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The 80s — Page 2

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My grandfather passed away from Alzheimer's, but he was a big Star Wars Trilogy fan.  Would have been in his 80s were he still alive.

I wish that I could just wish my feelings away...but I can't.  Wishful wishing can only lead to wishes wished for in futile wishfulness, which is not what I wish to wish for. 

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88' here

“Long you live and high you'll fly and smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry and all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.” Roger Waters

Cosplay Gear Lightsaber: LAZERER 1W blue laser

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@1990osu: Sorry to hear that. But you have a point.

I think there are more old Star Wars fans than we know. After all, let's say some guy was 40 when he saw Star Wars in 1977. He would be 75 today.

Myself I'm an '84, so I missed out on all three in the cinema. But I remember my father (who passed away some years ago) telling me once that his brother who is and has always been a bit of a tech-nerd said to him in 1977: "I saw this movie in the cinema called Star Wars, you have to see it! It's the best movie ever made!"

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Born in '82 I didn't discover star wars until the early 90's renaissance (I had a very generic knowledge that it existed but didnt really know anything about it)

As for the 80's though, I have lots of memories. Cartoons in the eighties were AWESOME. Transformers, G.I. JOE, Thundercats, Voltron, M.A.S.K., Muppet Babies, He-man, Shera, Jem (yeah, even the girl cartoons were awesome!). It was a great time to be a kid. And I LIVED for Saturday mornings. It pains me that my (future) kids won't grow up looking forward to the incredible thing that was the Saturday morning cartoon lineup on network tv. Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies were always a highlight.

Also thinking about tv, I remember sneaking peeks at MTV at my grandparents (the only people I knew who had cable). It was a rare thing, but was consistently the most mind blowingly cool thing ever. It just oozed cool. And then I saw Michael Jackson's Thriller. Ho-ly crap. Utterly terrifying and incredibly awesome all at once. Mind blown.

I also have lots of fond memories of all the awesome toys from the eighties. Robots that did stuff (transform, combine to make bigger robots) were all the rage. Transformers and Voltron were big names. Pretty much all the cartoons were basically animated toy commercials so they all had their tie in toy lines. Oh, I had a Rambo Big Wheel.

As for tech, I vaguely remember atari, though we never owned one. Our friends down the street had a cd player, which my sister and I had no idea what the heck it was. We called the CDs "shiny records". We eventually got a Nintendo, but it was several years after its initial release (maybe even the early 90's). My dad was an engineer and he got a Hewlett Packard 286 at some point.

I also vaguely remember going to classic Disney re releases like Bambi and Pinocchio at the movie theater. I also remember seeing Song of the South air on tv before it got locked away. And 1989's Batman became an obsession of mine. I wasn't allowed to see it until it was aired in edited form on network tv but I had ALL the toys, bubble gum cards, etc. I was introduced to Batman via the Adam West reruns they aired on weekday afternoons in the 80's.

It's tough for me to separate the eighties from the early nineties b/c my childhood spanned them together.

So yeah, I was basically a child pop culture sponge, soaking up all the commercialism of my childhood. Ha!

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Sorry for the bump, you guys have some great threads and projects on here.

I was born in '68 so really I grew up in the 1980’s. It was a great time - playing outside most of the year, computer games taking off, bmx bikes, Star Wars! and host of other cool, and not so cool, sci-fi films and TV. The music was pretty great too, though got a bit weird and sataurated with manufactured pop towards the end of the decade. Still some great underground scenes as well.

A shame about the 90’s though 😉

50 Cent is just an imposter

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Honestly, I like the '80s & '90s equally. I don’t have any memories from the '80s, but a solid chunk of my favourite movies and music hail from that decade.

The '00s can suck a [d]uck, though.

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TV’s Frink said:

It was a lot of fun being in my 50s during the 80s.

Holy shit, Frink was born in the 1930s?!!? Christ!

When’s something gonna happen?

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  1. Did you participate in the early home video revolution? If so, how did you, for instance, obtain all of the episodes of Star Trek (TOS)?

I worked at a Walden Books in the late 1980’s.
We had two customers who ordered the entire entire series of Star Trek on VHS.
We had two large stacks in the stock room of their unclaimed orders.
Every other two weeks each guy came in, figuring payday, and bought two tapes.
One guy asked for specific tapes, the other guy was like “surprise me.”

  1. Were you tech-savvy? If so, were you an audiophile, a videophile, a computing enthusiast/programmer, …?

I tend to be a late adopter to pretty much everthing. I was an audiophile and used to make (what I thought that the time) were fairly elaborate music mixes on cassette tapes using two cd players, a turntable and a radio shack mixer.
I was big on Super 8 cut downs of movies in the 70s and followed them into the 80s until the US manufacturers (Ken Films, Castle Films, MFI) stopped making these as Beta & VHS took over. I remember when I bought the Star Wars tilogy on VHS I went to town on my super 8 digests and made my own little fanedit, doing things like cutting in the asteroid field from TEBS into ANH when the Facoln comes out of hyperspace before being captured into the death star, things like that. The Star Destroyer chase from TESB made it into ANH to make the Tatooine escape a bit more dynamic.

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AntcuFaalb said:

Please share your stories about living during the 1980s. I’m increasingly fascinated with this decade and would love to read some firsthand accounts.

<span style=“text-decoration: underline;”>Some food for thought</span>:

(I will add more to this list over time.)

