The 80s Nostalgia Thread

So much learning! So much 80's!

The number one song the day I was born was "Monkey". I like 80s music, but this amps up the 80s-ness so much it gets annoying.

So! 80's! It hurts....

Oh my, a link from Irregular Webcomic! sent me to a LEGO wiki, where I managed to find this. It was my first "serious" LEGO set, after years of having only known Duplo and Fabuland^* I no longer remember which was the first Fabuland set I got, but among the ones I remember having, the one I remember most vividly is the Mill with Shop....

edited 21st Jun '14 11:14:09 AM by Medinoc

You know the Coke ad campaign going on about "share a Coke with..."?

Bill Murray follows it to its logical conclusion.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

At Dragoncon I picked up a Transformers: Generation 1 boxed set, but until tonight hadn't saw any of it. Now that I have watched some eps, I wonder why my pre-teen self thought they were cool. I was either snarking at it or groaning about the bad puns.

To be honest that's pretty normal for those sorts of cartoons, I've found. A lot of '80s cartoons are pretty much glorified toy commercials aimed at little kids, so it's hardly surprising if they're a bit short on dialogue and plot. But then, with Transformers, that would be kind of missing the point, as the appeal is more "look at the cool transforming robots!" than anything else.

(Having said that, why is it anime of the period seems to do much better, even American adaptations, even if it were kid-oriented, when watched again as an adult? Or is that just me?)

Funny, because most anime was also a toy commercial, but even then most of those series were written with plot and stuff. Some were aimed at adults in Japan, but the dubbs were censored in the name of Think of the Children!.

The writers for the Transformers G1 and Gi Joe cartoon did do a few good episodes.

The one good thing all those toy shows did, was give new writers a break in Hollywood. Even kiddie shows needed writers. JMS of Babylon Five fame cut his teeth in the cartoon market. It was so big that a producer who quit just before the crash of 1989 bought a village in France. Not a villa, an entire village due to his success in cartoons.

"Stand by me"

Shit made me cry every time

Anyone else just watch the Punky Brewster cartoon intro(but just the intro, I didn't like the cartoon) because they thought it was Cyndi Lauper? Even thought your alternatives at first were Rock 'n' Wrestling (also tangentially tied to Cyndi Lauper) and the 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo?

But that intro though. So appealing.

edited 21st May '15 8:32:22 AM by MeninistWunderkind

So much 80's cheezy goodness in cartoons back then....

Speaking of 1980's animation, I have had Earworm in my head since Friday. I am a mid-teens young person with late-reproducing Boomer parents. I already have had a fondness since my early childhood for old saturday morning shows of my parents's childhood in the late 60's and 70's. I don't know much about 1980's animation, however. My parents were young adults then. Thus, when I was introduced to a show from the early '80's with a very earwormy theme via a Wiki Walk here, I was unprepared. The similarity of this theme to the Hall of The Mountain King does not help!

Doole-ee-doo-de-doo, Inspector Gadget...

Oh God, now I'm looking at the LEGO wiki. Thanks, Medinoc.

A little searching turns up my first LEGO set: http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/4015_Freighter

Ah, the eighties, where box art only needed to state that the toy boat does, in fact, really float.

I love Bricklink. It's like the Lego wiki, but with a 'buy it now' option.

So, not a website for those of us with poor impulse control then?

Alrighty, did the UK have a retailer like Toys 'R Us or Linoel Playworld? It was candyland for a girl who wanted her barbie (and yes GI Joe), legos and latter micromachines and other goodies.

I remember when $100.00 toys needed the "special counter" where you had to take a slip of paper to the nice man who when into the back to get that expensive toy.

And Daddy did buy me an erector set, my cousins got one so I got one. I used to play with it and make stuff. Barbie got her hair caught in a motor once...

Anyways...

How did you tropers buy the toys of your childhood?

We had Toys R Us here, but in my neck of the woods it was mostly independent toy shops.

I bought them with my xmas or birthday money.

Allowance money, supplemented by some lawn mowing.

And here I was just batting my pretty eyes, (and working my ass off trying to get good grades). A girl's best weapon is "Daddy, pleassee"...

So, mental Wiki Walk led me to try and look up the Fighting Game I played as a kid on good old Amstrad CPC, with only the knowledge that the executable was named "FIST.BIN". Turns out it was The Way of the Exploding Fist.

A TV Tropes search led me to the GameBreaker.Fighting Games page and... oh my god! I used to do exactly this! (before getting wtfpwned by the first AI opponent that knew how to jump).

Which means there's at least another person on this site who played this game.

edited 19th Feb '16 1:11:46 PM by Medinoc

For those that grew up in the 80's when they had Nickelodeon. Does anyone remember seeing Maple Town or Maya the Bee?

South Africa got Maya — big time. No Nickelodeon required. Just SABC 1 and 2.

I was 0-9 during these years. My limited memories include:

• No one in my family, extended included, had poofy hair in spite of being all over the media at the time. In fact, my father's mother (retired, lived with us) was the only poofy haired among us, with one of those 1950's perms that stunk up the house.
• Actually going outside! Had a lot of fun exploring the neighborhood, biked to the park often which was *gasp* unsupervised.
• Atari, and then Nintendo...and how life consuming Tetris was. (I got to level 23 a few times as a 9 year old)
• Writing down passwords in old games.
• Nintendo Power!
• Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Weird Al...the Holy Trinity of 80's music.
• Animation had gotten so good so fast that I couldn't stand to watch the stuff my older siblings liked. I felt like I was watching cardboard. (incidentally, cardboard is now one of my favorite shows)

All I can think of right now. :)

edited 25th May '17 1:45:29 PM by sarysa

@Taira Mai: I can't believe I forgot about Square One. Maybe my brain pushed that into the 90's, but I loved that show. :D

@Re: Shows not aging well, didn't watch the worse ones until the 90's. Inspector Gadget, Heathcliff, MLP, TMNT...all had good plots even though most merchandized.

@Meninist Wunderkind I vaguely remember it, and the intro rings a bell. 85-86 is why I barely remember it, I guess.

@Taira Mai: Allowance money? I had like none until the '90s. Had to beg my parents, though they present-bombed us on Christmas. Also got prize money one year (prob '90s) doing hoagie sales for my school, though I think my parents subsidized my win.

I'll end with the song I perhaps imitated most:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv6tuzHUuuk