What were the 80's like?

[Hereward]

The 70s spawned Thatcher and Reagan. The 80s were caused by them.

[zelticgar]

Coming home from school, changing into play clothes (tough skins!) and going out to play. Lots of pick up football, baseball. Bike riding. We were all pretty much free range kids but most people did not worry because most of the moms were home and kept an eye out for the kids. Moms had their own network and knew what was going on all the time.

When it was dinner mom would ring the dinner bell and we would come running home. Some other moms would just yell kids names and moms down the street would repeat it.

There was no call waiting with phones and when people lived in the city they were charged to call the burbs but the burbs could call the city for free. My Yaya would call and ring twice and hang up. That was the signal to call her.

We all walked or rode bikes to school regardless of weather. In the summer we went to camp or the local recreation center for the day.

Cable TV and VCR's were new. CD Players were also new. I remember watching MTV for the first time when I was 9 years old.

Teenagers tended to hang around in parking lots and then we would find an abandoned road, park, railroad bed or golf course to start a party. Finding beer was easy. Most of the time you just hung out at the store and asked an adult to buy you a case of beer. If that did not work someone always had an older brother or a fake ID.

ET and Can't Buy Me Love are two movies that capture the vibe of the suburbs in the 80's. Karate Kid is another one, especially the scene where they are in the arcade/playland area. Very 80's.

[Lily Valley]

Zero millenials will remember the eighties.

The 80's are remembered by me as a time when I:

cut the neck and bottom off of all of my sweatshirts,

sported an asymetrical haircut,

bleached my hair with sun-in,

contributed to the hole in the ozone layer by using too much hairspray,

watched my friends become materialistic by making sure everyone could see the Guess label on their acid-washed jeans

watched my other friends trying to mimic them by stealing Guess labels and sewing them onto their knock off acid-washed jeans

danced to awesome music

got into dance wars with other young ladies at dance clubs

tryied to learn kung-fu

went to a therapist

screamed, "I GOT A FEELING INSIDE OF MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE / IT'S KINDA STRANGE LIKE A STORMY SEA!!!!!!!"

made fun of goth kids by saying, "Give me a clove, I want to die. Did you see my new shoes? They're black and pointy like all of my other shoes."

wore Dr. Martin's boots

wore Levi's 501 jeans

sported a fauxhawk

terrorized pedestrians by pretending to vomit on the sidewalk

joined a "gang"

got harassed by the police for being in a "gang" (seriously, some of my friends were graffiti artists and the cops were VERY CONCERNED ABOUT GANGS)

ANNNNNNNNNNNND........(wait for it).................

Watched the first bags of concrete get mixed for the world's finest urban skate park

MC WHAT WERE YOU DOING????

My earliest memories were from the late 70's when punk was a thing. I used to make my mother drive past the school so I could look at the "punkrockers" sitting on the bleachers smoking. I thought they were some kind of magic. Literally. I didn't know they were just human teenagers, I thought a "punkrocker" was a type of leprechaun or fairy or unicorn of something. They were so beautiful and so exotic it took me a couple of years to figure out that they were just kids with totally awesome hair.

Edit: I camped out on the sidewalk for 4 days to see Depeche Mode and hooked up with a scalper, got my front row ticket for free in exchange for holding a place in line.

Also Reagan created bag-ladies. Before he shut down all of the mental health hospitals there were zero schizophrenic homeless people in my hometown.

Double Edit: Mt. St. Helens erupted the day my best friend moved out of the neighborhood

I programmed jumpman on my commodore 64

Never beat Zork. Damn that thief!

[Jaxom 1974]

It will actually be interesting to see if pop culture if the 90s lives up to the pop culture of the 80s. Because 80s pop culture is just the best.

[Bronn Stone]

The 80's were a time for college for me. I knew a few students with Mac computers. They cost as much as the cheapest new cars. Much more common were the Commodore 64s which could be used for games and word processing and not much more. The IBM PC (and its clones) were just starting to take hold.

Because I was at a major university (Berkeley) I knew dozens of people with email addresses, which they read using terminal programs on a mainframe. I didn't have one. In fact, I personally used more computers in the 70's than in the 80's. But the Internet DID exist, it just wasn't something popular culture was aware of, even though I had heard the term. More common were BBS systems, which one would connect to via a modem and upload/download text documents or files.

