Tag: 1980s
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Video Stores: Shared Spaces (retrospective)
Let’s hop into our nostalgia-fueled mental time machine and travel back before the internet became so omniscient nobody ever had to leave the house or directly interact with another human being again. Unless I have a readership comprised of kids on other kid’s shoulders wearing a trenchcoat and sunglasses going by the name Mann Adultguy,…
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Totally 80’s: Villains!
What would a movie be without an antagonist? The counterpoint to our hero, villains exist in fiction to provide urgency to our main character’s quest and largely set the plot in motion. After all, where would Daniel-son be without Cobra Kai and Johnny to fight? Or Schwarzenegger’s Dutch without the Predator? Or Indy without the…
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Sleepaway Camp
I never went to camp as a kid. Growing up in Missouri, there was plenty of available open space and fresh air right where I lived, and besides that, my folks were never the type to want to ship their kids off for extended periods (also, I was a real sweety pie). After watching Sleepaway…
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10 More Garbage TV Shows From The 80’s
Television knows how to make great TV…now. Before the present day, however, TV was considered a second-class form of entertainment that beginners and has-beens would work in. But considering how much money was being pumped into TV, and how much garbage was being produced with all that money, it’s hard to feel sympathetic about the…
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Cult Classics: Better Off Dead
Lane Meyer wishes he were dead. He tries over and over – self-immolation, carbon monoxide poisoning, jumping from a bridge, even hanging. But like most things in his life, it never quite goes his way. Did I mention this is a major plot point in an 80’s teen comedy? Better Off Dead isn’t just another…
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10 Beloved 1980s Films That Suck
Film culture from the 1980s is now known for perfecting the blockbuster, creating the teen movie, and churning out tons of (somewhat inappropriate) films for kids. And a lot of movies from this decade have gone on to become true classics: Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ghostbusters, and many more. But not…
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10 Garbage TV Shows From The 1980’s
Listen: television is a cesspool. You know it, I know it, hell even TV knows it. Instead of the respect, promotion, and (especially) money that gets pumped into creating films, television has traditionally been the ghetto of visual entertainment. Even paintings–images that don’t even move, for cripes sake–get entire buildings in major cities dedicated to…
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10 Totally 80’s Horror Flicks For Halloween
If the 1980s in America was a decade about anything, it was one of excess: a supercharged economy afforded artistic enterprises to be produced that normally would have been ignored, if not outright abandoned, were it not for the gigantic amount of capital flowing and available at the time in the arts. As such, many…
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Perfect Movies: Back to the Future
Is this yet another Gen Y/early “Millenial” (ugh) article about the movies people of my age watched as children back in the 1980s? Of course it is. To clarify: I do not identify as a Millenial. I have previously written on this site about my dislike of how people of my generation have been conflated…
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Totally 80’s: Sitcoms!
Ah, 1980’s sitcoms. One of the more comforting pop culture artifacts to a nostalgic mind, there were never cozier worlds built in fiction than the ½ hour laugh track-driven situation comedies of that decade. Featuring near-perfect families who lived in gigantic houses and got into weekly shenanigans that may or may not end up in…
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Introduction: Totally 80’s!
Flashy, shiny, commercial, and money-driven, the 1980’s in America is now viewed through a powerful nostalgic lens by generations who either lived in, were born in, or now look wistfully back at this decade as a representation of Post-World War II America at its height. The Baby Boomers–having started with an idealistic counterculture mindset–grew up,…
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“Did I Do That?” TGIF Revisited: Introduction
If you had the luck to have spent your childhood in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably have fond memories of the wonder that was television programming in those decades: with cable television becoming popular in the 80’s, entire generations of children and young adults would spend hours glued in front of the tube…
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