The Excessive Eighties: a time where you go-go when you want to kick up your Sunday shoes as you walk like an Egyptian, hear doves cry or feel the Punky power while you moonwalk the Thriller.
All the men were preppies who wore pastel suits with narrow ties, drove sports cars that Lee Iacocca personally stood behind and traded stocks on Wall Street - after all, as Oscar Wilde said, nothing says success like excess. (Unless they happened to be teenagers, in which case they were Totally Radical or studied karate and learnt the meaning of "Wax On, Wax Off".) Everyone had huge hairdos, enough make-up to sink a ship and power suits with shoulderpads big enough to knock the giant mirrored sunglasses off anyone who walked within a three foot radius of them. And those without them had flat-tops and wore gym clothes and break-danced on top of cardboard. Millenials (then known as "Echo Boomers" and later "Generation Y") started being born, one day to become, despite their best efforts, the young adults of The Turn of the Millennium.
Computing technology first became a true cultural force in this decade, starting a trend that would keep on snowballing to this very day. The Eighties was the decade of cell phones literally sized and shaped like bricks, jokes about being unable to program VCRs, the death of Betamax, and the beginnings of personal computers and gaming consoles beginning to proliferate inside homes, perhaps one of the trends from this decade with the largest of cultural implications. Cable television also took off big time, with MTV, TBS, HBO, and CNN becoming household acronyms.
In the US, it was also the first wave of the Japanese Invasion, the inklings of which started in '78 with the dub of Battle of the Planets, continuing on with Star Blazers ('79),Voltron ('84), getting even more hardcore with Robotech in '85, and hitting its apex by cranking the qualityUp to Eleven with the nationwide release of AKIRA ('88).
On the homefront, the 1980s produced a rash of pop-cultural icons that today are looked upon, at worst, with Affectionate Parody, and at best, as the national ideal. The conservative political culture of the era meant two rather contradictory things for the production of pop-culture; on the one hand, the surge of private enterprise together with new media technologies allowed corporations such as Hasbro an unprecedented ability to build massive franchises around their products, typically with a TV show and accompanying toys, but on the other Moral Guardian complaints would challenge the ethics of making a show that was "essentially one large commercial." The result was the rather spoof-worthy And Knowing Is Half the Battle segment common to many mass franchise shows, shoving an Anvilicious moral into the action. Fortunately, these were conveniently located after the actual plot, so kids could just turn it off at that point and run down to buy the toys. Besides, the segments makegreatjoke fodder.
Politically, the first part of the decade, Cold War tensions continued to escalate. Some accuse this of being an intentional move by the West to render the economically inept Soviet Union infeasible by drawing its resources away from things like infrastructure and feeding its people, which market economies could accomplish easily. While this is, essentially, what ended up happening (though more complicated than that in real life; in Eastern Europe the decade's real deathblow to communism was considered to have been all the new media technology), the fact that the other possible outcome of such a strategy was global thermonuclear annihilation had a profound impact on Western media tropes. Most obviously, dystopian Speculative Fiction, particularly set After the EndTwenty Minutes into the Future, enjoyed a surge.
The second part of the decade, however, couldn't be more different. Gorbachev, spry for a CPSU leader at age 54 (this was the only time in the Cold War that the Soviet leader was substantially younger than the American), shook up the by-then sclerotic Soviet leadership upon taking power in 1985. Gorbachev restructured the economy (perestroika) for "accelerated" development (uskoreniye), encouraged openness (glasnost), made tentative moves towards democracy (demokratizatsiya), and went Karting with Reagan. For a hot second in 1988-89, it seemed like the USSR had reached a final rapprochement with the West. And then came The Great Politics Mess-Up.
Throughout this era, there came new problems like the spread of AIDS which created a public health panic that dealt first a body blow to the gay community as homophobes treating them as modern lepers (even though that community took the danger seriously far sooner than others). However, the epidemic paradoxically later proved a partial blessing in disguise for gay rights as stricken people like Rock Hudson were shoved out of the closet, forcing the public to realize that LGBTI people were all around them, much like themselves. The Eighties also had the highest murder rate in U.S. history, almost twice what it is today.
Politically speaking, the decade lasted roughly from the inauguration of Ronald Reagan on January 20, 1981 to the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, so almost 11 years. (Sometimes Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister in 1979 is considered the start, especially in the UK.) Culturally, the decade lasted roughly from the death of Disco in 1979 to the release of Nirvana's album Nevermind in 1991.
Thanks to a common twenty- or thirty-year lag, it's still The Eighties in much of Fictionland. Although The Seventies and The Nineties are gradually returning.
See Also: The Forties, The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, The Nineties, Turn of the Millennium and The New Tens.
Popular tropes from this time period include:
The Aggressive Drug Dealer: Crack cocaine and heroin caught on big during this decade, along with their pushers, hence the establishment of this trope as part of the larger "Just Say No" movement.