I was probably the last generation for whom it was remotely possible to pay for college through part time work without loans - I got some small grants and work a lot of hours. It really was a mistake in retrospect (should have taken the loans for more study time), but by the 90's it was not possible.

Reagan was pretty universally loathed in Berkeley - because it was perhaps America's most liberal city AND because he'd sent the National Guard in to break up protests only 15 years earlier while Governor. I began the decade a Republican and Ronny drove me away with his embracing of the Moral Majority types - in the 70's California Republicans had been social moderates and fiscal conservatives.

Music was still pretty much played by musicians and sung by singers. While Rap may be powerful and definitely involves talent, it will never be music to me until the performers write the music they rap to and play it on instruments.

Sports wise, it was a great time to be in the Bay Area if you liked the 49ers. And hell on Earth for those of us who despised them. ESPN existed as a powerful sports news network, but they didn't really show games except for oddball sports.

By the end of the decade we had started to get pagers.

[Weeping Sore]

The VCR came out in the late 70s but didn't see widespread use until the 80s. The VCR was a bigger deal to me than the PC in the 80s. All of a sudden you could pick out what you wanted to watch instead of just passively watching whatever was on TV or at the multiplex. And VHS (sorry betamax) boxes of the 80s were awesome. There are still some movies I regard nostalgically even though I haven't seen them just via my recollection of looking at the VHS cover.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

The music, if not better than now was definitely more iconic and innovative than anything now.

This cannot stand. The 80s were the worst decade for music between now and the 60s. Hair bands. Rock almost died from that bullshit.

[zelticgar]

I love me some Slaughter!

Nelson, Dio, Ratt, Quiet Riot. Such awesomeness!

My kids are obsessed with 80's on 8 when i turn on the satellite radio. We Built this City (On rock and roll) is on heavy rotation this month.

Don't forget Saturday morning cartoons and after school specials. I have a theory that this generation will be more susceptible to growing up to be drug addicts because the after school specials no longer exist. Those shows scared the shit out me. I did not touch a drug until college. I thought that if you smoked weed you might randomly jump off a building because pot was usually laced with all kinds of other crazy drugs. :)

[eyenon15]

Corporate garbage had already taken over music by the 80s, it wasn't much different than now.

Along with a wave of one hit wonder bands from Europe with gender bending appearances.

Madonna, MJ, hairbands, and Cyndi Lauper shit ruled the airwaves.

You had to travel outside of your home to things called record stores if you wanted to hear something like Metallica.

[zelticgar]

not all bad - Van Halen, Guns and Roses, Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi...

[all swedes are racist]

This cannot stand. The 80s were the worst decade for music between now and the 60s. Hair bands. Rock almost died from that bullshit.

Oh man... Not to open a huge can of worms that probably belongs in another thread, but THIS can not stand.

Earth Crisis, Come Away With ESG, Surfer Rosa, Damaged, Purple Rain, Hounds of Love, Colossal Youth, Swordfishtrombones, The Queen is Dead, Appetite for Destruction, Kill Em All, Songs About Fucking, Naked City, Perfect Prescription, Signals Calls & Marches, Psychocandy, Isn't Anything, Double Nickels on the Dime, This Nations Saving Grace, Number of the Beast, Daydream Nation, You're Living All Over Me, Paul's Boutique....

[Dr. Pepper]

Zero millenials will remember the eighties.

The first wave of millenials definitely remember the 80's.

[Iskaral Pust]

I was too young to appreciate most of the 80's pop culture (I was born in 1977), not aided by growing up in small, rural village in economically depressed Ireland. The 80's nostalgia kindles some memories for me, but not the same level of affection that Americans especially feel for the decade. For me the 80s is a mix of childhood innocence and naivety plus a background gloom of unemployment, the Chernobyl cloud supposedly blowing across Europe and violence at soccer matches. But then the decade ended (88-90) in an improbable golden age for Irish international soccer. If I had older siblings I might have been more aware of music but my parents were still listening to Abba and John Denver and the only tape I owned was Michael Jackson's Bad album.

The 90s was when Ireland had an economic boost with improving employment and disposable income, added cable television (especially televised soccer matches) cell phones and home computers, a lot more American TV shows were broadcast in Ireland (not just Dallas and the Cosby Show) and there was a general wave of optimism after the Berlin Wall fell.

[Weeping Sore]

Oh man... Not to open a huge can of worms that probably belongs in another thread, but THIS can not stand.

