Bring Back the 80's!

Responding to anti-80's sentiment

monkeyinabox.net it's dot com.... just posted an article asking why all the retro interest in the 80's all of the sudden. So I figured I'd answer. :)

For a large percentage of the people who spend money at the moment (and thus convince vendors to pander to them) the 80's were an age of innocence. We're all a bunch of nostalgia freaks.

Also, the 80's were a very optimistic time. Not just because Reagan said they should be, but because all of the things you tout about in your article (video games, communications technology, computers, music videos) were only then beginning to blossom. We could watch cartoons that Tex Avery made in the 1940's promising a "home of tomorrow" that we felt we could live in by the time we grew up. Jim Henson, PBS and others did a since-then unprecidented job at actually trying to broadcast educational programming to the world without charging the world any money. Sesame street, electric company, 3-2-1 contact, bill nye, ghost writer, Mister Rogers, Cap'n Kangaroo, school house rock, nova, national geographic, the best that they can do nowadays is Barney, Teletubbies, and a few reruns of Arthur.

In the eastern hemisphere the 80's were a peak for television. Almost every britcom worth mentioning (ab fab, faulty towers, blackadder, are you being served, a fine romance, as time goes by, etc) were made in the eighties (the notable exception being Monty Python, which was a forerunner to the rest), and thats where anime got it's start as well (Gundam, Ranma ½, Kimagure Orange Road, Uresei Yatsura, Jubei Ninpucho, Bubblegum Crisis, Urotsokudoji)

Playgrounds were made out of metal, instead of interlocked plastic bubbles. The playground at Powell Butte elementary school had 2 slides, each of which were upwards of 10 feet tall. One 8x12x12 jungle gym (where I spent 60% of my recesses), one 12' wide jungle-gym-styled merry-go-round which saw 30 rpms from time to time, and a 20 (twenty!) foot tall swing set, with four swings. And four acres of tree lined field in full view of the recess monitor, which meant you could run to the other end of it (a quarter mile away) and not be in trouble.

Nobody got their hands mangled by posessed merry go rounds, or impaled themselves or got tetnis or any non-trivial burns on any of the scary peices of metal. Our playgrounds failed to live past the 80's thanks to FUD caused by ridiculously rare playground accidents.

That brings me to another severe failure since the 80's. In the 80's people believed that getting things done involved doing them. Now getting things done involves exploiting whatever is handy. If someone offended you, you used to give them a good punch in the nose. Now you sue them for defamation of character. If you were getting sued in the 80's, you made your case and the truth would set you free. Now you have to bury your opponent in paperwork before he does the same to you.

Video games had severe technical limitations, which meant that game designers were forced to use their imaginations to make games fun to play. Now there are so many options when making a game that game designers only focus on eye candy, largely to the detriment of overall game quality. I don't have an Xbox or a PS2, and I'll never feel compelled to play their games. (I'll get an Xbox cuz I need a media center though, of course)

Music was simply better. It is not a matter of taste. Zero people will tell you that the course of their lives were changed when they heard "hit me baby one more time" or "why can't I breathe" or "every day is a winding road". I think I've become fond of only a couple of dozen songs that were released since the end of the millenium.

Movies have not gone downhill since the eighties, at least not in most aspects. The ability to make seamless special effects has improved by ten fold every year (or the cost to do it has reduced tenfold, whichever) so now there are stories that just couldn't be effectively told in the eighties.. but movies have gotten unforgivably more expensive in spite of falling production costs, so that now movie tickets cost nearly as much as DVD's. That and since 2000, something like 60% of films are either sequels or remakes. This doesn't say the films are "bad", but it does say that the producers are frightened to try out new material.

The 80's had some very bad movies of course, such as anything that relied heavily enough on puppets, but it had some movies that simply haven't been equalled since: Terminator 1, Die Hard 1-3, The Goonies, The Last Starfighter, The Explorers, The Princess Bride, Tron, Short Circuit I+II, Certain nightmares on elm street, Certain hellraisers, Ghostbusters I+II, Certain Terry Gilliam flicks, Beetleguise, The Neverending Story, etc.

I think that aside from us nostalgics, our culture is heavily reflecting on the eighties now to meditate on the creativity we have since then lost. In order to make something new, we have to really examine this old stuff.. because it came from an era when new stuff was made freely, and we want to do that again.

Posted by jesse at July 1, 2004 04:34 PM