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    #76
    Glorious line this, from the Wiki "Market research reportedly found that chess and auto racing were popular interests of young men."

    Used a market research firm for that, did you? Chess came up around the top of the list?

    I'm amazed it didn't end up called Tits N Beer.

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      #77
      You may have never seen a Chess King, but you’ve seen its effects. Pleated acid washed jeans, etc.

      I don’t know if the 80s were a particularly hopeful time for humanity overall, but I was a kid in the 80s, so it seemed hopeful. At least up until about 1988.

      I suppose every period has its pros and cons. Even now, which often feels like the end times, a lot of people I know, including me, are asking bigger questions about what is really important and worth caring about and it feels like that could lead to all kinds of good things.

      Contrast that with the late 90s when everything seemed to be generally fine and serious people thought we’d reached the end of history, but there was a lot of smug complacency as a result. Besides, things really weren’t fine and the music was bad.

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        #78
        Oh, since no one else has mentioned it: I was rather surprised, on googling bits and bobs about the series after finishing it, to discover who the parents are of the actor who plays Robin. Perhaps you lot already know, but if you don't, it's some good trivia.

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          #79
          Yes and when you find out, you can’t believe you didn’t see it.

          To be honest, the whole thing is so cartoonish that I thought it was a representation of how America was represented on TV/movies in the 80s rather than what it actually was but I never set foot on either America nor a mall until the 90s.

          The 80s wasn’t a particularly hopeful time in Britain what with Thatcherism; 1984 being like, well, 1984; AIDS and the burgeoning awareness of climate change only being enlivened by the emergence of hip hop, glam metal and being in a punk band.

          have I mentioned that not only did I see but ran the fan club for Tank whose poster is on Billy’s wall

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            #80
            Originally posted by Bordeaux Education View Post

            To be honest, the whole thing is so cartoonish that I thought it was a representation of how America was represented on TV/movies in the 80s rather than what it actually was but I never set foot on either America nor a mall until the 90s.
            l

            It's both.

            It is an homage to Stephen King and Spielberg films, among other bits of pop culture, from the 80s. And there are lots of specific 80s references (some are cataloged here https://www.thrillist.com/entertainm...re-easter-eggs). But most of those are fairly subtle.

            But unlike a lot of homage/nostalgia films or TV shows it does a good job of not piling up the obvious 80s tropes. It isn't "I love the 80s." Nobody has a Michael Jackson glove or his jacket. The women aren't all wearing neon leotards with leg warmers and nobody is dressed like the guys in Miami Vice or talking like "Valley Girls." Contrast this to something like The Wedding Singer, which just piles on every conceivable bit of 80s fashion and reference even if they didn't happen until years after the film was supposed to be set. (I like that film anyway. It's one of Sandler's good ones).

            Instead, it actually gets the details right and does a very good job of showing what being that kind of kid in a boring, mostly white US town in the 80s was really like. At least where I lived. Wood-paneled basements with ugly carpet. Wallpaper (why did we always have to have fucking wallpaper?) Most of the interior design was leftover from the 60s or the 50s. Dungeons & Dragons. Comic books. Classic rock radio. For those with the patience and the aptitude (not me) messing around with electronics or early computers was a popular hobby (I tried to get into ham radio, but gave up after a short while. My dad and brother were into it for a while too). Most kids had fairly cheap knockoff BMX bikes until they graduated to a "10 speed." (Somehow those bikes seemed to be more durable than any of the much more expensive ones I've owned. Probably because I was lighter.) They meant freedom to us and parents were fine with us riding all over without a helmet. When we got older, we could drive an enormous 70s Detroit-made car first owned by our grandparents. We spent a ton of time at the pool or the movies because most of us didn't have air-conditioning - until we got older and got shitty summer jobs at places like Scoops Ahoy. But there was always that one douchebag who had a Camaro and listened to Foreigner and had a cool job, like lifeguard.

            Just look at the boys in the photo below. The short-shorts hiked up high with the shirts tucked in. The clashing color polo shirts. That was me and almost everyone I knew in 1984. I can't recall any of this being on screen before because, you know, it looks bad.

            The girls look a bit better because adolescent girls read magazines and know a bit about fashion. Boys don't. That's accurate. Also, the "makeover montage" was a staple of 80s teen movies, so ST does one with El and Max, and that's why El has that shirt with the suspenders and the pleated jeans.

