I’ll check it out. Thanks. 
Yeah, this is something everyone forgets about the 80’s. I started high school in 1980 and I remember knowing that one day (not too far in the future) we’d have a nuclear war. Ultravox’s “Vienna” used to make me cry everytime I saw it. I think that feeling was partly responsible for the wild fashions and fun music. I can’t begin to explain how it felt when the Berlin Wall fell and you finally realized maybe we wouldn’t all die…
Whenever I think of the 1980’s, I think of the movie The Wedding Singer.
I had the advantage if being born in the early eighties (82) and so I am able to remember a lot of stuff from the era, but luckily, since I wasn’t in the age range of 12-30, I don’t have to feel embarassed about anything I did or liked. 
Since I was a little kid, what I remebmer most of the kids things, the toys, the cartoons, and movies. Transformers and G.I.Joe were my gods back then. The music I don’t remember much, but I do like some of it, although not from a nostelgia pouint of view, but cause I actually like it. (Not all of it, though.)
Hey, I liked the fashions! Don’t forget the Miami Vice blazers, plastic jelly shoes, mismatched dangly earrings, spandex, and wide belts. Everybody wore kinky costumes and listened to fun music. What’s not to like?
I wholeheartedly agree with MsRobyn.
For my 10th grade class picture, I wore a pink crinkled satin blazer (complete with shoulder pads), and my hair was shaped like a triangle…if I had a copy of the photo, I’d share the horror. I still love some of the music from that era.
sigh Good times.
I was born in 80, so I caught the 80s filtered down through my sisters. Hence my love of shirts that were way oversized, sidways pony tails, belted sweatshirts (not on me, of course, as I am male, but on girls), off one shoulder shirts… wait a minute. All these fashion styles are coming back! I’ve seen off one shoulder neon lime green shirts! I’ve seen leg warmers! I’ve seen the poodle crimps! Look at The Darkness for some classic late 70s early 80s style arena rock! Brace yourselves, we’re in for a revival.
Delete the references to the movies of the era (as I don’t remember many of them) and add in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Saved by the Bell, Thundercats, Voltron, Pound Puppies, and half a dozen other programs and you have me.
Well, I’m not overly fond of the music either although I do like a bit here and there. G’n’R isn’t bad and I do like some of the New Wave-ish stuff.
I’m much more fond of the Grunge Era in the early to mid-nineties though.
Also, for you in particular, men’s shorts were well above the knee. Don’t set your time machine for summer, unless you want to see guys knees and lower thighs as far as the eye can rach.
Born in 1985, but still an 80s child in some respects. Playing Oregon Trail, woot. I’m not really old enough to have worried about nuclear war, but I’m currently wearing ox blood docs.
It would be nifty to see the 80s, but I’ll take 2004 over 1984 anyday. No that wasn’t really meant to be a pun.
You reminded me of one of the milestones of my life in the 80s: going to boot camp in 1985.
The further we get from the Cold War, the more the memories of my boot camp days stand out as being from another era. In contrast, my high school memories seem more recent and less dated.
It is ironic that when I was in boot camp, I often thought of Viet Nam-era bootcamp as being ancient history – the drill instructors never actually hit us or anything, you see, like they did back in the bad old days.
Nowadays, I see the Reagan-era military as just as strange and old-fashioned now as the Viet Nam seemed to me back then.
In my boot camp days, it was all about the Big Red Menace. Everthing we did was coated in anti-communist rhetoric. It seemed perfectly normal, but I’m sure that if we were to zip into our time machine to Basic Training in 1985, it would feel very different from Basic Training today.
Oh yes… They don’t swear at recruits anymore (who’d have imagined this 20 years ago?)
How could I have forgotten Computer Camp in 1983?? The Commodore Vic-20 rules! 
Baseball shirts with your name in fuzzy letters, ironed on the sleeve or on the back of a t-shirt.
Speaking of nuclear war: The Day After. That movie was so disturbing to me back then, but I saw it again a few years ago and it’s so incredibly cheesy.
Amen! Though I’m more of an NES fan myself.
The best things to come out of that decade were Mario, Zelda, and Metroid.
Have you guys heard this song “Preoccupied with 1985”?
http://www.absolutelyric.com/lyrics/view/bowling_for_soup/1985/
Kind of funny/sad. This thread reminded me of it. Not a bad song
Yes, unfortunately. It describes me to a ‘T’. :o
Only if I can now avoid the party where I met the former Mrs Factotum.
About the only thing I’d do different (other than the aforementioned) is spend a lot more time writing down things about the local music scene. It would help with the book I’ve been trying to put together on the subject.
I graduated from high school at 17 in 1985, so I came up during the best/worst of it! I think I burned my yearbooks just to destroy the pictures!
The bands I dimly remember seeing live were X, Oingo Boingo, The B-52’s, Souxsie & The Banshees, David Bowie, The Who, Sparks, Police/Sting, Madness, Untouchables, Duran Duran, Squeeze, and a whole bunch more that never got saved in the diminished capacity of my brain at the time.
The clothes were just wrong.
Go back? No thanks. I like it here, even though I’m old now!
Wait, I’m pretty sure that Nintendo was late, late 80s, like 89 or something, and those other games might even be into the 90s. So I don’t know if that counts. I do remember playing my old Colecovision though. At least I think that’s what it was. And the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I had a Pound Puppy too. For some reason, I seem to remember a lot of pastel colors in clothing.
Wow… Stirrup pants. Shoulder pads. Jelly shoes and jelly bracelets. In neon colors. Doctor Marten shoes. Crimped hair. Blue mascara. Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Big, heavy, stiff skateboards with giant plastic nose guards. The Cars. Off-the-shoulder clothing. Giant tennis shoes with no laces. Run DMC. Acid-washed stretch jeans, ohhh yeah. 49ers. Respressed memory therapy. Cocaine. Family Ties. Those awful tiered ruffle skirts that are back in style, sort of.
And never, ever forget The Devil in Miss Jones.
Bah, I wouldn’t want to time-travel back to the '80s. If I did, I wouldn’t be on the Internet right now! Well, maybe I would, but all the porn would be ASCII. As for fashion and music, I think the best past time to be living would probably be the mid-'60s, with countless great bands and space-age clothes and spiffy recycled military uniforms.
There was some good music in the '80s, though. Queen and Devo were great bands, and some lesser-known noisy no wave stuff was pretty decent. Still, I think that culturally speaking, the best time to be alive is today, since we can still listen to all the old music, watch the old movies, wear old clothes if we want to, but also go out and find the amazing new things happening. I’m sure there was a lot of great obscure art and music happening in the '80s. but I would have had a much tougher time finding out about it then than today, since so much cool stuff is available on the Internet.
I also wouldn’t be too keen on living during the Reagan administration, except that the Bush era isn’t that great either. It might be nice to relive the '90s Pax Clintonia.