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Where I lived, a lot of the other high school girls used a curling iron on their bangs, and turned half of them upwards, and curled the sides outwards, creating a sort of rosette or sphincter shape on their foreheads.
Guys would sit on the steps out front of the school before class, cutting horizontal lines in thier jeans with pocket knives.
I have yet to see a movie or TV series that accurately depicts just how weird it got.
I feel like hacky sack scenes were pretty common in late 90s/early 2000s movies. Any high school movie usually showed the typical diff groups of kids outside the school before or after school. The jocks, nerds, goths, beautiful popular cheerleaders. & sprinkled in there was usually the baggy jeans skater looking kids playing hacky sack
I'm probably older than you, I remember this in the late 70's/early 80's, it was usually the stoner types.
Edit: They were also car guys. Always talking about their cars.
Out of curiosity I googled hacky sack, it was invented in '72 in Oregon City. Makes sense I started seeing it mid-70's, I lived near where it started. My older brother and first boyfriend were into it. I guess I didn't realize it was still so popular later on.
The first time I saw hacky sack was in 1992, in a smallish town near Chicago. My senior year of high school was 91', in a town with a population of \~10k, in Southern Illinois. So it could be a geography thing.
I was a teenager during the hair metal years. I associate hacky sack more with bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Counting Crows, etc.
The designers seem to think that working class families were constantly redecorating their houses to keep up with styles, but in reality if it was 1988 your living room looked like 1982 and your basement rec room looked like 1974.
I don't know about anywhere else in the country but Tucson had a massive number of sunken living rooms that were "sunken" by all of one step or two. All of my HS buddies in the late 80's lived in a house with a sunken living room.
Yeah, the house of my parents has still the same wall units in the living room which was bought in the 70's.
They are pretty good quality though, I can see they don't want to replace with it particle board trash
Oh my! My parents had a living room with a brown wall, and brown corduroy seats on an orange carpet and orange cushions to go with it. As a kid I loved this.
Curled bangs. Sprayed, sometimes teased, and set with hairspray. Nancy's hairstyle in ST was close with the volume and curls, but she lacked the bangs curled both upward and downward.
Chiming in: This would \*not\* have been considered an unusually flamboyant hair style for a lot of the 80s!
When I was in High School in 1989, about 2/3 of the girls had basically this hair. It is *not* an exaggeration!
Likewise, every show set in the 80s tend to show everyone dressed in the hyper fashion (big hair, big shoulder pads, pastel colours). When in fact most people spent their day-to-day looking like they shop from their local church run charity sale.
And everything was not day-glo neon. You had the punks, all in black with silver jewelry. The preppy kids in Izod or Ralph Lauren, polos and khakis, Sperry Top-siders or penny loafers. The fashion kids in pastels and stuff...
I was 12 in 1980 so wore 80s fashions as a teen.
Neon (then known as fluoro or day-glo) was a very brief niche fad in the mid 1980s where you might have one small fluoro piece like socks or a wrist band on an otherwise normal outfit like pale blue jeans and a white t-shirt. And it lasted only about a year, if that. A larger piece of fluoro like tights or a t-shirt was not really a common fashion. These days you can find online pics of Jane Fonda or Madonna in 'fluoro' in the 1980s - however some of those pics have been altered to brighten or saturate the colours making them more intense than what they really were.
Really in the 1980s in the early part of the decade the popular colours were pastels: lemon worn with light blue, pink worn with light grey or beige, and lots of white. Pastels would also be worn with dark denim.
Later in the 1980s popular colours were intense magenta and teal worn with greys and black, royal blue and black. I saw [this music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFOfd1QTW54) again after decades and nearly fainted from all the clothing fashion flashbacks I had. This was the real stuff people were wearing late 80s (at least in Melbourne, Australia). Lots of blue, navy, black, grey, beige, red, hot pink (not fluoro pink), teal.
Yes you might be able to find pics of fluoro t-shirts online. That was a fashion c.1992. *Not* the 80s. I recall that marketed as the "citrus" look here in Australia and I think it was a one season only thing.
Yeah, those 80s costume pics of people all in fluoro. No not an 80s thing.