Earth Crisis, Come Away With ESG, Surfer Rosa, Damaged, Purple Rain, Hounds of Love, Colossal Youth, Swordfishtrombones, The Queen is Dead, Appetite for Destruction, Kill Em All, Songs About Fucking, Naked City, Perfect Prescription, Signals Calls & Marches, Psychocandy, Isn't Anything, Double Nickels on the Dime, This Nations Saving Grace, Number of the Beast, Daydream Nation, You're Living All Over Me, Paul's Boutique....

Don't forget Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. It's almost St. Patrick's Day.

[all swedes are racist]

Don't forget Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. It's almost St. Patrick's Day.

Ach. Quite right, terrible oversight on my part

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Oh man... Not to open a huge can of worms that probably belongs in another thread, but THIS can not stand.

Earth Crisis, Come Away With ESG, Surfer Rosa, Damaged, Purple Rain, Hounds of Love, Colossal Youth, Swordfishtrombones, The Queen is Dead, Appetite for Destruction, Kill Em All, Songs About Fucking, Naked City, Perfect Prescription, Signals Calls & Marches, Psychocandy, Isn't Anything, Double Nickels on the Dime, This Nations Saving Grace, Number of the Beast, Daydream Nation, You're Living All Over Me, Paul's Boutique....

I'm not saying there was nothing good in the 80s, just that it's the worst. I haven't heard everything on that list, but of the ones I know a few I really like, a few do nothing for me, and a couple I actively dislike. Stacking it up against the 90s, 00's, and now the 10s there is just far less good music out of the 80s, and the some of the major trends were abominable.

[Ormond]

I was in my 30s during most of the 1980s. I don't remember a lot about the pop culture of the time -- "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Return of the Jedi" were released in the early 1980s, and "Star Trek The Next Generation", started in 1987, and that's about all the well-known pop culture I paid attention to.

The 80s was also the decade that AIDS first became a phenomenon, so as a gay man that's a lot of what I remember as being bad about the era. Wondering which of one's friends and acquaintances were next going to be diagnosed with a then almost always fatal disease does not make for the most pleasant memories.

[Whitestripe]

Having been born in 1971, I am a poster child for Gen X. I grew up in rural North Carolina, not far from a major US Army base. I was not particularly politically astute as a teenager, nor really into popular culture ( I was one of those alternative kids everyone made fun of)

What I remember:

My parents desperately trying to sell a house in the mid-80's

Jimmy Valvano, and NC Stat winning the 1983 NCAA championship (I was a Carolina fan, even then)

The Dean E Smith Center opening at UNC- Chapel Hill (and begging my parents to let me drive the three hours to see concerts there, they did)

Saturday morning cartoons, after school specials and Friday Night Videos

The launch of MTV

"I want my MTV!" campains, staying up late to watch 120 Minutes, and the New Year's Eve Headbanger's Ball

AIDS

Huge social, racial and religious divides (remember this was small town Bible Belt where the Baptists ruled the roost)

Materialism (you were nothing without your Jordache jeans and Members Only jacket

neon colors, pegged jeans and shoulder pads

Iranian Hostage Crisis

Nelson Mandela and his release (1990, I know)

The Berlin Wall "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" My college roommate Tanja's father was a German military officer (her mother met him when she was in Germany with the USO they got married, had a baby and stayed in Germany until he was killed when Tanja was five) She was studying abroad in Berlin in when the wall started to come down November, 1989. She was there, and cannot speak of it even today without getting emotional.

Stock Market Crash and recession of 1980

Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink

We did not have a computer. I went to college with a "word processor" that had one line of type.

Going to my friends' houses to play Atari.

My older sister would get very angry at me for getting finger print smudges on her LP records and all hell would break loose if I scratched one!

In the 80's I discovered Nick Cave, Souisxie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Depeche Mode and the Smiths. I lost my virginity at 17 with the Cure playing in the background.

[eyenon15]

Having been born in 1971, I am a poster child for Gen X. I grew up in rural North Carolina, not far from a major US Army base

Was that base Ft Bragg?

[drawkcabi]

Just remember, you asked...

I agree with what most have said here and lady narcissa has the right of it with her assessment but still, allow me to indulge...

I turned 5 years old in 1980 so this is going to be from the rose tinted perspective of that 5 to 14 year old kid that was his mother's only child and was spoiled completely by parents who could afford to do so during that time. So remember that when comparing with what others have said or will say. The 90's were the last good decade, but the 80's was the last great decade, as Free Northman Reborn said simply, The 80's were awesome, but I will expand on that.

