The thing that immediately reminds you of the 1980s

Superman II and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Two movies I saw 10 times apiece in the summer of 1981.

Pac-Man

pink/purple/aqua color combinations - It's so 80s.

John Hughes movies; Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller.

This exact shade of teal. It was INESCAPABLE.

Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels"

Songs with saxophone solos and synthesizers

Compact Discs. I was working part time in a record store and the owner made a big deal about how we were getting a bunch of CDs in the next shipment with a big display to show them off. I never saw him so excited. It was 1986. Every time I see a CD I can see my boss Cecil looking at me wide-eyed and saying, "They're called compact discs and they're not made of wax they're made of plastic. Plastic!" He gave me David Bowie's Let's Dance as a bonus but I didn't buy a player to play it for another two years.

[quote]He gave me David Bowie's Let's Dance as a bonus but I didn't buy a player to play it for another two years.

Cute! That's the opposite of what happened to most people, who bought CD players and couldn't find much to play on them. A cute cartoon in Stereo Review showed a dead man on the floor in front of a wall full of stereo equipment. In the corner of the room, his wife sat at a desk with a smoking gun beside her. She was writing a letter: "And, in future, I would suggest you delay the release of new technology until there is sufficient media to go with it. Do you have ANY IDEA what it's like hearing nothing but the '1812 Overture' all day, every day, month after month?"

About five different things in this one picture.

Chinese restaurants with color themes of R5 and Nagel prints in thin black frames.

My Perry Ellis salmon coloured linen blazer. My suits: Chipp, Alexander Julian, Armani, and high water Brooks Brothers sack suits.

Chicago house music

Seedy Times Square

The black-and-white L.A. Eyeworks ads that took the Blackglama concept and made it New Wave.

Shoulderpads

Laserdiscs

Mullets, big hair

Checkerboard Vans

15 dollar including tip dinner at Indian Restaurants on East 6th St.

Tama Janowitz, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney

Limelight, Palladium, Nell's, Boy Bar, Pyramid

R12, funny you should mention the Perry Ellis blazer. I had an Ellis chalk stripe double breasted jacket that I always received compliments on when I wore it. It was gorgeous, and the only reason I could afford was because it went on sale around Christmas time, and I happened to work at Bloomie's at the time, so I also got the company discount. My other suits were Ungaro, which were of very high quality in the eighties and had the same cut as an Armani(Bloomie's sold both the Armani and the Ungaro, but even on sale I couldn't afford Armani, but a good sale put the Ungaro in my price range). Nice clothes are another thing that remind of the eighties. Polo Green fragrance too. The boy I most loved to fuck(in fact, I was in love with him) would wear that scent, and it drove me crazy.

Melrose Avenue:

Flip and Aaardvark for cheap but cool vintage (which I wore)

Cowboys & Poodles, Let It Rock and Retail Slut for the trendies

The Groundlings for cheap comedy (Pee-wee Herman, Phil Hartman and Edie McClurg!)

Drake's for "adult books" (with the most '80s facade of them all)

Fellini's (straight bar) and The 1 (gay bar with GREAT music)

Most of it was gone by the time "Melrose Place" came along, but Fellini's was the inspiration for "Shooters" on the show.

Also, who can forget movies like Sailor in the Wild and Cousins, and mags like Playguy, STARS, Mandate, Stroke and Skinflicks? The pictorial one of these mags did on Jeff Stryker was covered in so much cum that I couldn't even open it after regular jerk off use for a year.

R17 I got Alexander Julian and Perry Ellis at sample sales, dear! I couldn't afford them either. Armanis were gifts from a banker boyfriends in his 30's. Have to have a turned out twink at Café Lux, Montrachet, Odeon, Indochine... I was such a whore, but that was the 80's.

Also early 80's Peppermint Lounge, Danceteria, Area. Vintage sharkskin. Rockabilly. Black jeans. Tower Records. Talking Heads. Clove cigarettes.

"New Wave Theatre" and Peter Ivers. Actual strange underground shit on broadcast TV.

"MV3," which was the L.A. version of "American Bandstand" for New Wavers.

British ska — and its great spiky graphic design.

Generra hypercolor shorts.

The stepfather character "Gary" on the "Ew!" skits for The Tonight Show always wears those horrible Generra clothes in earth tones. Those always make me think of the Eighties.

Dynasty.

