Some parents even got into fisticuffs with each other in the toy stores, battling to get the perfect Cabbage Patch for their child. We're not being hyperbolic; parents were seriously punching each other for dolls. You'd be in your car listening to a cassette or in your living room listening to a vinyl record on the hi-fi, and all of a sudden the music would just… stop.
If you wanted to keep rocking out, you had to stop what you were doing and take out the cassette or pick up the vinyl record and turn it over. Yes, in the '80s, listening to your favorite music involved active participation. The harsh reality of physical media is that only so many songs can fit on a side one. If there was such a thing as going viral in the '80s, it happened during the season finale of Dallas , in which oil tycoon J. Ewing played by Larry Hagman was shot by… somebody.
Nobody knew by whom, but it was all anybody could talk about that summer. More people had wild and far-fetched theories about who shot J. There was so much excitement and speculation that when Dallas returned later that year, a record 83 million viewers tuned in, according to The History Channel.
Up until , you could only watch the news at designated times in the morning and evening. But with the arrival of CNN, news junkies had a way to stay informed around the clock. Though the brainchild of Ted Turner become the cultural phenomenon that it is today during the Gulf War in the early '90s, those who tuned in during the '80s were able to witness the dawn of a new media age in its infancy.
In the '80s, just about every kid in the country wanted to learn a few breakdancing moves. Maybe not everyone had what it took to bust a move like the Windmill or the Head Slide—but if you could pull off a respectable Robot, that was enough to be able to bust a move at the school dance without looking completely foolish.
It was on this day that the 10th flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which carried five NASA astronauts and a civilian schoolteacher, exploded just 73 seconds into its flight, killing everybody on board.
Innocent lives were lost that day—and the dream of everyday people making it to space felt even more out of reach. What made the Chicago Bears the most exciting team in sports in ? Winning the Super Bowl certainly helped, but what ultimately made the team a sensation was a quirky little hit song called " The Super Bowl Shuffle.
Who knew that a baby trapped in a well could bring an entire nation together? But that's exactly what happened when one-and-a-half-year-old Jessica McClure Morales fell into a well in her aunt's backyard in Midland, Texas, in the fall of Everyone in the country was glued to their TV screens as rescuers worked tirelessly to pull the child to safety from that foot-deep crypt.
It was a nail-biter every step of the way—and when that mud-caked baby face finally saw sunlight again, it felt like a victory for all. Sure, you could play video games at home, but there was something special in the '80s about hitting the arcade with a big roll of quarters in your pocket and challenging some friends to a friendly game of Rampage.
The sound of an arcade packed with kids joyfully banging on buttons and pulling at joysticks will always be music to our ears. Many Americans weren't all that aware about the famine in Ethiopia until they heard the unforgettable chorus of " Do They Know It's Christmas ," recorded by a super group of British musicians called Band-Aid. In addition to raising money for famine relief, the song also delivered a pretty darn catchy tune.
Even people who haven't thought about Ethiopia in decades can still belt out those lyrics, "Do they know it's Christmastime at aaaaaall? The band Whitesnake made '80s pop metal that was pretty easy to forget.
However, what wasn't so easy to forget were their music videos, particularly the ones starring the lead singer's girlfriend, Tawny Kitaen , who made rolling around on a luxury car look like classical ballet. Her starring roles in Whitesnake videos were enough to inspire hundreds of kids around the world to follow their musical dreams. In the '80s, David Letterman was still the rebel of late night television, and he knew just how to find comedy in things that no one had ever considered before.
Case in point: We never thought velcro was all that funny until we saw Letterman with velcro shoes, a velcro dart gun, a velcro basketball, and—the piece de resistance —a velcro suit. If you've never watched a man in full velcro jump from a trampoline onto a velcro wall , you don't know what you're missing. It started out with tearing holes in the knees of your jeans or tights and cutting off the collar on your sweatshirt so you looked like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. And soon, it evolved into a style movement where clothing wasn't fashionable unless it was almost entirely shredded.
There are even online tutorials on how to cut up a shirt so that it looks '80s-ready. As if people in the '80s didn't feel anxious enough about the threat of nuclear war , the Chernobyl disaster of made everyone all the more acutely aware of how vulnerable they really were.
On April 26, , at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine in the former Soviet Union, a reactor explosion caused a lethal amount of radiation to be released into the atmosphere. As a result, 30 people died and hundreds more were sickened with radiation poisoning, and it took weeks just to fully contain the incident. It was one of the biggest upsets in Olympic history and a reason to feel pride in American athletes.
With a team made up of college kids, nobody expected the U. However, on February 22, , the scrappy Americans beat the Soviets in a stunning upset, a David-and-Goliath story that Sport Illustrated picked in as the single greatest moment in sports history.