The 80's were a time of wonder, a time of magic. A time when anything seemed possible, anything seemed doable. However so much was also not instantly accessible, you either had to work for it or wait for it a bit (which seemed like work).

It began with the video game boom. There were consoles everywhere. Atari was the top dog though and what every kid wanted. There was the Atari VCS or 2600, but then there were the computer/video game consoles hybrids like the Atari 400 and 800. I had the 400 which was a superior video game console at the time (meaning Pac-man actually looked like Pac-Man) but an inferior computer. There was the Colecovision which I also had and there were expansion adapters for it that you could actually play games from the Atari 2600 on it. This would be like having an Xbox today and being able to buy an adapter to hook up to it and play Playstation games on it. There was the Intellivision, the Vectrex, the Magnavox Odessey^2, and a half dozen more.

There were video game arcades. Entering into one of these places in the early 1980's was like entering a new futuristic world. The lights were always kept dim to enhance the attraction of the flashing neon lights flickering from each individual cabinet. The sounds of all the electronic beeps, bleeps, and bloops were usually accompanied by 80's rock from a juke box that was blasting it's music from its speakers or it was piped in throughout. There was always a feeling of warmth emanating from so much electronics plugged in and bright vibrant colors flashing.

There were so many games. Some of the most fun ones were the sit down ones. You could imagine being in your own x-wing fighter on the infamous run against the Death Star, or be Captain Kirk in his chair on the actual bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

There were games like Dig Dug, Galaga, Centipede, Joust, Pole Position, Donkey Kong, but Pac-Man and the Pac-Man franchise was the mac daddy of them all. In the 80's to be dropped off at the mall on a Friday night and spend the time with buddies away from parental supervision, hanging out at the arcade, movie theater, and pizza joint, was the best thing in the world.

Then there was the television. Everything posters have been saying about Reagan is just about right. But here is one thing he did that made him a hero to me and so many other kids, though we didn't really know it then. In the 60's and 70's due to FCC regulations you couldn't have cartoons of toylines. Reagan deregulated that. So we went from cartoons like Scooby-Doo, Speed Buggy, Jabber Jaw, animated forms of live-action shows like Brady Bunch, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, and super-hero cartoons like Batman, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and Super-Friends (but no direct toy tie-ins) to Transformers, G.I.Joe, Robotech, Challenge of the Gobots, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Voltron: Defender of the Universe, M.A.S.K. and many more. Some cartoons like Super-Friends which became the Super Powers Show finally got direct toy tie-ins. This gave way to the line everyone thought they were clever for using "half-hour toy commercials". But it was so much more. Because so many of these toys were futuristic or fantastic we were given a glut of sci-fi/fantasy stories on TV. Yes, much of them they were dumbed down for kids and they made you want to buy the new action figure or vehicle debuted, but it also inspired the imagination and sense of fun in a kid like nothing else!

Saturday morning was appointment television. You waited all week just for that time of morning where all 3 netowrks, all 3 of them, NBC, CBS, and ABC would show nothing but cartoons from 8am to noon. Thinking of how things are today where any show you could possibly want is instantly accessible, it just makes me feel like that feeling of Saturday morning anticipation is gone for good and makes me a little sad. We had Smurfs, Snorks, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Muppet Babies, the Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, Garfield and Friends, The Littles, The Puppy's Further Adventures, ALF, Turbo Teen, Mighty Orbots :D ,Blackstar, Thundarr the Barbarian, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, The Real Ghostbusters, Tarzan, Super-Friends, Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, Incredible Hulk, Space Stars (new adventures of Space Ghost, Herculoids, Teen Force Astro and the Space Mutts), Rubik The Amazing Cube, Pac-Man, Saturday Supercade (Donkey Kong, Frogger, Q-bert, Pole Position), new adventures of The Flintstones, Jetsons and other Hanna-Barbera characters, and repackaged vintage Looney Tunes in the form of The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show and later The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show.

We also had shows on in the afternoon too after school. These times they were normally provided by local stations, not network affiliates and usually found on the UHF stations. These were shows like Transformers, G.I. Joe, Robotech, Voltron, Gobots, M.A.S.K., He-Man, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Thundercats, and SilverHawks. By then end of the decade you get into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Disney Afternoon (Ducktakes, Chip and Dale, etc.) and Tiny Toons. Batman: TAS, X-Men, Animanicas, Pinky and the Brain, and a new Spider-man were all around the corner in the early 90's.

