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Ask HN: What made the 80s so pleasant?

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Re: Ask HN: What made the 80s so pleasant?

#31

Post by starwind »

mattl wrote: post #4

Stranger Things and other modern movies like Wonder Woman: 1984 present an inconsistent idea of what the 1980s was like. Case in point, there's a scene in a supermarket with a bunch of breakfast cereals from various pop franchises. That never happened in reality. In reality, the same cereal would be repackaged for whatever was the hot movie/brand at the time. This is somewhat sent up in this video from UK's The Adam…

Didn't know that. I googled 1980s cereal and sure enough: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/70437468476516/

Re: Ask HN: What made the 80s so pleasant?

#34

Post by dogline »

vavrek wrote: post #20

Was born in 1973 and grew up in the Redwoods of Northern California, near what would eventually become Silicon Valley. In that place and time, the 80's were mostly a very fun and exciting bunch of years to be a child, with the crazy hippie 60's/70's mentality of the adults crossing over into a new "cleaner" era of exploding fresh technology and intelligent comic vision. Records became cassettes. Being able to record…

Did you say, awful "Cop Rock"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Rock

Re: Ask HN: What made the 80s so pleasant?

#35

Post by porcoda »

echlebek wrote: post #29

Stranger Things is not a documentary. Life sucked in the 80s and things are better now. Source: I was born in the 80s

I was born in the 70s and have to agree. I’ve commented to family members recently that some of the unpleasantness going on around the US lately is reminding me of the bad state my city was in during the 80s. I definitely do not want to repeat the 80s even if it had some highlights like my Commodore 64 and some good music.

Re: Ask HN: What made the 80s so pleasant?

#36

Post by omosubi »

mattl wrote: post #4

Stranger Things and other modern movies like Wonder Woman: 1984 present an inconsistent idea of what the 1980s was like. Case in point, there's a scene in a supermarket with a bunch of breakfast cereals from various pop franchises. That never happened in reality. In reality, the same cereal would be repackaged for whatever was the hot movie/brand at the time. This is somewhat sent up in this video from UK's The Adam…

Slightly tangential but I read this article recently on how deregulation and Reagan "created your childhood" - pretty interesting stuff. https://www.everything80spodcast.com/deregulation-and-advert...

Re: Ask HN: What made the 80s so pleasant?

#37

Post by mr_toad »

jhbadger wrote: post #23
ElectronShak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Case in point, there's a scene in a supermarket with a bunch of breakfast cereals from various pop franchises Yep, Season 3 Episode 1. Also seems like everyone went to the mall to hangout :-)

The mall hangout thing was pretty spot on though in the 1980s (I was born in 1970). So much so that eventually a lot of mall security started making a point of harassing teens that weren't actually actively shopping though.

I think mall culture came down to two things: fewer ways to communicate, so the mall was an obvious central gathering location, and secondly fewer things to do, so the mall was where bored teens hung out.

Re: Ask HN: What made the 80s so pleasant?

#39

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

cmollis wrote: post #9

I was born in 1967.. so I remember the 80's very well. First, let me say that it wasn't all great: AIDS was pretty scary (as someone else noted).. no one knew what the hell that was and it was killing a lot of people. There was also the ever-present spectre of nuclear war with Russia...Iran-Contra, 1987 stock market crash.. However, to your point, there was no exhausting news cycle, no exhausting bullshit social medi…

"Lay ordinate and abscissa on the century. Now cut me a quadrant: third quadrant if you please, I was born in sixty-five."*

Now that I got that out of my system, yea. The 80's were nothing special and kinda sucked in retrospect. Cars were crap, everyone thought we were months away from WW III, if you wanted to learn something, you had to head over to the library and hope the books you wanted were still there. Wikipedia, etc., simply did not exist. Google was not a thing. People made sure they always had change on their person in case they needed to make a phone call (girls I knew would have a dime sewn into their bra for emergencies). I lived in NYC at the time, Times Square was a shithole (no, it wasn't "gritty," it was flat-out nasty).

* OTOH, I think Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones came out in the 80's. And so did Neuromancer and we ended it with "Sex, Lies and Videotape" and the fall of the Soviet Union, so it wasn't all bad.

[edit] just googled it and Time Considered was written shortly after I was born. So much for that!

[second edit]Yeah, I'm old. The book I was thinking of was actually Stars in my pocket like grains of sand which was actually published in the 80's. So win one, lose one :-)

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