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The 80's were awesome


zelticgar

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Arcades were great then. You actually had a reason to go to them.Our Dad took us to a place called Wizard's every weekend.

Dragon's Lair. Even though it cost 50 cents and you died an outrageous amount of times. I think difficulty made it better. I don't think I ever did get past the lizard king.

Adventure. The Skyrim of the early 80's.

There was also a rush of great rpgs at the end of the decade, Zelda 1 and 2, the Dragon Warriors. Loved Ultima 3 (Exodus) as well, but didn't get to play it until the late 80's when it was ported to NES. Just as well because I think the graphics were updated a bit for it. Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, I think these were all NES ports of computers games as well.

It kind of sucked being always aware the US and Russia might blow up the world at any moment. I was aware of this even at 5 years old. But it was a great decade for video games for sure. 

Oh also, with the exception of the great cartoons, I have to admit TV really sucked back then. There were certainly exceptions, but one thing I remember is putting up with a lot of really terrible TV simply because there was nothing else on and also because I didn't know better.

Oh and since I said nothing about movies, I'll add Back to the Future, the Karate Kid, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

 

 

 

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5 hours ago, litechick said:

When I was that age, people emulated the 60's.  Now people emulate the 80's.  Big surprise!  Who could have seen that coming?

Just the other day I realized that Straight Outta Compton is older now than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was in the 80's. Same is true of Master of Puppets and pretty much everything that came out in the 80's. 

 

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14 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

*snip*

Oh yeah.  All of it!

I think the mystery of things was still in play in the 80's. If you wanted to see something or have something or play a video game or whatever, it was not instantaneously available.

The internet is the most wonderful thing, but the 80's were the last gasp of WAITING. 

Waiting for the phone to ring.

Waiting for the busy signal to stop so you could call your friend. 

Waiting for a TV show to come on so you could watch it in real time (or else miss it if you didn't have a VCR, which many did not have until late in the decade).

Waiting for someone to come pick you up at the mall and not being able to know when they'd get there because no one had a cell phone.

So much anticipation!

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Also...  DOUBLE CASSETTE BOOM BOXES.

The gateway into making mix tapes.  I raided my college-aged brother's collection of music to make my first one in 1985 and there was no looking back.  I would mow neighbors' lawns just to make $7 or whatever so I could ride my bike to K-Mart to buy blank TDK's, Maxells, or BASF's.  Borrowing tapes from friends so I wouldn't have to spend $7.99 on an album at the mall. 

I love that my kids can listen to virtually any song with a quick search on their tablet, but they are missing out on the work it took to procure and curate the perfect mix tape.

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5 hours ago, Jo498 said:

And there were only 3 TV channels until the late 80s...

Speaking of 1980s TV... I remember NZ getting our third TV channel in 1989 (the first non-state-owned one). None of the channels ran 24 hours, but rather had an overnight closedown period starting just after midnight.

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1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

Arcades were great then. You actually had a reason to go to them.Our Dad took us to a place called Wizard's every weekend.

Dragon's Lair. Even though it cost 50 cents and you died an outrageous amount of times. I think difficulty made it better. I don't think I ever did get past the lizard king.

 

I remember going to the mall and I did the same thing every time. Donuts with Grams, Pet Store to pet the dogs with Grams, then I was allowed to go on my own - head straight to Aladin's Castle which was the name of the arcade at the mall. There was always a big line for Dragon's Lair. I played Galaga and Ms. Pacman. I remember lining up your quarters to hold my place in line. Once I blew through my quarters I'd head right to Spencer's Gifts to check out the R rated posters in the back of the store. 

1 hour ago, Mr. X said:

Just the other day I realized that Straight Outta Compton is older now than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was in the 80's. Same is true of Master of Puppets and pretty much everything that came out in the 80's. 

 

Blows my mind. Just had my 25th high school reunion and we were talking about the fact that when we graduated the class of 1966 was having their 25th reunion. We would have though they were ancient back then! 

 

The other really cool thing about the 80's was neighborhood games. We would always gather together to organize pick up games of tag football, soccer, four square and wiffle ball. We would also invent games like Bike Chase, Wall Tennis, Murder Ball and Acorn Battles. 