Fox from Back To The Future. Whatever the reason, down vests were not just something your mom made you wear on cold-but-not-too-cold fall days; kids in the '80s wore them because we thought they were cool. Elizabeth Takes Off , Elizabeth Taylor's bestselling book on weight loss, was a compelling read even if you didn't want to shed a few pounds. In just a matter of pages, Taylor's advice could zig-zag from helpful to downright loony.
Admittedly, we have yet to try her patented tuna salad—which involves combining tuna with tomato paste, grapefruit, scallions, and mayonnaise—and we likely never will. We're also in no hurry to eat peanut butter and steak sandwiches, which Taylor swore by, or cover our fruit with a cottage-cheese-mixed-with-sour cream dressing. Just reading about her out-there diet ideas is enough to decrease our appetite, frankly.
The very concept behind the Nintendo Game Boy seemed too good to be believed when it came out in Back then, people would've been just as shocked had jetpacks become commercially available.
But sure enough, Nintendo had done what seemed impossible at the time: They found a way for gamers to hold a gaming device in the palm of their hands. Granted, the games weren't that sophisticated at the time—Tetris seems like cave paintings by today's gaming standards—but it still felt like sweet, sweet freedom being able to game on the go.
Though most people don't remember much of the first-ever televised MTV Video Music Awards in , they'll always remember Madonna writhing around the stage in a wedding gown while singing "Like a Virgin. Years later, in an interview with Jay Leno , Madonna admitted that her stage crawl only happened because she lost one of her stilettos during the performance. It's over there and I'm on TV,'" she explained. I rolled around and I reached for the shoe.
We can still picture it like it was yesterday: the calm and unflappable Bjorn Borg versus his rival, the short-tempered and volatile John McEnroe. It wasn't just a great tennis match; it was the most dramatic tennis showdown of all time.
This was the second time that the United States had won the gold medal in Olympic hockey. A series of small earthquakes near Mount St. Helens in Washington state begin in March of Earthquakes throughout the month increased the volcanic activity, and near the end of the month, the volcano had its first eruption in over one hundred years as a series of steam explosions blew a crater into the summit, releasing ash.
The volcano remained active through most of April but then ceased activity for a number of days. By the middle of May on May 18 the pressure had built and Mount St. Helens experienced a huge eruption that created avalanches, explosions, large ash clouds, mudslides, and massive damage to the surrounding area. Fighting during the war continued between the two nations until when they signed a cease-fire.
A formal peace agreement to officially end the war was not signed until August of It was estimated that over one million people, military members and civilians, lost their lives as a result of the conflict. It was the first hour news network available to cable subscribers in the United States and Canada and has since become available worldwide.
The network originally struggled to find success but by the mid- s it had gained more influence and became well known for its live coverage of events as they happened, often being the first to broadcast during big news events. The Staggers Act of comes into effect in October of The Act allowed for the deregulation of the United States Rail Industry which had remained largely untouched since the Interstate Commerce Act that had been created with the purpose of regulating the booming rail industry and the monopolies that had been controlling the rails.
The Staggers Act allowed carriers greater freedom in establishing rates as well as increasing the overall flexibility of the industry. Magnum, P. Thundarr the Barbarian [cartoon] In the year , a comet hurtles between Earth and the moon. The moon is destroyed, and the Earth loses its ozone layer—causing the entire planet to be laid waste. Their parents, Henry and Muriel, live in the other half.
Segments ranged from the uplifting young people overcoming severe handicaps to lead normal lives to the unexplainable a park ranger who had been hit by lightning over 7 times to the simply stupid a stuntman jumping a motorcycle over the spinning rotors of 3 helicopters. The two eastern boys are having difficulty adjusting to the new life until the warden finds that Skip has a natural talent for riding broncos with the inter-prison rodeo coming up.
Any Which Way You Can Starring: Clint Eastwood Philo takes part in a bare knuckle fight to make some more money than he can earn from his car repair business. He decides to retire from fighting, but when the Mafia come along and arrange another fight, he is pushed into it. Private Benjamin Starring: Goldie Hawn A sheltered young high society woman joins the army on a whim and finds herself in a more difficult situation than she ever expected.
By the time they are rescued, they have learned a great deal about life and are raising a child of their own. Urban Cowboy Starring: John Travolta Bud is a young man from the country who learns about life and love in a Houston bar. The Shining Starring: Jack Nicholson A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future.
Friday the 13th Many years after two summer camp councilors are killed at Camp Crystal Lake, the owner decides to reopen, which sparks a series of grisly murders. Flash Gordon A football player and his friends travel to the planet Mongo and find themselves fighting the tyrant, Ming the Merciless, to save Earth.
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