Being Born is a good place to start XD
The big 80s were certainly a great decade for me.
The movies:
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
3 Fugitives
Throw Mama From The Train
And the Jerry Lewis / Dean Martin reunion on the Telethon.
Also, Sinatra was still alive.
The entire LA punk scene was great.
X was great
Crime Story and Miami Vice, getting out of the Corps, my 1965 Catalina Covertible, my 1983 Eldorado Biarritz, my 1989 Z-24 Convertible...
The end of Disco
One of the best -- President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul.
Having Reagan as a 2 term president. You just knew the nation was in good hands with his leadership and it was a fairly profitable decade in American history.
What I loved about the’80s:
I was in my 20s.
That’s enough.
You can’t have the 80’s without Rubiks Cube.
Reagan made it a most perfect decade.
Got the best job I ever "had".
Lost a very good friend.
A lot of the music, the movies, the world leaders, not even half the Marxist crap in our country today.
From the motorhead perspective, 1980s cars were cool because they were the best of two worlds. They were modern in the sense of being fuel injected and using electronic engine management, but they weren’t so complex that you couldn’t work on them. They struck the perfect balance. I’ve got two cars from the 1980s — a Toyota and a BMW, both in headturningly excellent condition — and they are simply great cars.
From the cultural perspective, the 1980s was the last decade that was still rooted in traditional America. I was in elementary school in the 1980s and several of my teachers were women in their fifties, as was the principle, who set the tone for the school. They were educated and started their careers in the 1950s. That was the culture they taught, though of course somewhat modified by their experiences in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1980s was the last decade where people in power positions within the educational establishment had their roots in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Musicwise I’ll just post this as something good that the eighties gave us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG07WSu7Q9w
Great music (ELO, Dire Straits, Peter Gabriel, Cyndi Lauper, The Bangles, etc, etc)
and terrible music (”Ebony and Ivory”, “The Doggone Girl is Mine”, “To all the girls I’ve Loved Before”, “Woman”)
The only movies that I liked were "Red Dawn" and the Rambo films, but "Star Wars II" (1980) was a disappointment. "Star Wars III" was better, but neither could hold a candle to "Star Wars I."
In sports, the Los Angeles Dodgers won a couple of national championships, but soon after winning the 1980 Rose Bowl game, the USC Trojans came under the leadership of a series of mediocre coaches and went into a funk that lasted the rest of the century. However, the Occidental College Tigers did better, with seven winning seasons and 10 straight victories over arch-rival Pomona College.
The 1980's also produced the ugliest cars of just about any decade. Automobile stylists seemed to have been influenced by cubism, for the streets were filled with cars that looked like boxes. They also weren't very well-made; there are probably more 1950's cars on the road today than there are 1980's cars.
I loved the great movies, great music and the end of the Carter Administration.
So, in essence, the 80s were devoid of much of anything of lasting value?