  • Bike Chase - 2 teams on BMX bikes within a 2 or three block territory. The goal was to capture or knock the other teams players off their bike. Typically it would end with two kids fighting because someone cheated and left the agreed upon boundaries. 
  • Wall Tennis - A bastardized version of racketball played against the parking lot wall of our middle school. 
  • Murder Ball - like football and Rugby combined, basically tackle the guy with the football. We would play before school on the first day and rip our pants. Mom would kill me when I got home. I actually still see kids doing this occasionally. 
  • Acorn Battles - We would play this in the fall with wrist rockets, slingshots and just throwing acorns. Split into two teams and try to take over each others forts by attacking with acorns. Can't believe one of us did not lose an eye. 
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Yeah, I think even into the 1990s at the end of the program (probably often rather 1 or 2 a.m. than midnight but there was also (almost) no tv in the morning until noon or so on workdays) the national anthem was played and then the screen either turned blank/snowy or (I think usually) a test pattern was shown. In Germany there were alternative regional channels, so some people could get more than 3 (because they lived close to another region or had a better antenna) but 3 was the norm for a long time.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testbild#/media/File:FuBK_testcard_vectorized.svg

The first time I remember watching TV in the morning was during the 1984 Olympics because L.A. was 9 hours behind, so late night stuff was shown in the morning (or probably summaries).

A lot of this stuff seems impossibly quaint now, almost as if it had been another century ;)

 

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19 minutes ago, zelticgar said:

 

  • Murder Ball - like football and Rugby combined, basically tackle the guy with the football. We would play before school on the first day and rip our pants. Mom would kill me when I got home. I actually still see kids doing this occasionally. 

We called this Kill the Man with the Ball, or sometimes just Cremation. Also had another name for it that I was too young to know was homophobic. We were a lot more ignorant back then.

Quote

Acorn Battles - We would play this in the fall with wrist rockets, slingshots and just throwing acorns. Split into two teams and try to take over each others forts by attacking with acorns. Can't believe one of us did not lose an eye. 

We did this with the heavy golf-ball sized spiky seed pods of sweet gum trees.  Those suckers hurt when you got hit!

We also played hotbox, also known as pickle.  It was basically runners going back and forth between two bases while two fielders tried to tag them out.

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My childhood was more early '90s than the '80s, but I was certainly around for the late '80s (also, the rural area I grew up in was still immersed in '80's culture probably until 1996). Definitely an amazing time for most middle class Americans and even more American kids for all the reasons described here.

I think the biggest reason we look back so fondly though is that the world was legitimately a more simple place for most us. Big, complex issues certainly existed, but most of us didn't know about them and many of them really did have no effect on us at the time. We were in a bubble, but it was a bubble with walls that actually did protect us. The only real existential threat for us was the Soviets, but at least that was a constant. Everything else, if we even knew about it, was just a problem for other people, and often not a huge number of people either (or at least, not a huge number of people that we were aware of). Easy to be nostalgic for a time like that. 

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I am still loving part of the 80s.  GI Joe and TransFormers are still on at 5am each morning for 2 episodes each. 

Playing Bards Tale on a Commodore 128 with a disk drive that needed an external fan to keep it cool.

I think the first game console I had was an Odyssey...

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56 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Worst part of '80s TV...waiting for my parents to finish watching those interminable prime-time soaps like Dynasty, Dallas or Falcon Crest.

What? No.  That was time to spend with your mom!

As Well as Merder, She Wrote, Magnum PI, Love Boat (though admittedly many of these were carry overs from the late 70s...).

Knight Rider, A-Team, etc...

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7 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Knight Rider and The A-Team were the shizz. I know it was primarily a 70's show, but some of my fondest memories were staying at my grandparents' house over the summer and staying up late to watch re-runs of M*A*S*H with my grandpa.

Ahhhh...another aspect of the 80s you bring up: It's a heyday for reruns. Bless the syndication.  Watched a lot of reruns in the summer especially. MASH, Jeffersons, Lucy, Green Acres, and so forth. 80s children are possibly the best with pop culture because there was such exposure to so many things...

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15 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

I member!

But member I never got a proper Atari 2600 console, just the Colecovision adapter that didn't come with a pack in game. So I only played it at my uncle's.

Member the 2600 joysticks? Member the thumb cramps? I also used those joysticks for the Atari 400.

I member my Atari 400. For that I had Pac-man, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Astrochase, Popeye, Congo Bongo, Joust, Buck Rogers, Missile Command, Spy Hunter*, and 3D Tic-Tac-Toe. For it's cassette drive I had States and Capitals (still member the capital of every state!), Hangman, Clowns and Balloons, Zaxxon, and a program that taught the Italian language.

*Just saying the name Spy Hunter and the Peter Gunn theme starts playing in my head.

Okay, I'm showing my age here but we had what was called an Atari VCS and it still works. It was the original name of the 2600.  Of course, my kids cut their teeth on Nintendo 64 so Atari is the Stone Age to them, although they did get a kick out of Space Invaders. It originally belonged to my older brother and I got in in a bribe--I promised not to tell the parents that he was selling weed to the other neighborhood kids if he'd fork over the Atari. 

