didn’t that weird ABC invasion mini-series Amerika come out around that time too?
You don’t remember Glasnost and Perestroika?
As a child of the 1980’s, I most vividly remember Gorbachev, that big birthmark on his head, and the softening of US/Soviet relations.
here it is tho it was in 87
Gorbachev brought pizza to Russia.
It didn’t take Hollywood to make the USSSR look implacably evil to the people of 1985. Just two years earlier, they had shot down a commercial airliner for making a mistake:
I have heard complaints about Baby It’s Cold Outside but none of the rest of this paragraph looks at all familiar to me.
I agree!
And that was their second KAL airliner that they’d shot down, IIRC. The first wasn’t a total loss, but some people died nonetheless.
There does seem to be a contradiction here. The Cold War had certainly not abated, and yet we were aware of Glasnost and Perestroika. My personal recollection is that I knew about certain revolutionaries who were out to de-commie the USSR, but they were merely a fringe group who had zero chance of actually succeeding.
What I recall, being a teenager from 1985-1991 was that the Soviets were the big bad guy- the “Enemy” so to speak. They weren’t trusted, stuff like Glasnost and Perestroika were looked at with a skeptical eye, and that according to their own propaganda, they were out to overthrow our way of life- economically, politically and religiously.
It took until 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviets didn’t do anything whatsoever before it was widely accepted that maybe something was different. Even then, the big question was whether they were pulling back from the Warsaw Pact out of choice, or whether this was happening in spite of what they wanted. And if it was the former, at what point were they going to react violently to an independence movement? If the latter, were they going to implode violently at some point?
Finally in 1991, when the Soviet Union just sort of deflated in September and the CIS/Russian Federation came about, I think everyone actually realized how frail they had been internally.
Ditto.
I think it would be really nice if that were true; but I see no evidence of it. The entire society is saturated with Christmas stuff starting now before Thanksgiving, with sizeable pockets of Christmas in July sorts of things. And nearly everybody around here just assumes that you’re part of it. I’ve seen a news story about an area town’s Christmas celebration that said ‘this will bring everybody in town together!’
There had been intermittent periods of partial thaws in relations between the USA and the USSR. It’s my recollection that this was seen as another one of those, with some possible loosening of restrictions on Soviet citizens which couldn’t be counted on to continue; it certainly wasn’t expected to lead to the sudden non-violent dissolution of the USSR.
That particular division was so baked into USA culture that there was science fiction set far into the future that assumed it was still continuing.
The half-hour “A Charlie Brown Christmas” show will have scenes cut by the networks to add more commercials. Eventually, the show will be padded out with additional scenes so it will become a one-hour special with enough time left for the normal complement of commercials.
The voices in the additional scenes will be noticeably different.
My electric self driving car drove me to the marijuana store so I could buy some more legal weed, but when I got there I realized they were closed to celebrate Juneteenth. I should’ve checked my smartphone to see if they were open.
What might be more surprising to people of 1985 is how many things have not changed.
If you transported someone from 1985 into a city today, it would look absolutely normal. The buildings are the same, the roads are built and maintained the same way, schools still look the same, restaurants are the same, airplanes are still the same, boats and ships are the same, people dress pretty much the same etc. There are no space colonies or underwater cities, or really not even much advancement in space tech other than computers until SpaceX came along. Heck, there are still plenty of cars from the 80’s and earlier still on the road. New Cessna 172s still look just like 1985 Cessna 172s.
The ‘world of the future’ circa 1985 was projected to look very, very different. The shock might be that it really isn’t, except for digital stuff. Giant flat screens would not be a surprise, since we knew even then that things were trending that way. The internet would not be a surprise, since it was already around. What we did with it, on the other hand…
But by and large, in 1985 we expected much more rapid change in the next 40 years than we got. After all, our reference for 40 years of change was 1945 to 1985, and things changed a lot. We went from propeller planes to the Space Shuttle and Concorde in that time. We went from vacuum tubes to the internet in that time. We had every expectation that 2025 would be just as advanced over 1985 as 1985 was over 1945, or even more so because the rate of change seemed to be accelerating.
I agree that appearances wouldn’t be starkly different. But the digital age has so fundamentally changed how we live that I think it would become apparent pretty quick that this was the future.
People today have portable computers that consume their everyday lives. Communication is not just ubiquitous, it’s instantaneous. There is an entire “world” (cyberspace) where people interact (for things like commerce, but also friendship and relationships) that didn’t yet exist for the general public. Even you, I think, would agree that there have been profound social changes.
I agree that the world didn’t change in ways that a person from 1985 probably expected, but I believe that they’d be in awe of this new world (e.g. cars are still terrestrial, but they are like spaceships with their technology!)
there are societal changes that someone in 1985 wouldn’t expect … like an adult model/ film star or exotic dancer is just another job … back then you’d be shunned from society if it was discovered you were either Now you can find them on the PTA … or find out that the PTA members have an only fans account
also, tattoos and colored hair are everywhere now so that woman with the nose ring and green hair and smiley face on her cheek is your kid’s kindergarten teacher ,
People will spend hours staring at their phones every day. It will make them laugh, it will make them cry, it will entertain them, sometimes it will be responsible for causing car collisions. People never leave home without them.
I used to do this with my rotary phone in 1985, but I was a bit odd. 
I don’t know that we didn’t have that rapid change, rather that it was less visible than what a person from 1985 would see out the car window from the time machine to home, or that will be immediately visible on walking into the house.
I mean, all the computing/phone/networking changes have in many ways dramatically changed how we conduct our lives. Whole categories of things that were critical in 1985 are now obsolete and fast fading away, such as phone books, answering machines, land-line telephones, stereo systems, VCRs, newspapers, magazines, and so on.
Not much of that is really something you’d notice right away; it might take your 1985 time traveler a while to actually realize that nobody has mentioned “the paper” in several days, if they weren’t a big newspaper reader in 1985. Or that there’s no phone sitting out somewhere, and no phone books nearby.
They would notice that everyone has these little oblong things in their pockets, and that people usually tap on them, and occasionally use them like a telephone or a camera. But they wouldn’t really have much of a handle on how those devices are integrated into the Internet, with each other, or how the various functions are integrated in the phone itself. The idea that you could take a picture and send it via a text to someone half a world away in seconds would be amazing.
Hell, I recall going on a trip in 1998, and making sure I had enough film of the right types, and having the right types loaded for what I was doing was a big consideration. Then I had to get it all developed and printed when I got back. At some point after that, I made an album and showed that to my parents. But in 2010 when my wife and I visited Italy, I just took a photo of the Pantheon and shot it to my Dad, who replied seconds later about how cool that was. That whole photographic process in 1998 (or 1985) was just reduced to a two second operation, and was more timely to boot. A person from 1985 wouldn’t necessarily understand that without some explanation or experience.
Exoplanets!!!
Also, the solar system had lost a planet.
But sometimes Google is wrong about the hours. Next time I’ll tweet at the manager - they’re a digital native and probably check their DMs 24/7