The 80s Nostalgia Thread

Okay, Captain SNES is a comic that basically acts as a sequel to Captain N. At one point there is a five page◊ bonus comic◊ about◊ Captain◊ Atari.◊ The three villains that Captain Atari must defeat are Evil Otto, from Berserk, Croc, from Pitfall! and Spinner. I've scoured the net, but I have no idea which game Spinner comes from. Does anyone know?

Ugh, a wiki walk reminded me of the sicking 60's era nostaliga that hit the 80's.

I'm talking about the pop culture, mainstream media trying to hammer "THIS IS IMPORTANT,, IT WAS A THING THAT HAPPENED". Not what real people outside of NY or LA thought about the 60's.

A People Magazine article written at the time:

There was a flood of 60's -OMG THIS IT'S BEEN TWENTY YEARS- specials on PBS during the 80's and early 90's. As aging hippies tried to say they were "all super serious guys! Pay attention to us!".

As the child of the 80's, I was not impressed. Hippies did appeal to some other girls in my class - hippie day in high school always attracted the usual suspects - but not me.

Now nostalgia is a personal thing as that article suggests. I loved the music and in The '90s, I had heaps of 60's music greatest hits.

But as Cracked.com pointed out: during the "Summer of Love" and the protest era, music like this topped the charts:

The '70s nostalgia was organic and grew up from DJ's and artists playing with it and the fans gobbling it up. Ditto 80's nostalgia - radio stations played Nothing but Hits and the public wanted more.

But it's was a weird era in The '80s. Instead of the playful nostalgia it was this drab "THIS IS SUPERIMPORTANT THAT YOU MUST REMEMBER" pop-culture nostalgia.

The 60s nostalgia movement did give us The Wonder Years, but thats the only thing that really came out of it.

I recall more 5Os nostalgia. It's what gave us power shoulders, things like the navy-and-cream phase and a stress on hair products...

edited 7th Dec '17 5:33:30 PM by Euodiachloris

I was still a little kid in the 1980s, but I remember seeing equal parts of both at various times. I remember not understanding why The Big Chill and a bunch of other early-1980s melodramas were such a big deal, or why people were so upset about the '60s being over (especially considering my own mom was a kid then and would have only seen a lot of the turmoil on TV, if at all).

I was born in 1990, but grew up surrounded by eighties pop culture and have always felt weirdly nostalgic for a decade I didn't even experience. I've spent all evening listening to eighties pop songs and feeling particularly wistful.

It doesn't help that that PSA of Ronald Reagan telling kids that "racist talk is un-American" showed up on my Twitter feed earlier. And I'm like, man. I know the Reagan administration did plenty of truly awful things (Iran-Contra, their inaction on the AIDS crisis, etc), and I probably would have hated him if I had been an adult back then, but at least he was a better class of scumbag than the president today.

Reagan was a product of his time, federal funding for AIDS was "$2.3 billion in 1989 and nearly $6 billion total over his presidency." per Wikipedia.

As a child of The '80s, I saw his presidency first hand. The "Reagan build up" helped minorities get ahead via the GI BILL - many joined the Reagan era military and then got out and went to school on the GI BILL. Many took advantage of the "kickers" - addons like the Army College Fund - that put top tier universities within their reach.

Reagan signed the INF treaty - taking a whole class of nuclear weapons out of service.

As much as he is a whipping boy for civil right in The '80s, it was under his presidency that the Justice Department and the EEOC started enforcing the cases that reversed decades of discrimination against women and minorities.

An American history professor I had made the following observation - while Kennedy gets credit for the Civil Rights era, he did less for Civil Rights than Eisenhower. LBJ did more but had that litte problem called TheVietnamWar that overshadowed his presidency. Nixon and Reagan continued the trend of enforcing those laws.

Nixon is beloved by many Native American tribes for giving back their lands and improving conditions

While Reagan did veto one bill, his justice department build on the legacy from Eisenhower to Carter.

He's nowhere near the boogeyman the media makes him out to be.

Then again, it's my own Nostalgia Filter - my father worked for a defense contractor, my mother a nurse in town. The Reagan era was good for both of them: he worked and saved enough to send me to college, she was an immigrant who became chief nurse at our local hospital, helped by policies that removed roadblocks she would have had in The '60s.

Edited by TairaMai on Jul 15th 2018 at 3:35:42 PM

Nixon established the EPA, too. Even the... shall we say "less good" presidents of yesteryear did some good things. Not anymore.

Anyone remember the Urban Legend that keeping batteries in the freezer made them last longer? Along with the rumor of the green "M&M's" (first they were toxic, then they were a legal Spanish fly).

Along with razors in candy and the poodle in the microwave, these were what I remember most as the "faxlore" or oddball legends of the 80's.

The battery thing stopped when many news stations did studies and people just wanted a place to put their ketchup and butter without the coppertops hogging vital freezer real estate.