Speaking of weed, we used to use roach clips as barrettes and clip them to our boots as decorations. I also had a rainbow colored mohawk...punk was great. :) 

 

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14 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Ahhhh...another aspect of the 80s you bring up: It's a heyday for reruns. Bless the syndication.  Watched a lot of reruns in the summer especially. MASH, Jeffersons, Lucy, Green Acres, and so forth. 80s children are possibly the best with pop culture because there was such exposure to so many things...

Those are still on. There's RTV, MeTV, LaffTV...you can watch MASH, Hogan's Heroes, The Jeffersons, Good Times, One Day at a Time, Night Court, Mama's Family, etc. And there's a station called GRIT and that's where the westerns are, like Green Acres, Bonanza, Big Valley, Laramie, Walker Texas Ranger, etc. 

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7 hours ago, The Wedge said:

We called this Kill the Man with the Ball, or sometimes just Cremation. Also had another name for it that I was too young to know was homophobic. We were a lot more ignorant back then.

This game caused more injuries than any other game combined. So many untreated concussions in the 80's. Its a miracle i can remember my own name. 

7 hours ago, The Wedge said:

We did this with the heavy golf-ball sized spiky seed pods of sweet gum trees.  Those suckers hurt when you got hit!

We also played hotbox, also known as pickle.  It was basically runners going back and forth between two bases while two fielders tried to tag them out.

I think each region had their own version of this and used whatever round objects happened to fall from trees in their part of the country. We used to have crab apple battles as well. Those were in the fall before the acorns fell. We would pay the little kids to collect them in their wagons for us. 

We called it pickle in the northeast. I played it with my brothers all the time in our driveway. We used to love whizzing the baseball as close to each other as possible. Again, so many untreated concussions. 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

Those are still on. There's RTV, MeTV, LaffTV...you can watch MASH, Hogan's Heroes, The Jeffersons, Good Times, One Day at a Time, Night Court, Mama's Family, etc. And there's a station called GRIT and that's where the westerns are, like Green Acres, Bonanza, Big Valley, Laramie, Walker Texas Ranger, etc. 

Yes.  But not the same. Not same at all. :P

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Yes the 1980's were so awesome. Ronald Regan was elected and served for 8 years, The AIDS crisis became a worldwide panic and The Soviet Union and the Eastern Block disintegrated to be replaced by crony authoritaarianism and tradionalist conservatiive politics.

 

I think that we can all agree that it was an important decade of change, but to call it "Awesome" is a bit dumbfounding in my eyes. 

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Another thing that popped up in the mid-late 80's were shows in first run syndication.

These were TV series that were shown as new episodes without airing on any particular network like ABC, CBS, NBC, or even FOX. They could air on those networks, but not exclusively. In Baltimore one show would come on CBS, in Dallas it would be on FOX, or even more likely an unaffiliated station somewhere up the UHF dial.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was at the beginning of this trend. Before that you mostly only saw game shows like Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy! broadcast that way. With TNG, it proved that a television series could be successful aired this way.

So then we got a glut of new shows mostly airing on Saturdays and Sundays. There was TNG of course, which came to be the centerpiece of my weekends. But there was also Superboy, My Secret Identity, Super Force - these shows were cheesy and low budget, but at the time were fun to watch, at least for me. Some still are.

And speaking of cheese, there were a bunch of sci-fi/horror anthology shows that all seemed to come out at once. Freddy's Nightmares, Tales From The Darkside, Monsters, Friday The 13th: The Series, and a new Twilight Zone.

Then there were a bunch of sitcoms, many of them reboots of former network sitcoms and most sub par even by 80's sitcom standards. There was New Gidget, New WKRP in Cincinnati, What's Happening Now!, Charles in Charge, Small Wonder, and Out of this World.

By then end of the decade Baywatch began it's run and became a behemoth of first run syndication.

By the 90's Hercules and Xena came along.

 

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7 minutes ago, Cubarey said:

Yes the 1980's were so awesome. Ronald Regan was elected and served for 8 years, The AIDS crisis became a worldwide panic and The Soviet Union and the Eastern Block disintegrated to be replaced by crony authoritaarianism and tradionalist conservatiive politics.

 

I think that we can all agree that it was an important decade of change, but to call it "Awesome" is a bit dumbfounding in my eyes. 

The 80's were Awesome because everything was Awesome in the 80's, not to mention Rad, Outrageous, and Excellent.

If the 60's were groovy, the 70's far out, and the 90's Extreme, then the 80's were Awesome.

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