July 01, 2004

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
Comments

Hah! Boy did I light a fire under you. I'm not sure what your dot.com comment is, but if you're saying I should dot.com, you're right. It was hosed by some domain stealer and then someone bought it and made a lame ass site with nothing on it.

It's hard for me not to think of the 80's as good. I was young. I had no bills, so lot's of time to spend playing games, exploring new technology and just having a good time. Was what we had back then better than today's? Hell no. Would I want to go back to what I had back then? Hell no. Would I like the innocence and and free time? Hell yes.

Playgrounds were much more fun, but they were dangerous as hell. Why are they all plastic these days? Safety first. Sure, Men With Hats, were doing the Safety Dance, but kids were falling off tall slides and flying off merry -go-rounds onto asphalt. I'm not sure where you were in the 80's, but I remember enough kids getting hurt.

If you are stuck in the 80's for music, then I feel sorry for you. Sure there's good music from then, but please, if you think Britney is the only choice these days, look a little deeper. Let me know what kind of music you like and I'll point you toward some good stuff. There's so much good music these days. None of the radio stations around here play it. Radio back in the 80's was much better, before it all got bought up and turned into one national station of crap.

Movies? Sure there are good movies from every decade, but I hardly think the 80's offered up anything OVERALL that's any better than today. Sure there's always crap movies out there. Don't watch them. Special effects are a toss up. Lord of the Rings could not have been put together in the 80's. No way. Star Wars films from the 80's are better than the new ones, simply because the story was better. No wonder Lucas didn't make them back then. Lame effects + lame story = lame movie.

Sure, it's fun to watch VH1's I LOVE THE 80's, but I watch it more to laugh at what we all did. I PITY THE FOOL who can't look back and say, 'what were we thinking?'



Posted by: monkeyinabox at July 1, 2004 10:47 PM

On your movie list:

Die Hard 2: 1990
Die Hard with a Vengeance (3): 1995

I'll give you Short Circuit (I) and Ghostbusters (I). But the sequels? Uhmmmm... GB 2 wasn't terrible, but wasn't that good, either. I never even bothered with SC 2.

And I'll back monkey there on music, too. I mean I like "Living on a Prayer" and "Jack and Diane" as much as the next guy, but you know... even Bon Jovi and John "Couger" have moved on ;-)

And if you think today's music is bad compared to then, I got 5 words for you: New Kids on the Block.

:-)

Posted by: Jon at July 1, 2004 11:46 PM

Bon Jovi and John Couger have moved on, but have moved on to what? The music today sucks. As for making fun of New Kids. Who the hell do you think Ncync and the Back street boys copied. Lets compare some music shall we.

Heavy metal/rock genre
In the 80's we had Iron Maiden
Currently we have Moron, I mean Maroon 5.

Pop genre
In the 80's we had Michael Jackson
Now we have Justine Timbercrap

Female pop singers.
In the 80's Madonna
Currently Britney Spears. Need I say more


Diva's
In the 80's we had Chaka Khan, and Diana Ross
Now we have Christina Aguilara(great voice but #1 shes a skank and #2 her music is horrible).

In the 80s
President Ronald Regean (the Gipper)
Today
President George Bush (fill in the blank)

In the 80s
Cold War
Today
Planes slamming into our world trade centers

As for Star Wars movies. Are you kidding me? The current movies are better than the old ones? WHAT? Episode I and II have been very dissapointing compared to the old Lucas movies. No comparison.

TV shows.
Hmm lets see here. Can you name me one sitcom that you would want to watch with your kids. How can you. There arent any sitcoms. They are all reality garbage shows. One copying the other. I used to watch family Ties, The Cosby Show, Facts of life, Knight Rider, Chips(although 70's) MacGyver, A-Team. TV has only a few good shows now. Everybody loves Raymond is good and so is King of Queens. But lets face it. I wont let kids watch either of the two.

The bottom line is this. In the 80s society was happy. They had fun. They didnt worry about terrorist attacks. They had good movies, music and TV shows. I would go back in a heartbeat.

Posted by: RRegean at August 2, 2004 02:05 PM