There were no cell phones, but there were pay phones and that one phone in your parents’ kitchen.
We didn’t have personal computers, laptops, or iPads, but there were those TRS-80s from Radio Shack that we could program to count to one hundred.
And there were school dances and Park Dances and DJs taking requests on the radio. There were drive-in theaters, bars that didn’t ask for ID, and those fights in the Rax parking lot.
They were the 1980’s, a decade during which the American transition continued moving away from the traditional and to the rebellion, and the evolvement was very apparent with the best movies, the top-selling albums, and the most dreamed about cars.
The Tortured Soul
Hollywood’s filmmakers made adventure films during the decade with new flicks like Indiana Jones, The Empire Strikes Back, The Terminator, and Alien, but far more focused on the nerd, the broken-hearted, the rebel with no real cause, and the misunderstood youth.
Some films had a character like system-bender Ferris and another featured dangerous Maverick who only wanted to hear from Goose again. While most of the boys in “Fast Times” just wanted to be with the girls, all Spicolli wished to do was eat pizza with Mr. Hand. And John McClane, deeply in love yet estranged from his wife because he’s a goof of a husband, saves the day and gets the girl.
Oh, and we sure can’t forget the brain, and an athlete, a basketcase, a princess, and a criminal who told the teacher, “You see us as you want to see us … in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.” All tortured souls like Billy in St. Elmo’s Fire or John Keating from Dead Poet’s Society or Duckie from Pretty in Pink.
The Big Change
The 1980s still featured solid rock n’ roll, most of which is considered “classic” these days, but American music had been pushed by the Brit bands like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. With a wide-open front door to the U.S., more diversity arrived and found a place between ACDC and Bruce Springsteen
We could relate to “Born in the U.S.A.” but then we found ourselves relating to “Purple Rain,” too. It was always fun to squeal along with “You Shook Me All Night Long” but then The Police told us about “Roxanne.”
And, of course, there was the emergence of the youngest member of the Jackson 5, Michael, who sang about being off the wall while rocking with you and beating it with Billie Jean because they wanted to be starting something so he could make a thriller.
The American Family
The popularity of “Happy Days” and the “Brady Bunch” in the late 1970s and early ’80s guided screenwriters during this decade to remake both but with new issues in the culture of the United States, including drug addiction, adoption, literacy, and sex.
Even ALF was a descendant of the “Bunch” theme, mixing an adopted alien into a family, and then there was “Full House” based in San Francisco with a widower with kids and a brother-in-law and best friend helping to raise three (actually four) daughters. But three TV series, “Married with Children,” “Roseanne,” and “The Simpsons” took the TV family to a new level.
The kids in these shows are not perfect like Greg and Marsha or Richie and Joanie but instead mischievous, promiscuous, and self-righteous because, like most, they’re growing up as a member of a dysfunctional family.
Joanie got Chachi, Roseanne can’t sing the national anthem, and somehow Homer hasn’t murdered Bart.
Vroom.
The best car for a high school kid old enough to drive in the 1980s was the one your parents allowed you to borrow for the evening, and there was always a curfew, the mileage was written down, and the gas gauge was measured before the departure and after the return.
But it was also a time when some real beauties were rolling off the lines here in the U.S., and also imported from Europe and Japan. The dreams, though, for most kids in the first half of the 1980s concerned the Porsche, the Cadillac, the BMW, and the Mercedes. Some of us went to school with classmates who drove them because their parents were successful lawyers, skilled doctors, or those who were living off trust funds left by family.
Instead, most teenagers rocked it with dad’s Oldsmobile or mom’s Chevette in an era when the popped collar, the jean jacket, the penny loafer, and that one glittery glove were bold fashion statements in a valley stoked with industry, retail, organized crime, and casual sex until something called AIDS altered it all.
Then came the 1990s.