            Jonathan has an almost timeless look - at least it would look normal at any time from the 1960s onward. That's supposed to show that he's "authentic" and so we should root for Nancy to like him, but that is how the cool guys who knew about the Violent Femmes and Hendrix usually dressed. I'd like to say I dressed like him as a kid, but I didn't. I dress like that now. I looked more like Mike, but not skinny. It was bad. I never had hair that long, however.

            Everyone either had a "girlfriend" they only knew from camp and barely talked to, or knew somebody who did, or made up a story about a girlfriend from camp or knew somebody who did. Nothing could be verified back then and so we all believed all kinds of lies and half-myths and urban legends. Just as our species has since the dawn of time. (Unfortunately, its unclear if the internet has made that problem better or worse. Both, really)

            Nancy looks like every girl in my junior high. And every girl in my junior high was named Jennifer or Heather or Nancy or Christy. Every one.

            They've shown big hair on some of the male characters - especially Joe - but not really gone for it on any of the female characters even though enormous 80s hair really was a thing, especially in fly-over/Orange Julius/Chess King country. I suppose that if they gave Nancy a massive perm, the younger fans of the show and fans from overseas wouldn't believe it and think they were doing a parody. But where I lived, big hair - i mean BIGGGG hair - was very common, especially among women from the more rural areas around here where Whitesnake and Bon Jovi were very popular.





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              #81
              "The 80s wasn’t a particularly hopeful time in Britain what with Thatcherism; 1984 being like, well, 1984; AIDS and the burgeoning awareness of climate change only being enlivened by the emergence of hip hop, glam metal and being in a punk band."

              Awareness of climate change was very low in the 80s, as I recall. That didn't really pick up until the early 90s. Part of that was because, apparently, the oil companies suppressed it and part of it was because all the data just weren't collected yet. Then again, my memory might be tainted because my earth science teacher, who is generally a good guy and a great teacher, still isn't convinced that climate change is caused by increased carbon in the atmosphere. Back when I was on Facebook, I observed an old classmate of mine - who was with me in all of the same earth science classes with that guy and is now a geology professor - school our old teacher about the current data on climate change. It was literally a case of "now the student has become the master."

              I've reconciled myself to most types of rock music, but not glam metal, or "hair metal" as we know it. Glam metal was the preferred music of rednecks where I lived, but that's not the only reason I don't like it. It's just really boring and the misogyny and cynicism of it hasn't aged well. I also didn't like hip-hop because that became the preferred music of assholes in my school. I've come around on that. But not on glam metal.

              I'm sad to admit that the AIDS crisis felt very remote to me in the 80s. I had no sense of the numbers and I naively thought "well, just don't have sex with men or shoot heroin. Problem solved." I grew up, fortunately.

              I knew a lot of gay people in high school, but I didn't know any of them were gay until after high school, because they weren't out yet. That's how it was.

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                #82
                My experience of growing up in 80s Britain was of being terrified of "the bomb", I think I spent a large part of the decade assuming we'd never make it to 1990.

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                  #83
                  Same.

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                    #84
                    Yup. One of our teachers showed us that Caldicott documentary If You Love This Planet, and I became convinced we'd be gone by Christmas.

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                      #85
                      Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                      Awareness of climate change was very low in the 80s, as I recall. That didn't really pick up until the early 90s. Part of that was because, apparently, the oil companies suppressed it and part of it was because all the data just weren't collected yet.
                      It may have been the environment I grew up in, but I that by 1988 - I know the date because we were talking about absorption spectra when I was studying chemistry A-level - people were saying that the greenhouse effect (as it was described then) was a bigger problem than the Ozone Hole.

                      My doom-and-gloom moods of the 80s were in phases, really. The early 80s was mostly financial : still occasional power cuts, TV footage of miners strikes, and family holidays to places in Britain that were close to towns that were desperately run down and decaying - which seemed like a different country for someone growing up in polite, wealthy Oxford. The mid-80s was the nuclear fear, exacerbated by Chernobyl, plus, as I've mentioned before, the time we heard all the F-111s leaving Upper Heyford in the night and we thought that the war with the Soviets had started - when in fact it was just(?) the US bombing Tripoli. The late 90s was AIDS, Ozone Hole and Climate Change.