Animated Adaptation: Of practically everything, including films, TV shows, comic books, video games, action figures, dolls, plush toys, music videos, and real-life celebrities!
Anime, called Japanimation at the time, started becoming somewhat popular in the US in the '80s (although it would take untill the second half of the 90's untill it truly exploded in mainstream popularity).
Canada Does Not Exist: A wave of low-budget cop and action-adventure dramas start being produced in Canada, but primarily for U.S. consumption. This leads to the weird phenomenon of shows which take place in a "nowhereland" that is neither fully the US nor completely Canada.
Cold War and Red Scare: A big feature of this period, particularly in the early 1980s with the European Missiles Crisis, the Nicaraguan civil war and Libya. Especially Libya. The Cold War plots here can be divided squarely between before and after 8 December 1987, the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the U.S. and USSR. It's generally straight Red Scare before that. After, it's Renegade Russian or Make The Bear Angry Again.
Darker and Edgier: Even though this was a fun decade for many people this decade had many negative sides to it:
Crack cocaine was created and many people became destructively addicted to it; to make matters worse, the turf wars between dealers and gangs decimated many black neighborhoods in big cities.
The sexually-transmitted disease AIDS became an epidemic. The first two cases of patients dying from AIDS had taken place in 1959, but there are only a handful of known cases dating to the 1960s and 1970s. At least 121 AIDS-related deaths took place between 1980 and 1981. By the end of the 1980s, the disease had spread worldwide and there were over a million known patients. And in the U.S., the initial stigma of AIDS as a "gay disease" contributed to unfair ostracization of its victims and LGBT people in general.
The beginning of the (currently ongoing) "war on drugs" resulted in skyrocketing incarceration rates, hundreds of thousands of people ending up behind bars for nonviolent offenses.
More generally, the 1980s were the time when the American middle class began losing ground in terms of GDP share. Socio-economic inequalities more or less kept in check for a half-century started growing again, creating an increasing polarization between haves and have-nots.
'80s Hair: If you were in a (popular) metal band or were a female country singer you wore it one way and only one way, BIG! This was also the decade in which the mullet really went mainstream. (Though the actual name "mullet" was only coined and applied retrospectively in The Nineties).
Football Hooligans: For the UK at least. It became such a problem that Margaret Thatcher put together a cabinet just to tackle them. Measures put in place then led to Hillsborough. These days the problem has been virtually eradicated, although the trope appears quite often in foreign films set in the UK where football is involved, and Hooligans continue to cause problems in places not the UK (mostly South America).
I Was Quite A Fashion Victim: Applying to works looking at this decade in hindsight, a survivor of the so-called "decade fashion disaster" might confess to this.
Montage Ends The VHS: It's when a commercial VHS tape has trailers, intros or just a compilation montage promoting a line of tapes at the end, after a movie or episode it contains is over.
Works that are set/were made in this time period include: (Note: many were also a part of the Nineties; usually those made in the later part of the decade, and are marked with a '*').
X-Factor. First version. Debuted in February, 1986.
Kid Flash/Wallace "Wally" West assumed the mantle of The Flash in March, 1986.
Watchmen: First appeared in September, 1986. Remember that it's an alternate form of the world we know. Fashions, technology, drugs, and politics are different. Except in the movie.
New Warriors. First appeared in December, 1989. Received their own series in July, 1990.
Judge Dredd: Started in 1977, but many of the most significant stories, such as the Apocalypse War and The Judge Child appeared in this time period, as well as iconic antagonists The Dark Judges and P.J. Maybe.
a-ha - This Norwegian pop group had a number one hit in 1985 with "Take On Me" thanks to its partially-animated music video becoming an MTV hit. They remained popular everywhere but the US.
Maria Conchita Alonso. (Her first record came out in 1979, but she had many successful Spanish-language records in the 1980s.)
The B-52's - Although they formed in 1976 and released their first album in 1979, the Eighties were their most successful decade by far. In the late 1980s, their music finally crossed over to mainstream radio.
Anita Baker - A female R&B singer whose ballads became quite popular.
Bananarama - A British girl group who had a series of hits in the mid-80's including "Cruel Summer" and a cover of the 1970 hit "Venus."
The Bangles - One of the first all-female rock bands to have major commercial success, having many top 10 hits throughout the latter half of the decade.
Barenaked Ladies. Released their first indie tapes in 1988-1989.
Bauhaus. An influential 1970s band, continued releasing new material until their 1983 breakup. They considered founders of Goth Rock.
Beastie Boys - Widely considered to be pioneers of the rap-rock movement, they were solely responsible for breaking the color barrier of rap.
Leif Garrett (Although he reached his peak in the late Seventies, he released two albums in 1980 and 1981, and was still touring and acting at this time)
Genesis complete their transition from a moderately successful progressive rock band led by Peter Gabriel to a massively successful pop group led by Phil Collins (both men also become stars in their own right during this period).
