The Eighties


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    'Twas a good decade for pop culture.

    "Legend has it that man once washed his jeans in pure acid!"

    —Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

    The Eighties: a time where you go-go when you want to walk like an Egyptian, hear doves cry or feel the Punky power.

    All the men were preppies who wore pastel suits with narrow ties, drove sports cars that Lee Iacocca personally stood behind and traded stocks on Wall Street - after all, as Oscar Wilde said, nothing says success like excess. (Unless they happened to be teenagers, in which case they were Totally Radical or studied karate and learnt the meaning of "Wax On, Wax Off".) Everyone had huge hairdos, enough make-up to sink a ship and power suits with shoulderpads big enough to knock the giant mirrored sunglasses off anyone who walked within a three foot radius of them. And those without them had flat-tops and wore gym clothes and break-danced on top of cardboard. Generation Y started being born, one day to become, despite their best efforts, the young adults of The Turn of the Millennium.

    Computing technology first became a true cultural force in this decade, starting a trend that would keep on snowballing to this very day. The Eighties was the decade of cell phones literally sized and shaped like bricks, jokes about being unable to program VCRs, the death of Betamax, and the beginnings of personal computers and gaming consoles beginning to proliferate inside homes, perhaps one of the trends from this decade with the largest of cultural implications. Cable television also took off big time, with MTV, TBS, HBO, and CNN becoming household acronyms.

    In the US, it was also the first wave of the Japanese Invasion, the inklings of which started in '78 with the dub of Battle of the Planets, continuing on with Star Blazers ('79), Voltron ('84), getting even more hardcore with Robotech in '85, and hitting its apex by cranking the quality Up to Eleven with the nationwide release of Akira ('88).

    On the homefront, the 1980s produced a rash of pop-cultural icons that today are looked upon, at worst, with Affectionate Parody, and at best, as the national ideal. The conservative political culture of the era meant two rather contradictory things for the production of pop-culture; on the one hand, the surge of private enterprise together with new media technologies allowed corporations such as Hasbro an unprecedented ability to build massive franchises around their products, typically with a TV show and accompanying toys, but on the other Moral Guardian complaints would challenge the ethics of making a show that was "essentially one large commercial." The result was the rather spoof-worthy And Knowing Is Half the Battle segment common to many mass franchise shows, shoving an Anvilicious moral into the action. Fortunately, these were conveniently located after the actual plot, so kids could just turn it off at that point and run down to buy the toys. Besides, the segments make great joke fodder.

    Politically, the first part of the decade, Cold War tensions continued to escalate. Some accuse this of being an intentional move by the West to render the economically inept Soviet Union infeasible by drawing its resources away from things like infrastructure and feeding its people, which market economies could accomplish easily. While this is, essentially, what ended up happening (though more complicated than that in real life; in Eastern Europe the decade's real deathblow to communism was considered to have been all the new media technology), the fact that the other possible outcome of such a strategy was global thermonuclear annihilation had a profound impact on Western media tropes. Most obviously, dystopian Speculative Fiction, particularly set After the End Twenty Minutes Into the Future, enjoyed a surge.

    The second part of the decade, however, couldn't be more different. Gorbachev, spry for a CPSU leader at age 54 (this was the only time in the Cold War that the Soviet leader was substantially younger than the American), shook up the by-then sclerotic Soviet leadership upon taking power in 1985. Gorbachev restructured the economy (perestroika) for "accelerated" development (uskoreniye), encouraged openness (glasnost), made tentative moves towards democracy (demokratizatsiya), and went Karting with Reagan. For a hot second in 1988-89, it seemed like the USSR had reached a final rapprochement with the West. And then came The Great Politics Mess-Up.

    Throughout this era, there came new problems like the spread of AIDS which created a public health panic that dealt first a body blow to the gay community as homophobes treating them as modern lepers (even though that community took the danger seriously far sooner than others). However, the epidemic paradoxically later proved a partial blessing in disguise for gay rights as stricken people like Rock Hudson were shoved out of the closet, forcing the public to realize that LGBTI people were all around them, much like themselves.

    The Eighties also had the highest murder rate in U.S. history, almost twice what it is today. Roughly covers the period from the inauguration of Ronald Reagan on January 20, 1981 to the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, so almost 11 years.

