in 1981, Mtv debuted! ESPN debuted in 1979... let's not forget how big of a deal Saturday Night Live was back then.
The hard part for me is that most of what reminds me of the 80s didn't occur until a little later. But, here's some of the early stuff Olivia Newton John's "Physical" Evo's "Video Killed the Radio Star" Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams" (1983) Flashdance (1983) & leg warmers Rubik's Cube and variants A-Team (1983)
The hard part for me is that most of what reminds me of the 80s didn't occur until a little later. But, here's some of the early stuff Olivia Newton John's "Physical" Evo's "Video Killed the Radio Star" Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams" (1983) Flashdance (1983) & leg warmers Rubik's Cube and variants A-Team (1983)
Don't forget Reagan was shot in 1981. That was a bit event (world wide), and could easily be referred to.
• The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi • Leg warmers and weird-ass music, one of my co-workers from another volunteer job said that the 90s was us getting over the high of the '80s. • Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, “Mr. Goberchev, tear down that wall!”
I just thought of something else... Poor people all drove huge cars because they were cheap to buy... and felt guilty about it because the trend was moving toward fuel-efficient cars because of the fuel shortage (boy, did we fall for that one).
So not having seen the other posts. I'm thinking office holders might work, but you're going to need to ground the culture with worldbuilding just like you were doing a sci-fi or a fantasy. So I'd look at making sure you get the fashions and hairstyles right. Communications tech is always key, so make sure you get the telephones right - I wasn't around in 1982 so the questions I'd be asking myself right now are things like whether everybody still has rotary telephones or are most of them keypads. Have cordless landline phones come into use yet, and if so do they have antennas. What do TVs look like? How widespread is cable TV as opposed to broadcast? Do you have a social divide between kids that get MTV and kids that don't have cable yet? And yes, I get that some of these questions probably sound stupid to anyone who was there - and might even be the wrong questions - but seeing as I was born in 1986 and my memory starts roughly in 1989, I'm not going to know that off hand - and those are going to be the types of questions that differentiate 1982 from 1979 or 1985. It's also going to be important in that your characters are going to spend their time quite differently from today because they have a different frame of reference. Also maybe check into whatever the big technological CHANGES were underway at the time. What is the new thing that characters are trying to integrate and thinking a lot about ("American Hustle" did this well with the 1970s using a microwave oven - best line of dialogue ever: "How many times do I have to tell you not to put metal in the science oven?!"). My first thought is again to use Cable TV and maybe early personal computers - I just checked and the Commodore 64 was introduced in 1982. Anyone who was able to get their hands on one of those would be interesting. Also, something that Back to the Future used to great effect grounding itself in it's own time period (1985) was repeated references to arcade video games in gas stations - that was present then, but for a modern viewer it's a big 80s stereotype. The other thing would be major news events - not just news figures but the actual things that happened. The first thing that springs to mind politically is the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981. You could probably also use Star Wars references - "Empire Strikes Back" came out in 1980 and "Return of the Jedi" didn't release until 1983. So that was in common parlance.
Also the other big thing is to make sure you don't reference ANYTHING from the 80s that developed after 1982. You're just out of the 70s, so remember that most of what we think of as "The 80s" has not happened.
I was born in 1980 so my first thoughts go to toys and cartoons, although I remember my mum watching Eastenders a lot, old loony tunes cartoons with Tom and Jerry which you never see now (from the UK) I remember cold mornings and no heating or very little heating in the cars, brown shaggy carpets and polo neck jumpers, turn dial phones with spiral cords, mice in the attack as we had no pest control, panda police cars and lots of smoke, everyone seemed to smoke!
If you actually lived the very early 80's you'll know that it was still very much the late 70's. The look, the feel, the clothes, the hair....
This thread is like 80s porn *eyes widen*... I'm just gonna leave a reply here because it'll help my own story too (how cheeky of me, right? )
Let me see if I can answer a few of these... Push-button. They were called push-button phones. And I'd say it was around 30% push-button in 1982, maybe 40% in some cities. They might have been developed and ready for market, but if anyone had them, it was only the super-rich. And a mobile phone was called a car-phone and it took up half the trunk space of a full-sized car (full-sized by 1982 standards, not today's). Again, it was only the rich (and the odd corporation) that had them which explains why they didn't mind giving up so much trunk space. The rest of us needed that space for storing stuff we forgot to take out of the back seat at some point and didn't feel like taking into the house. Mostly they looked like furniture, boxy wooden cabinets. There were still a lot of so-called floor models and the tops of them were where people put their family photos with a doily under them (to protect the wood from scratches, and yes, they were made of real wood, not that plastic imitation stuff) that had to be moved every time you dusted. The biggest screen you could get was 26" and if you had a new one (less than five years old) you were in the minority and probably quite well off. The standard procedure if your TV started acting up (which was every seven to twelve minutes) was to smack it hard with the flat of your hand. Most times this actually worked, strangely enough. Also, there was always a static build-up on the screen that attracted dust in a big way. You could get quite a zap from dusting the screen. If you put your hand within an inch or so of the screen, you could feel the static field. Even standing too close, you could feel it through the cloth of your pants. I said a lot about dust and that's because TVs in those days were huge dust magnets. At a guess, I'd say about 50/50, at least it was in Calgary where I lived at the time. But it was a boom town at the time, so it might be more like 70/30 in other places (with the 30 being cable subscribers). It was too new to have had that kind of effect yet. Most kids only saw it if they passed by an appliance store window. And that's another thing about TV. Appliance stores had TVs in their windows and it wasn't uncommon to stop and have a gander at whatever was shaping up on the news, etc. Nothing much at 'street level.' Technological change was something that happened at NASA or in the labs of universities. Even personal computers weren't very widespread and anyone who had one wore thick glasses and had a pocket protector (and carried a slide rule in case the computer crashed). In other words, the nerdiest of nerds and not in the way we mean it today. Nerds were more often called dorks (likely because of their high-water pants and clunky shoes) and no one admitted to knowing one unless they were related. And even then, they never admitted to actually hanging out with them or even talking to them. Most of us couldn't understand a word they said. Cars. Most talk about what people were planning to buy was about cars... or beer on up-coming weekends. As far as actual integration goes, most guys were trying to adjust to the fact that cars were becoming more and more complex under the hood and thus more difficult to maintain in the backyard. Despite the fact that the C-64 outsold every other computer ever (and may still be the biggest-selling computer of all time) in 1982, it was rare and (see above) those who had them were also rare and shunned (which is why they started clubs so they'd have somewhere to go to talk about computers without getting beaten up). I'm not saying that we had a hate on for technology, just that most people considered computers to be 'the wave of the future' and were perfectly happy to leave it there... in the future. Although the media talked about this for the usual amount of time, it wasn't considered the earth-shattering event it might be made out as today. We weren't as mesmerized by media at the time and so we just got on with our day. The presidency especially wasn't as blown up to godlike status as it is now.
Tom and Jerry were creations of Hanna-Barbera. Looney Tunes was a trademark of Warner Bros. and included Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Tweetie Bird and Sylvester the cat. Just to set the record straight.
The same thing happened in the early 1970s... and come to think of it, every other decade roll-over. We were still wearing bell bottoms in 1976.
"Decades" as eras are always artificial constructs. What we think of as "The 60s" really only happened between '63 and '69, for instance.
Oh, yes...I couldn't remember but you get the idea! I was between the age of 1 and 10, I wouldn't have noticed anyway lol