R20, I was whorish in that I fucked friends and went to arcades to jack off and occasionally have sex, but I never got anyone to buy me suits. However, there was an old guy in the Bloomies men's furnishings department that always gave me ties(some of which were ridiculously expensive) and would take me out to lunch. I was such a bumpkin that I didn't know he wanted to fuck me; he seemed like a kindly gent. I wish I would have known, I might have gotten a few Armani's out of the deal too!

ANOTHER 80s THRWAD???? ENOUGH!

ANOTHER 80s THREAD???? ENOUGH!

NEVAH!

The little pleats in the shoulders of Perry Ellis shirts.....

Buying houses in East Hampton....

Screaming at my asshole ex because he made an AIDS joke. He died of it in 94.

"The Stud" in San Francisco, skinny black jeans, spiky hair, The Challenger disaster and multiple pages of death notices in the Bay Area Reporter.

Luke & Laura

Subscription-television boxes (ON-TV; Selec-TV)

Guess jeans and their b&w magazine ads.

A few days ago I saw a teenage girl wearing a pair of vintage Reebok running shoes and was immediately transported back to 1986 and going with my sister to the small local mall in our city and watching her spend her summer job money on a new wardrobe which included a pair of Reeboks. She was so proud of those shoes.

The other day, I saw a guy wearing a pair of the original K-Swiss sneakers. I haven't seen them since the '80s.

Driving gloves. In the eighties everyone seemed to wear them all the time, now I can't remember the last time I saw anyone wearing them, outside of Karl Lagerfeld.

The Preppy Handbook, polo shirts worn with their collars up, the ads of Benetton, MTV, Friday Night Videos, Molly Ringwald, Rick Dees, Panama Jack, sebagos, junk jewelry, fluorescent colors in clothing, red lipstick, Lady Di's wedding dress train, Luke and Laura's wedding, Dynasty and Falcon Crest, greed and excess.

Sharkskin and raw silk...

"Just Say No"

Mullets

Cabbage Patch Kids

E.T.

Shoulder pads

The last decade when Saturday morning cartoons constituted the majority of American animation

The many hairstyles of Blair Warner from her early faux-Farrah do to her ungodly she-mullet in the Edna's Edibles years to her simple, sensible, timeless look in season 9.

Susan Clark's ultra-butch spiky chipmunk cut from [italic]Webster[/italic] (Mackenzie Astin also wore a similar do on [italic]Facts of Life[/italic])

The bulge in Bruce Boxleitner's TRON unitard

J.R. Ewing's smile that meant he was up to something dastardly

"Whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis?"

"Beat It"

Ernest P. Worrell

The Pointer Sisters

Cyndi Lauper

Air Supply

"The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" — humorous then, disturbingly prescient now

"Somewhere Out There"

SCTV

Christopher Atkins' ass in [italic]A Night in Heaven[/italic]

The room-to-room railroad on [italic]Silver Spoons[/italic]

ALF

Annie

The plane coming up over the sunrise at the beginning of every [italic]Golden Girls[/italic] episode

The AIDS quilt

Ronald Reagan's jellybean speech

The episode of [italic]Punky Brewster[/italic] where Mike Fulton went to jail for something Punky did

[italic]Return to Oz[/italic]

[italic]Spaceballs[/italic]

The five-minute long ad that used to appear at the end of every Disney video in the early part of the decade.

The fall of the Berlin Wall

Pee-Wee's Playhouse

[italic]Muppet Babies[/italic]

[italic]Alvin and the Chipmunks[/italic]

[italic]Garfield and Friends[/italic]

[italic]Gremlins[/italic]

[italic]Small Wonder[/italic]

The Izod alligator

The cola wars

[italic]Gimme A Break![/italic]

[italic]227[/italic]

The marriages, divorces and remarriages of Gary and Val Ewing

Network promo campaigns that Kicked ASS!

"Cowabunga, dudes!"

[italic]Honey, I Shrunk the Kids[/italic]

Kurt Russell in his prime

[italic]Bosom Buddies

Night Court

Benson[/italic]

Alex P. Keaton

Mr. Belvedere

Julie Andrews' comeback in movies

The music video for "Physical"

The music video for "Allentown"

The CBS Special intro animation

"IN STEREO Where Available"

Men in pink Oxford shirts. They never wore those shirts before the 80s because pink was a girl's color. Men would be thought "homo" if they wore pink. But suddenly, it was everywhere. Women wore shoulder pads but men wore coats that were off-the-shoulder. Big, slouchy coats with pink Oxford shirts underneath and a baseball cap on the head.

