What were the 80s all about? . . . Bueller? . . . Anyone?
Well, you are truly a child of the 80s if any of the following
statements are true for you:
The eighties was a decade where young folk wore fluorescent,
neon clothing and business folk wore double-breasted suits with
shoulder pads and believed "Greed Is Good" . . . and
when Prince sang about partying "like it's 1999" it
seemed so far away!
Dallas and Dynasty ruled the airwaves,
Transformers were more than meets the eye, leggings under a short
skirt was considered a stylish look, Michael Jackson was still
black and 'by the power of Greyskull you HAD the power!'
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher promoted a 'return to
Victorian values' in Britain, which was matched by a new
conservatism in the USA under Ronald Reagan, who was voted in as
president and served the maximum eight-year term in office.
AIDS was introduced to the public as a sexually transmitted
disease of potentially plague proportions that would put paid to
the trendy permissiveness of the Sixties and Seventies.
Meanwhile at home and in the playground, people were struggling
to master Rubik's Cube - the biggest craze of the early part of
the decade, a block of movable coloured squares named after its
Hungarian inventor, Erno Rubik.
Video games were the hottest new innovation as video
arcade
game machines began to replace pinball machines in amusement
arcades across the Western world with Pac Man and
Space Invaders
leading the pack.
Sophisticated equipment for leisure and pleasure became
increasingly affordable as incredible advances in technology
continued, and the eighties soon also became the decade of gadgets
- From digital watches to cappuccino machines to cellular phones
to computers (Even though a Commodore 64 was the pinnacle of
computing excellence).
In 1984, Yuppies appeared on the scene. An acronym for Young
Urban professionals, it became synonymous with upward mobility,
greed, and selfishness. But then the 80s was the decade of Self;
self-improvement, self motivation, self-help manuals . . .
"There's no such thing as society. The individual is
all", Margaret Thatcher said. And appropriately enough, Sony
launched the personal pocket stereo cassette player - The
Walkman.
The Yuppies wore designer clothes, drove hi-tech cars, had
high-speed jobs and went nowhere without the one essential item -
the Filofax , a portable information system, (we used to call them
diaries and address books) held together in a leather bound ring
binder.
1987 introduced two new words to the English language -
glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) as the West
fell in love with Mikhail Gorbachev - The first cuddly,
user-friendly Soviet leader, who talked of the East and West
becoming good neighbours - which we finally did as the decade ended with Europe's
biggest ever street party as the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989
and East met West for the first time since 1961.
Then of course there were Gremlins, ET, Dukes of
Hazzard, Knight Rider,
Alf, Strawberry Shortcake, The
A-Team, Care Bears, Fraggle Rock, Cabbage Patch Kids,
Australia winning the Americas Cup . . . was that all really three
decades ago?!
|