    Thanks to a common twenty- or thirty-year lag, it's still The Eighties in much of Fictionland. Although The Seventies and The Nineties are gradually returning.

    See Also: The Forties, The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, The Nineties, Turn of the Millennium and The New Tens.

    Popular tropes from this time period include:
    • The Aggressive Drug Dealer: Crack cocaine and heroin caught on big during this decade, along with their pushers.
    • And Knowing Is Half the Battle (G.I. Joe et al)
    • Animated Adaptation (of practically everything, including films, TV shows, comic books, video games, action figures, dolls, plush toys, music videos, real-life celebrities)
    • Anime, called Japanimation at the time, became huge in the US in the '80s.
    • Canada Does Not Exist: A wave of low-budget cop and action-adventure dramas start being produced in Canada, but primarily for U.S. consumption. This leads to the weird phenomenon of shows which take place in a "nowhereland" that is neither fully America nor completely Canada.
    • Cold War and Red Scare: A big feature of this period, particularly in the early 1980s with the European Missiles Crisis, the Nicaraguan civil war and Libya. Especially Libya. The Cold War plots here can be divided squarely between before and after 8 December 1987, the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the U.S. and USSR. It's generally straight Red Scare before that. After, it's Renegade Russian or Make the Bear Angry Again.
    • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Thanks to the movie Wall Street, an enduring image of this time. Part of the economic climate of the time were Ronald Reagan's reforms and the Black Monday crash of 1987.
    • Cyberpunk (kicked off by Blade Runner and Neuromancer)
    • Darker and Edgier:Even though this was a fun decade for many people this decade had many negative sides to it. This was the decade when the crack cocaine drug was created and many people became addicted to this life threatening drug. The drug destroyed the lives of many people. Also during this decade,the sexually-transmitted disease AIDS became more noticeable. The first two cases of patients dying from AIDS had taken place in 1959. But there are only a hand full of known cases dating to the 1960s and 1970s. But the seemingly rare disease became an epidemic in the 1980s. At least 121 AIDS-related deaths took place between 1980 and 1981. By the end of the 1980s, the disease had spread worldwide and there were over a million of known patients.
    • Eighties Hair: If you were in a (popular) metal band or were a female country singer you wore it one way and only one way, BIG!
    • Football Hooligans: For the UK at least. It became such a problem that Margaret Thatcher put together a cabinet just to tackle them. Measures put in place then led to Hillsborough. These days the problem has been virtually eradicated, although the trope appears quite often in foreign films set in the UK where Football is involved.
    • Fur and Loathing (when it started)
    • I Was Quite a Fashion Victim (applying to works looking at this decade in hindsight), a survivor of the so-called "decade fashion disaster" might confess to this.
    • Japan Takes Over the World (A staple of the decade, particularly in Cyberpunk works. Often seems a little silly now.)
    • Merchandise-Driven (Virtually every original cartoon made in the eighties seems to be this way.)
    • Montage Ends the VHS: It's when a commercial VHS tape has trailers, intros or just a compilation montage promoting a line of VHS's come up at the end after a movie or episode it contains is over.
    • Mini-Dress of Power: and by power, they mean "powerdressing"
    • Narm Charm: Oh yes.
    • Pac-Man Fever
    • Pretty in Mink (works that weren't afraid to show fur tended to show even more than they would in The Seventies)
    • Double Standard Rape (Female on Male) (a common way of introducing romance subplots in '80s movies)
    • Rich Bitch (Dynasty, Falcon Crest et al)
    • Shoulders of Doom (the huge shoulder pads, bigger than the ones forty years ago)
    • Sweater Girl (with or without shoulder pads)
    • Valley Girl (like, totally!)
    Works that are set/were made in this time period include:

    (Note: many were also a part of the Nineties; usually those made in the later part of the decade, and are marked with a '*').

    Anime


    Asian Animation


    Comic Books


    Comic Strips


    Eastern European Animation


    Film

    (For films released in this time period, see Films of the 1980s.)


    Han-guk Manhwa Aenimeisyeon


    Literature


    Live Action TV

    Music

    Genres

    Musicians


    Professional Wrestling


    Tabletop Games


    Video Games


    Western Animation


    Other

    Random Kid: "'Cause now we know!"
    Random Joe: "And knowing is half the battle!"
    Chorus: "G.I. JOOOOOOEEEEEEE!"

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