It was like the Manhattan yuppie uniform. I wonder how many of those men are now skinny, tanned, bald headed guys driving around the Hamptons in a convertible sports car with the young, blonde, third wife sitting next to him. I live in the Hamptons. Nine months of the year I'm on the road with pickup trucks and school buses. Summer comes and it's tons of old bald guys in convertibles on the back roads.

Music videos for movie theme songs, something we don't see today. Every big block buster had a theme song and a video with clips from the movie.

Max Headroom

"Shutter shade" sunglasses

Rubik's Cube

Jelly shoes

He-Man and She-Ra

Overproduced music with synths and drum machines

Breakdancing

Huge boom boxes

High-top sneakers

Parachute pants

DataLounge

mix tapes MTV Max Headrom Neon Wham "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" Wall of TV's in the dimly lit teen deparments Big everything - earrings, shoulder pads, hair

Big American cars. I know they were more predominate in the previous decades but there were still a lot of land yachts cruising the roads in the 1980s and when I see one today which is rare, it takes me back to riding to the grocery store on a Saturday in my dad's Mercury Montego station wagon.

I was born in Britain in 1980 and barely remember the 80's.

I remember seeing the Berlin Wall coming down on TV and knowing that a lot of people hated Thatcher.

New Kids On The Block and Bobby Brown were the music I remember hearing then. My parents loved The Police.

I didn't hear the "classic 80s hits" till later.

R43: Thundercats, GI Joe, David the Gnome

Video jukebox on HBO. It seemed like they were always playing "I'm Still Standing" by Elton John, "Stand Back" by Stevie Nicks, and "Electric Avenue" by Eddie Grant.

Watching Mommie Dearest every time they showed it on cable.

"That's Incredible," "Real People," "Circus of the Stars," "Star Search," "Puttin' On The Hits," "Solid Gold"

Izod shirts, and the knockoffs they sold at places like Sears & JCPenney with foxes or dragons instead of alligators

Magazines with real content and interesting stories

Just Say No

"Where's The Beef?"

This:

This:

The Saint 12 West Palladium Twilo Tunnel Private Eyes Factory Danceteria

Damn formatting.

The Saint

12 West

Palladium

Twilo

Tunnel

Private Eyes

Factory

Danceteria

And this:

Lastly, this:

I saw a mint condition inbox Sony Walkman in an antique store on Sunday and I thought about my cousin who had an Aiwa that did everything, even had an equalizer on it and he could record songs off the built in radio. He wore it everywhere.

I was so jealous because my little cheapo $25 walkman could barely play a tape all the way through so much as auto-reverse to the B side and forget about FM radio, mine didn't even have AM.

Today even the cheapest phone makes that Aiwa look like shit.

I graduated high school in 1981, so the 80s took me from 16 to 26 ............ I remember new wave music, prime time soap operas, SEX, going to midnight movies, going to bars, SEX, spending $ 900 on my first VCR, getting my driver's license, having my first job, SEX ...........

Going to the video store, looking at the wonderful hand-drawn cover art for even the campiest B-movies. Having to choose between Beta and VHS. Being incredibly annoyed when the movie wasn't rewound by the previous renter.

Three things, actually -- money, affordable housing, and jobs.

YUP - 3 bedroom floor throughs in Park Slope for 1000 a month.

[quote]Being incredibly annoyed when the movie wasn't rewound by the previous renter.

I don't FEEL like rewinding them!

Yeah, I miss video stores too R58.

As kids every Saturday dad would give us enough money for two rentals which meant they didn't have to be back until Monday morning.

Spending an hour on a summer day in the place looking for something great was always a lot of fun.

The owners who were Pakistani took a liking to me and would always give me a deal and let me have an extra movie free, or an extra day before having to return them. More than once I'd run an errand for them and they'd give me a rental in exchange.

I was one of the first members when they opened in 1985 and one of the last when they closed in 1996. A Blockbusters opened across the street in 1992 and they lost most of their customers.

RIP National Video.

We finally got a separate tape rewinder to save wear and tear on the VCR deck, but then suddenly DVDs were all the rage.

This:

By the way, the uploader has a great channel if you're into 70s-90s nostalgia.