                      There was the counterpoint Thatcherite optimism that I wasn't always old and wise enough to see past: the world of Filofaxes and Yuppies and the stock market Big Bang and those oversized suits, often in garish colours. Living in a place insulated from the worst aspects of Thatcherism, and being in a city full of the cocaine and champagne addled Bright Young Things who had brilliant futures ahead of them (and who are now running the country), this optimism meant that I didn't feel the irresistible pessimism about the future that others felt.
                      Last edited by San Bernardhinault; 17-08-2019, 20:52.

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                        #86
                        Yeah, I first heard about the “greenhouse effect,” which apparently isn’t a very good analogy to what is actually happening, around 88 or 89. But it wasn’t widely discussed and there was more uncertainty.

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                          #87
                          The UN agreement had happened by 1992. It was fairly widely discussed. Maybe not in the US though.

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                            #88
                            There was always one kid at school with impressive Steve-like hair. The one at my high-school is now completely bald. Poetic justice.

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                              #89
                              Originally posted by Ginger Yellow View Post
                              The UN agreement had happened by 1992. It was fairly widely discussed. Maybe not in the US though.
                              Maybe it's just because I turned 17 in 1989 and was starting to pay attention more, but I recall consciousness about ecological issues suddenly sky-rocketing in 1989 and 1990, coinciding with all the "the 21st century is coming!!" think pieces. Al Gore started to talk about it, and was ridiculed for it, of course. There was more concern about the ozone layer then. Global warming was usually presented as speculative and probably a long way off, at worst.* And I met a number of meteorologists/geologists who weren't convinced. But I've since come to understand that just because one is an expert in one area of science, doesn't mean they understand the research in another area, even one closely related to their own, and a lot of scientists are very conservative and uninterested in changing their mind about anything after graduate school.

                              *But we're now living in "a long way off." 30 years seemed like a long time to me in 1989.

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                                #90
                                Originally posted by Stumpy Pepys View Post
                                There was always one kid at school with impressive Steve-like hair. The one at my high-school is now completely bald. Poetic justice.
                                Big hair was so common where I lived that a do like Steve's really wouldn't have stood out as remarkable.

                                We also had an African-American kid with a sweet high-top fade. That was more noticeable because there were only about 10 black kids in my school.

                                I've known a few guys who started losing their hair in high school. They could probably have got into a bar at 18 without ID.

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                                  #91
                                  Re: Bored's comment, I've assumed throughout that the main way in which ST differs from What Actual '80s TV looked like is that there are non-white characters in ST. Since my memory of current affairs / pop culture basically begins with Mandela's release and the fall of the Berlin Wall [insert joke about how the best thing about being born in the mid 1980s is not being able to remember the 1980s], I've only seen '80s stuff retrospectively, and it's always looked a lot whiter than subsequent things, to me (although the same is also true, certainly for American series, of the 1990s).

                                  HP, the cheapo BMX you had as a kid was tougher than bikes you've had since not because you weighed less, but because it was a BMX. They're built to be thrown around. Thick tubing (with weight not really being a concern, especially for the cheap ones) makes them strong, small frames mean they're a lot stiffer than 'adult' bikes, smaller and thicker wheels can take more of a pounding ...

                                  As for the hole in the ozone layer, I think one reason it's seen as less of a problem these days is that that was one thing we did manage to reverse. Although it's still there and to this day Tierra del Fuego (the closest inhabited land to it) has far higher skin cancer rates than basically anywhere else on Earth. My girlfriend has a Brazilian colleague who went to the Argentine seaside a couple of years ago and came back complaining that if you go to the beach here you don't get a tan, you just burn – unlike the beaches in Brazil. That's not nationalistic 'my beaches are better than yours' bullshit (he's from Belo Horizonte, hundreds of miles inland), it's actually true! If you ever come to Argentina in the summer, coat yourself in a thick layer of factor 50 suncream.

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                                    #92
                                    That sounds horrendous.

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                                      #93
                                      It's not that bad, to be honest. If you come to Argentina and want to spend any time on the beach, you're doing things spectacularly wrong.

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                                        #94
                                        Apologies, i got my chronology wrong. I don't know about anyone else but the first time I genuinely got shit scared about climate change was reading Ben Elton's 'Stark' and that was published in 1989. Before that, dying in a nuclear war was my number one fear

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                                          #95
                                          Just binged the whole thing. Great stuff. Dustin and Erica wouldn't stop cracking me up.

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