Then, yes, we got cable! The excitement of seeing the cable providers install the new cable lines just left us with this feeling of anticipation of potential greatness that was coming. We got cable in 1984, before that I remember going to my half-brother's house in a different town and first being introduced to this amazing thing there. I remember having Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and with shows like Donald Duck Presents, Mousterpiece Theater, You Can't Do That On Television, and Dangermouse I was thrilled to see my afterschool programming extend all the way into the evening! No internet, so outside from a my dad taking me to a topless beach in Italy when I was 7, I got to see nudity for the first time in movies like Police Academy and Bachelor Party...and after my parents went to sleep I'd sneak out and record movies like Young Lady Chatterley on our Betamax then in the days after I'd show it to all my friends.

Which allows me to segue into VCRs! Back in the 70's and early 80's there were 2 competing brands. the Sony Betamax and the VHS. Betamax had superior quality but VHS tapes were bigger and could hold more. Since movies usually ran close to 2 hours, VHS was the better format for them which was a big reason they eventually won out. However we got a Betamax in like 1977. We were the first house on the block with a vcr. At first we used it only for recording off of TV, lots of prime-time specials and episodes of The Muppet Show. Also we had home movies we could watch on it. Then I discovered one of the greatest institutions the 1980's could ever offer. The video rental store. We had one in the same shopping center where my parents' restaurant was. At first I didn't use it that much. I'd always go and rent like 4 or 5 movies and I'd always have trouble getting them back on time and end up having to pay late fees. Also as the 80's went on, many video stores phased out Beta tapes to rent and the selection got smaller and smaller.

In 1987 I got my first VHS VCR and from that point renting a video became weekly event. Again it's the thing with being on the hunt, looking for something good and the endorphins released when you find that perfect video you want to watch that night and bring it home. Sometimes more fun than the experience of watching the actual movie. The best times were when school was out and I'd go in on week day, because on Friday night, NONE of the new releases would be available, ever. On a weekday night, it was like going into a completely different store. They had movies that had only come out 8 or 9 months ago!

Before renting movies became a thing, the only way to see a movie repeatedly was to wait for it to come around again at your local theater. The big movies would usually do that. I remember seeing Star Wars in 1980 which was 3 years after it came out. Other movies like Back To The Future, Gremlins, Ghostbusters I remember them leaving and coming back to the theater the next year. Other times you just waited a couple years and movies would end up on network TV edited and with commercials.

Also, once renting movies became more common, it still wasn't common to own movies. A VHS or Beta tape of an average movie was normally around $95.00 to own. Rental stores would buy the movies and get their money back from renting them out, but for most people a movie had to be really special for them to own. When Top Gun came out on video it was a big thing because they priced it at $27 and this was like the beginning of people buying to own their own movies as a more common thing.

Back to video games. In 1983 we had the video game crash. There were just so many video game consoles out and so many titles, so many third parties putting out crappy video games, and with the over-production of Atari 2600 ports of Pac-Man and E.T., both games that were big disappointments, Atari lost a lot of money and people thought the video game craze had been a fad that was now over.

The action-figure/doll/die cast metal toys became bigger than ever. When Star Wars came out in 1977 and kids demanded toys, it caused an evolution in children's toys. Before Star Wars the most popular toys for boys were the larger 8 to 12 inch dolls like the original G.I. Joes or the Mego dolls and playsets were basically cardboard cutout backgrounds with bits of plastic accessories here and there. After Star Wars Kenner changed things up with their ~4 inch action figures, vehicles, and playsets that were mostly plastic and had much more play value like the Death Star playset.

Then in the 80's G.I. Joe comes along with their new comic book series and new toy line related to it and changes things up again. Now the ~4 inch figures have even more articulation, you can bend their arms and legs! The vehicles and playsets are even more interactive and detailed and more fun!

However, G.I. Joe toys had to gain momentum in the early 80's, they were still competing with Kenner's Star Wars toys which ruled until Return of The Jedi stopped playing in theaters, and other toys that took off immediately. One was Mattel's Masters of the Universe line with He-Man, Skeletor and all those greats.

