Just think of some of those wonderful songs: Tainted Love by Soft Cell, In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins, Funkytown by Lipps Inc., Billie Jean by Michael Jackson, Love Shack by the B52s, Straight Up by Paula Abdul.
Movies of the Eighties
The 80's was a great decade for movies: Indiana Jones, Ferris Bueller, Die Hard, The Terminator, Aliens, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, The Princess Bride, Bill and Ted, Vacation, Caddyshack.
So far, the new millennium has been more perilous than fun. So let's give the decade of the 80's a big fat kiss because it was a heck of a lot of fun!
What was your 80's experience like?
Takeaway Truth
Wishing you lots of fun, happiness, and prosperity in the year coming at us like a rocket ship on rails.
I have great memories of the movies and music of the 80s. Thanks for bringing them back.
ReplyDeleteHey, Emma. Glad to oblige. Have a Very Merry!
DeleteI realize that it's déclassé to pepper jokes with emoticons, Joan, but I suspect a lot of your readers are too young to remember the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteThey won't realize that Hall & Oates released their greatest album, Abandoned Luncheonette, in 1973, that the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, and the USSR collapsed in 1991. They won't remember that Ronald Reagan raised taxes seven times and tripled the deficit, that unemployment hit double-digit levels, that we invaded a Caribbean island whose biggest industries were a med school and winter vacations for frozen Americans, and that we financed Central American revolution by selling dope to our own citizens.
They won't realize that your naming Don Henley a great musician of the '80s is pretty damning. That's be like pointing to the Chrysler K-cars as the greatest innovations of the 1980s.
The Weather Channel and CNN weren't very big in the 1980s. In 1985, only 16 million of the 86 million households in the US could get cable.
I won't diss your kids. The one child of my five that survived childbirth was born in 1980, and I assume you got as much joy from your little ones as I got from mine, but is that because of the decade? No.
And I won't argue that this century has been wonderful. Looking at the numbers, we've had marked improvement over the past five years, but when you're digging yourself out of a pit, it's hard to feel celebratory. But even when one remembers the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam, and the Long Hot Summer of 1968, the 1960s were wonderful compared to a decade that gave us the Challenger disaster (and the closing of the frontier by a president for the first time in US history), and AIDS bringing an end to the sexual revolution, Tiananemen Square, Lockerbie, the World Series earthquake, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, the assassination of John Lennon.
Great post, Joan! Have yourself a merry little Christmas!