1. What was being an 80s Star Wars fan like?

2. Were you tech-savvy? If so, were you an audiophile, a videophile, a computing enthusiast/programmer, …?

3. Which technological developments excited you? Which didn’t excite you? What did you think was coming soon, but was actually far off?

4. Did you participate in the early home video revolution? If so, how did you, for instance, obtain all of the episodes of Star Trek (TOS)?

Please don’t just reply to this list. Write stories!

being a star wars or sci-fi fan in the 80s was good and bad good because we got to see these cult classic movies first hand but bad because it took so long to make a follow up if they ever got one and the star wars trilogy died a slow death jedi was lets be honest crap the skywalker saga could and should have went on with luke and his journey but alas
as for being tech savy our tech was limited to budget home vhs or beta max was as tech savy as some people got then personal stereo’s mix tapes c.d’s trying to copy video tapes we all did it then the home entertainment system boom nintendo sega atari
i much prefer now we can do all the stuff we wanted to do in the 80s with a computer music movies games create copy produce

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1. What was being an 80s Star Wars fan like?

The great thrill was Empire Strikes Back, exceeding all expectations, and worth the lengthy waits in line. Followed by the disappointment that was Return Of Jedi.

3. Which technological developments excited you? Which didn’t excite you? What did you think was coming soon, but was actually far off?

Compact disc. The sound was wonderful. Or, at least, we all thought it was wonderful. After my first player, I upgraded my speakers.

Zelda and I married in ’78 and bounced around the States throughout the 80’s. Consequently, money was precious and we would be considered poor by today’s standards. There was less stigma, and no peer judging back then for being poor. Everyone our age struggled, it’s the way it was. Early 80’s we bought maybe one record album a month, late 80’s one CD a month. I grew our own reefer. Politically, there was a rising Conservative movement and real consequences if you were perceived as an “outsider”.

Pick and choose, the 80’s was a decent time for music, although MTV would have a corrosive influence. Artists focused more on a video presentation over songcraft. While there were styles (hair metal bands) and specific artists I enjoyed, overall I preferred the 60’s and 70’s era. To be fair, I still prefer the 90’s over the 80’s.

I suspect most of us who recall the 80’s are halfway to the graveyard.

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AntcuFaalb said:

1. What was being an 80s Star Wars fan like?

I was a child in the 80s, but I can remember being a Star Wars fan. My first encounter with Star Wars was when I was at my Uncle’s house and he randomly put on Empire Strikes Back on VHS. I watched it and was blown away.

The main difference between then and now was that the Original Trilogy was the only live-action Star Wars content in existence (ignoring Ewok/Holiday TV specials), and pretty much everyone agreed it was awesome (except for some minor complaints about ROTJ).

And we all loved George. Consider how Lord of the Rings fans view J.R.R. Tolkien today. That was how Star Wars fans saw George Lucas: as this master storyteller with an unparalleled creative vision. The man was surrounded by an aura of mystique - unlike today, where Lucas is a divisive figure.

The other difference in the fandom was there were different ideas about what aspects of Star Wars were the most awesome. Today, the fandom seems to really be captivated mostly by the Jedi, lightsaber combat, the Sith, Force powers, etc. But in the 80s, the fandom was much more captivated by the world and technology of Star Wars: X-Wings, Star Destroyers, TIE fighters, etc. Yes, fans still love that shit today, but the focus of the 80s fandom was more around the “military sci-fi” aspect of Star Wars, whereas today’s fandom is more interested in Jedi lightsaber duels and Force powers.

This is probably because the Jedi in the OT were more subtle, more spiritual, and not as physically impressive. The Jedi were simply not as much of a big deal as they are today. The most beloved Star Wars character throughout the 80s was not even a Jedi: it was Han Solo. In fact, if there was one bit of iconography that defined Star Wars in the 80s, it was Han and Chewie in the Falcon.

4. Did you participate in the early home video revolution? If so, how did you, for instance, obtain all of the episodes of Star Trek (TOS)?

Well, my family bought a VCR when I was very young. Obtaining all the episodes of Star Trek was pretty difficult to do back then. You’d probably have to pay a lot of money to order a box set of VHS tapes from Paramount or something. Either that, or just wait for each episode to be aired on some local channel, and methodically record it over the span of a few months.

When I was a kid we mostly just recorded HBO movies on VHS. (I think that’s how I got my first VHS copy of Star Wars.) We would occasionally purchase an official VHS release of a movie, but that was pretty rare.

I think one aspect of media culture that was quite common in the 80s but has mostly disappeared today was recording movies/music directly from the television or radio. I would record HBO movies on VHS often. You had to check the “TV Guide” (a physical magazine you got in the mail that listed all television show time slots for the week for your local channels) to know when the movie would be playing. It was not uncommon to go over to somebody’s house, and see their “library” of VHS tapes on display on a shelf somewhere, with self-made labels inscribed with hand-written movie titles.

The first time I saw pretty much all the 80s classics (Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.) was when I went over to a friend’s house and they had it on VHS, recorded off of HBO, Cinemax, or even just a regular cable or network TV channel. It was quite common for movies on VHS to contain commercials, since they were recorded straight from network TV.

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Vultural said:

I suspect most of us who recall the 80’s are halfway to the graveyard.

Well yeah, given the average life span of a human. Anyone who can remember the 80s in any meaningful way is at least 40 by now. Now get off my lawn.