Then there were Transformers! That completely changed everything. After Transformers there were so many different companies bringing out their brand of configure changing toys, Gobots, M.A.S.K., Voltron, etc. So many different toys imported from Japan, almost all some kind of robot or space vehicle, and most having their own cartoon in Japan, though as a kid in the 80's I had no idea. The Transformers story is infamous, how they were 2-3 different toy lines imported from Japan and all imported by Hasbro to be one toy line in the U.S. with its own cartoon. The deal is also why we have a Macross Valkyrie as a Transformer toy, but the character looking completely different on the cartoon series and why genuine quality Robotech toys were so hard to find in the U.S. under that name, and the ones we did have like the Matchbox Robotech line, the Veritech fighter could not change modes, they were not allowed to make one that did.

But aside from instances like that, the late 70's and most of the 80's were a time when children had the greatest toys ever. This is my strongest argument, with or without rose tinted nostalgia goggles, for why the 80's were the best. When I was a kid and would bring my toys to school or to my parents' restaurant or wherever, the adults would look at them and say "I wish we had toys like these when I was a kid". I look at most toys for kids now and think "I wish they had toys like when I was a kid."

There was just an explosion of the coolest toys ever in that decade. All the die cast metal and Japanese toys, when Star Wars faded out G.I. Joe came up behind it and eventually became mega popular. There were also Cabbage Patch Kids, My Little Pony, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite, but I really wasn't into them. I did have Rubik's cubes though. At least a dozen of them. Regular ones, pyramid ones, trapezoid ones, flat ones, mini ones, keychain ones...and I never solved any of them :dunce:

I also had a Teddy Ruxpin, but was unimpressed, it never seemed to work right. By the end mid to end of the decade we had Laser Tag, Captain Power, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I wasn't as into toys at that point.

But throughout the 80's I'd have theme Christmases, like one year it would be a He-Man Christmas, the next year would be a Transformers one, then a G.I.Joe one. I remember the Christmases from 1983-1986 opening my new presents then going out and showing all my friends what I got and seeing what they got.

Then in 1986/87 things changed. A new player was on the scene, of a type most had thought were literally gone and buried. The Nintendo Entertainment System.

I was actually a latecomer to the video game landscape this time around. I remember after the crash of 1983 everyone thought video games were lame and no one wanted to talk about playing them or anything except the real hard core gamers. Then starting in 1987 I started hearing kids in school talk about this new video game, I had just started junior high and I was in 7th grade. Weirdos, I thought, who'd get so excited of video games? Zelda? What's that? Sounds stupid.

For my birthday in 1988 I got a Sega Master System, I wanted one because I saw you could play Monopoly on it and I thought that looked neat. I got that and a few games for it. I thought it was fun but nothing really great. Then for Christmas in 1988 I got a NES, I hadn't even asked for one, but I got it. I hooked it up and was introduced for the first time to Super Mario Bros. It was a (pun intended) game changer for me. I suddenly got what had got the attention of just about everyone else and once again I was deeply into video games. I started building my Nintendo library and by the next Christmas as the decade closed out, I got a Nintendo Gameboy and a Sega Genesis, both gave me hours and hours of great times.

I could talk so much more about the 80's but I guess I'll finish up with this post. There were other things I remember like I did feel like any day there would be nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. Anytime regular TV was interrupted with a "This is a special report" my heart would jump into my throat because I thought the next thing I'd see is a reporter saying nuclear missiles have been launched and stations would begin to switch to their emergency broadcasting systems. I remember the space shuttle Challenger exploding and that was the 9/11 of my generation. Things were just different after that. I remember watching on the launch of the first space shuttle into space, the Columbia, in 1981. I remember Reagan coming on TV talking about Nicaragua, then another time about attacking Libya. I remember the Iran Contra hearings and how it spoiled TV that whole summer, and I remember the Berlin Wall coming down.

I wasn't into fashion much, I thought sneakers with Velcro instead of laces were the coolest thing. I wasn't really into music, didn't get into that until later, I'm mostly nostalgic over music that was played in 80's movies. I remember sporting events, thought mostly NFL football. I remember the Olympics being a big thing too.

I remember no red M&M's because people thought the red dye gave you cancer.

I remember McDonald's introducing chicken McNuggets and they as with all their burgers too came in Styrofoam boxes and their paper bags were white. I remember "Where's the Beef" commercials, The Noid, Where's Herb? New Coke, Classic Coke, Diet Coke, Caffiene Free Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Caffiene Free Coke, Diet Cherry Coke...

I remember EVERYTHING had a cereal!