Is anybody else watching the “I Love the 80’s” shows on VH-1 this weekend?? I am hypnotized by them!!! Basically they take every year of the 80’s and spend an hour making fun of all the stuff we thought was cool. Some of the stuff that just cracked me up:
Dungeons and Dragons geeks
Silver Spoons
“Time for Timer!”
Public Svc Announcements about AIDS
Reminisences about getting cable and watching “scrambled porn” (I didn’t even realize guys did that!!)
Luke and Laura’s wedding
I know the 80’s has been done and overdone, but those shows are fun to watch.
And it really makes me nostalgic for the earlier years (What can I say? I’m such a 70’s-ish geek!) because I was so much more naive back then. I also missed a lot the first go 'round, so it’s really fun to reminisce over what might have been. So far, the best part has been the really bad fashion – I even owned a Member’s Only jacket, once they’d were thoroughly on the down-trend, that is. I had big hair too and thought mullets (even though we didn’t have that term back then) was the epitome of cool if coupled with an extremely preppy guy.
Yep, what a nerd I was. Dreaming of a boyfriend in a pink Izod and deck shoes. Ewwww!
Well, I have been watching this, “visual crack”, and all I can say is, Tetris!drool I remember staying up all weekend, and having tournaments with that game. Too bad that I couldn’t major in Tertris!
I had some big ass bangs that would take me about 20 minutes to get perfect, and if I didn’t like them, I would wash my bangs in the sink, and start all over again. It’s a miracle I still have hair in the front!
I did love the Eighties . . . I was 24 when I moved to New York in '81, and gosh did I have a good time. Didn’t accomplish a damn thing, but did I have fun? I already looked 40-ish (in a good, sophisticated, way!), so I wore the Nolan Miller look: huge shoulderpads, spike heels, glittery red lipstick, retro jewelry.
I loved the Maddie Hayes look, too: knee-length sheath dresses with matching knee-length coats. And one day, c1984, the ad agency I worked in had Don Johnson Day. Everyone–male and female–came dresed as Sonny Crocket. Scary thing was, we all had the linen jacket, pastel T-shirt and shades!
But it also caused me to recall all those repressed memories of the syndicated horror that is Small Wonder. Grrr. Damn you VH-1!
And damn me for watching this thing again even though I’ve seen all of it already. Takes me back to things I fondly remember (Nina Blackwood and Fridays), stuff I hated (ALF and the New Kids On The Block), and pure “what the hell were we thinking?” material (Strawberry Shortcake and “The Super Bowl Shuffle” - my cousin still has his vinyl LP of it).
I’m surprised to find how many of the commentators are actually funny, even Stuart Scott is tolerable for once. But this show also reinforces my belief that Joel Stein must be blackmailing every head of every media corporation to have a career. Not one iota of talent or wit has ever been displayed by Captain Obvious.
Well, it was just like if you watched a pay per view movie today without actually getting pay per view. Except that every now and then, the screen would unscramble partially for about .10 seconds.
I love that show. I was barely conscious for most of the eighties and it’s good to get caught up. I think my favorite segment so far is the “Was He-Man Gay?” bit from… 1983? Somewhere around there. I imagine some VH1 schlub getting a whole day to watch He-Man episodes and pick homoerotic scenes.
I was actually playing with Strawberry Shortcake and Pound Puppies during the eighties, so some of the things they talk about are a little beyond me, but the show is addictive anyway.
These shows usually remind of all the stuff I hated while growing up in the 80s.
Occasionally, a nice memory will pop up, like in the “I love 89” episode when they very briefly covered goth music. Basically, they lumped together the Smiths, the Cure, and Erasure, and then made smart-ass comments about how stupid they were.
I was immensely annoyed by their comments, since the Smiths and The Cure (among others) were the only things that made the 80s bearable.
Some of the commentators are OK–Mo Rocca, for instance–but others are just annoying wise-asses.
I watch it mostly for the commentary from both Mo rocca and Michael Ian Black, I never realized how funny that guy could be. I guess having only seen him as Johnny Blue Jeans on that crappy shoe Viva Variety didn’t do him justice. My favourite part is when he makes fun of George Michael.
“George Michael was gay? Didn’t see that coming. The front man for Wham!? Gay? No! Not at all!” (of course, this was interspaced with many a scene from “Wake me up Before You Go-Go”, such as the dancing in short-shorts.)
I imagined that after the taping Hal Sparks and Aiesha Tyler got together and tried to figure out how “Talk Soup” served as a jump point for not one but two careers. I’ve enjoyed watching the shows before but am getting kind of burned out after their having been on pretty much every day for, what, the last seventeen years now?
Pac-Man. The A-Team. Baywatch (before it became a worldwide syndicated phenomenon). Rubik’s Cube. Reggae. Breakdancing. Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Empire and Jedi. That’s Incredible. Square Pegs.
Me too. I love those guys. I hate the commentary from Lisa Ling or Lucy Liu (I always get those two mixed up), though. I think it’s Lisa Ling. It’s just so…boring. And banal. Like look!ninjas, I was but a child during the 80s, but it’s good to reminisce anyway. I had forgotten Perfect Strangers even existed.
I still watch it every now and again despite having seen every episode about 3 times.
I agree that Lisa Ling gives crappy commentary, along with a bunch of other people that aren’t Michael Ian black, Hal Sparks, Mo Rocca, or Aisha Tyler. You get some great quips from those guys, and then you get some has been telling you “durrr I really, like, liked Michael Jackson back then.” Fascinating!
This show pinpointed exactly when I stopped being part of pop culture, the year I emotionally moved out of the demographic. See, the 80’s were my 20’s, so as I watched the shows, I knew everything–I remember the TV shows, the music, I’d seen all the movies, I knew all the little scandals, and if I hadn’t been caught up in the latest fad, a friend had been. This is how it went through 1980, '81, '82, (the year I graduated college), '83, '84, even '85. Watching the 1986 episode, I distinctly remembered not going to a movie because I thought it sounded too young, a bit silly–but still, I was on track with the rest of it. 1986–missed a few of the top bands–wouldn’t have been able to name their hits; I remembered the hot TV shows, but I hadn’t watched them very often; the hot stars were a bit young for my 26 year-old tastes, and nobody I knew had been into any of the fads. 1987–this was the year I lost pop culture. TV, movies, bands, fads, drugs, whoosh–right over my head. Oh yeah, I had some memories, the songs sounded familar, I remembered seeing an ad or a trailer for the TV shows or movies, but none of it really impacted my life. 1988–same thing. The 1989 show was better, but only because I’d started teaching high school, and some of it sunk in by osmosis, I guess. Yeah, TV is really a wonderful thing. Thanks to VH1, I know that I was barely 27 years old when I was officially uncool–and I wasn’t even married with kids or anything–I didn’t move into a new demographic (newly married/young kids), I just stopped being “with it”.