R22 - I loved MV3! Richard Blade hosts a Sirius radio show and it's awesome. That was some seriously great alternative television!

My dad used to whack off to 20 minute workout at 6;30 in the morning before he used to go to work.

[quote] Polo Green fragrance too. The boy I most loved to fuck(in fact, I was in love with him) would wear that scent, and it drove me crazy.

Same exact deal here. My first love. Whenever I see a bottle and smell it, I get weak in the knees.

Does anyone remember Lucy's on Columbus ave., The Big Kahuna in the Village, and Sweet Hurricane on the UES?

Finally, this:

Me too R67. The first day of HS I was walking through a hallway and a beautiful blond preppy boy was spraying it on himself. I can see him and smell the cologne and it takes me right back to 1985.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off and white puffy jackets paired w white pants and gelled, spikey hair.

Everything else could possibly be late-70s or early-90s, but not those things. Pure, mid-80s gold.

Parachute Pants

Swatch (I had an awesome white one with no numbers, just neon blue hands)

Body Glove bathing suits in neon colors

Zinc sun block in neon colors, Fun face painting on the beach!

High-waisted, tapered, Guess jeans made all asses look good.

Baggy Guess jeans with the pockets down the front of the legs.

St. Elsewhere

Friday Night Videos

LA Gear running shoes!

[quote]15 dollar including tip dinner at Indian Restaurants on East 6th St.

For two.

The beginning of not being able to smoke in a lot of places. Some places you could, some places you couldn't.

(I'm trying to hunk of positive things....and it's hard).

For me:

Tower Records downtown (NYC)...actually, Tower Records everywhere. Loved it Great store. Fun to just hang out in and browse.

All the hair gels.

All those retro style East Village stores.

Over sized jackets from thrift stores with the cuffs turned up.

Sade (no I was not a fan).

Boy George and all that 'gender bending' stuff from England.

Videos...MTV...Girls Just Wanna Have FU -UN

'Being incredibly annoyed when the movie wasn't rewound by the previous renter.'

Some places charged you if you returned a video unrewound....

Crystal shops.

Shakti Gawain and all those books.

Channellers (actually we had a thread on the 80s New Age some time ago and covered all that stuff).

The Face (from England)

Self help gurus like Anthony Robbins. A buddy of mine is reading "Personal Power" and he's really into it.

Nouvelle cuisine.

R46 - We had a '69 Mercury Montego. Lightweight car with a V8, engine. I remember being very young in that car with my Mom driving after we went to see my dad at the hospital. We were at a stoplight and some young punk pulled up next to us and started revving his engine. My mother, a very conservative, sweet woman, SMOKED him at the light. She didn't bat an eye. One of my favorite childhood memories.

[quote]My mother, a very conservative, sweet woman, SMOKED him at the light. She didn't bat an eye.

By far one of the best mom stories I've ever read 8^)

Rubik's cube

Trivial pursuit

The Lost Boys

Geraldo talk show

Saturday night WWF

Reese's pieces

The Day After

Freddy Krueger

Spuds Mackenzie

Kajagoogoo

Jolt cola

The TV show Hunter. Saturday night was Hunter night with the entire family around the TV--pop, chips and watching Hunter drop the hammer on some dirtbag with Dee Dee kicking some ass too.

[quote]I was so jealous because my little cheapo $25 walkman could barely play a tape all the way through so much as auto-reverse to the B side

Those auto-reverse things rarely worked well..

CDs, especially classical. I hated 90% of '80s pop music. I found a smaller community of classical music fans within my existing gay community and we would go shopping together every weekend.

VCRs and gay porn. Brian Maxon was my favorite. And Bobby Madison.

"You take me away...to Another World."

The three As: AIDS, aerobics, and AA. I got sober, got in shape, made lots of new friends, and lost lots of them.

Oh, and food became better, starting for me with cookbooks by Marcella Hazan, Martha Stewart, and Alice Waters. I never got into the habit of eating canned, boxed, and frozen food, like the stuff I ate growing up.

Murder She Wrote

Smugly making fun of the 1970s without stopping to consider how future generations would look at you.

The Ken doll look for gay male bodies--muscular, but not too muscular, shaved, and tanned. The guys in ONJ's Physical video exemplified this look.

It was interesting to see this look again last night on the VMAs during Demi Lovato's performance. Her male dancers had the perfect 80's body. I wonder if it's making a comeback?

First time I saw The Breakfast Club,Linda Evans shoulder pads,Miami Vice pastel jacket that I thought was the coolest,AHa's Take On Me video on MTV,Billie Jean,Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual(played it to death),The Cosby Show,Madonna magazine covers,Rob Lowe's butt in Youngblood(wore out that pause button),Christopher Atkins Playgirl issue(wore that out too),when the Berlin Wall fell,fucking Reagan and Nancy,Princess Diana People Magazine covers,John Schneider's bulge and feathered hair on Dukes,when The Challenger blew up,my first Beta machine with it's big clunky buttons.

Me too R57

Asteroids, Starcastle, Ms.Packman at the arcade

Duran Duran, Def Leppard, Madonna, Prince, hair metal - Motley Crue .. on the MTV.

Trans Am, IROC-Z - classic American muscle cars.

Xanadu, American Gigolo, The Terminator

Yuppies.

Jeff Sessions

New Wave. Slam Dancing. KROQ.

Laser light show at the planetarium to heavy metal music

Nissan Maxima. For some strange reason it's the first thing I think of when someone brings up the 80s.

80s Maxima . Seemed like everyone had one or wanted one.

[quote]The other day, I saw a guy wearing a pair of the original K-Swiss sneakers. I haven't seen them since the '80s.

I bought a pair sometime during the '90s. They were made like shit. Not only did they not fit, it hurt to wear them. And I'd always worn them because they were so comfortable.

Tom Cruise movies. I saw every one of them, often on opening day, until Interview with the Vampire. HATED those books.

Being a Martha Stewart person rather than an Alice Waters person.

When Madonna was truly awesome and made great pop music.

Hall and Oates

Izod

Molly Ringwald

RIP popular music. The likes of Madonna ruined it.

Classical music. I stopped listening to popular music around 1986.

I was a huge Madonna fan, and her 80s music exemplifies the decade for me.

R103, I loathe, hate, and detest Madonna with every fiber of my musical being, and her 80s music is emblematic of the decade for me.

I was born in '78 so I really can't remember a time before Madonna. For gay guys of my generation, we grew up with her and her music instantly takes us back to our childhoods and teen years.

My sympathies, R105.

r104, did you hate the 80s or just Madonna? Or just hate her now?

I loved her in the 80s, came of age during the NYC 80s club scene (and grateful to have come through it alive). I began to turn off her during the whole Kaballah thing, found her amusingly pretentious during her fake British accent-packet-of-crisps English Rose period, feel sorry for her as we witness her chase her youth Nora Desmond style and basically icked out by the African baby buying.

I have always hated her, R107. I hated her music first, starting in 1984, and when I realized who she was, I hated her. Such trash.

r108 was crimping his hair and listening to Foreigner.

No, R109, I have never owned a single minute of Foreigner excrescence, either. Nor Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Huey Lewis, or any synthetic crap. The only popular music I found bearable was by Talking Heads, Police, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt. After buying a CD player in 1986, I switched nearly exclusively to classical.

Solid Gold

"No popular music." Well, SMELL YOU!

It turned to shit, R112. What was I supposed to do, buy shitty music? Nuh-fucking-unh.

I love it when my old threads get bumped!

Maggie

Donald and Ivana

Conrad reminds me of the 1980s.

Steve Strange

Just the word...

"Sheena"

I cannot imagine only listening to classical music for the past 30 years. All the music that was missed in that time! The mind boggles.

Such as, r120?

One of my iconic albums...

DL is full of eccentrics. If someone pays no mind to music for decades, that's his choice, although an odd one.

Men wore suits, and often really nice suits.

Getting my first VCR in 1983 and renting my first porn a couple months later. My local video store didn't carry gay porn, so I ended up renting Piggy's.

DREAMGIRLS on Broadway.

The color red.

My entire house, built in 1987.

Rick Astley.

Wally George. The beginning of confrontational and reality t.v.

Headbanger's Ball, and of course its attendant goblin Rikki 'The Interrupter' Rachtman.

Usually the guys who vehemently detest Madonna are the guys who have no rhythm and can't dance. I almost feel sorry for them...almost. R110. Never experiencing the liberating feeling of cutting loose on the dance floor and getting the opportunity to display physical expression.

FLASHDANCE

All the DL music threads.

R123

There are plenty of others but THIS is what came to my head...