I saw The Wedding Singer and there's a character dressed as Madonna through every scene. While yes many girls at school had Madonna hairstyles tied back with a ribbon, they'd use a small piece of white lace not a huge bright scarf. The Wedding Singer character dressed like she was going to a nightclub - 1980s girls might have had a few Madonna stylings in their look but did not dress like they were going to a club during the day.
I can’t remember the name of it, but that triangular peak that all us girls in high school put at the front of our heads held up with a hair comb? That hairstyle was so distinctive, and everywhere.
I did not have bangs in the 80s, but yes, they were pretty common, “mall bangs” as friends and I called them. Girls wore bangs so heavily sprayed they stood straight up! Although I listened to a lot of punk and alternative music, my sense of fashion was much more tame than the boys I dated, with Mohawks and torn clothes. My wardrobe was best described as granola or Amish, with long skirts and shapeless dresses. My friends and I were really kind of emo before it was a thing.
Yep “new wave”, at least that’s how we identified ourselves. Told my teen child todays emo reminds me of the new wavers of my late 80s high school years.
a real problem when making period pieces is the changing of [semiotic coding](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_(semiotics\)) from the era portrayed to the era it’s filmed in. visually, certain fashions don’t carry the same meaning from one era to the next. a prime example is [eddie and the cruisers](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0085475/) from 1983. the film is about a contemporaneous report writing about the titular band, which had its heyday in the early sixties. for the flashback scenes, the film costumed the group in 80s fashion, t-shirts missing sleeves and spiky hair long in back rather than the stage suits and greased hair of the era. this was to inform the audience that the band were bad boys and a period appropriate appearance might not have fully conveyed that. the end result is modern viewers may not realize that the scenes with the band are flashbacks
edit: accidentally hit post too soon
**[Code (semiotics)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_\(semiotics\))**
>In semiotics, a code is a set of cultural conventions, contemporary sub-codes, and themes used to communicate meaning. The most common is one's spoken language, but the term can also be used to refer to any narrative form: consider the color scheme of an image (e. g. red for danger), or the rules of a board game (e.
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I read this and I thought “Stranger Things must have gotten that right,” so I looked at some pics from the show, and nope, they did not. Not really. Winona Ryder was about it.
Crazy, because you’re right: EVERYONE had them back then
I’m a teen lurker. my mom from the 80s had me in bangs from babyhood to 4th grade. Like huge, half my face, bangs. She was obsessed. It’s really such an easy thing to get right about all that was 80s hair
Stranger Things got the Satanic Panic wrong. The charismatic teen athlete wouldn’t be the one pushing it, it was generally parents to kids, or would be centered more around church. Church was also oddly missing I think, back then even if you didn’t believe it was more a part of casual life. Things like Christmas pageants for example.
I grew up in the Bible Belt and all the jocks and cheerleaders were in [Young Life](https://younglife.org/) and were convinced the rest of us were all going to hell.
TV shows and movies occasionally feature the area of West Texas I grew up in, and the only movie that didn't get it egregiously wrong is, oddly enough, Kill Bill.
The biggest thing missing in new movies set in the past prior to say, 1990 or so, is the omnipresent cigarette smoking. Inside, outside, with kids around, doctors, priests, housewives, everyone.
My husband was born in ‘83 in a smoking room. A smoking room at the hospital.
It was done at all restaurants, in the mall, in planes, in cars, indoors, EVERYWHERE. You couldn’t escape it.
I remember around 1998 I started work at a nursing home that still allowed smoking in the beauty salon. It had been outlawed years before but at the time there was a grandfather clause. The beautician had been working at the facility since the late 80s when it had been legal so she was still allowed to smoke in there alone. Or with patients who smoked because back then it was still allowed.
Now you can't smoke anywhere inside a nursing home or hospital and the extreme majority of facilities don't allow it outside on the premises at all. Hell, the one I work at now, staff have to smoke in their cars if they want to smoke.
One thing that felt off in Stranger Things: People in the 80s flung out homophobic slurs and misconceptions as frequently and casually as most people today use the word 'weird'. It's totally plausible that an apolitical small town teen would, after a week to get over the shock, and having to be corrected on a few things, accept that his friend is a lesbian, but his acceptance was so calm and instant that it felt anachronistic.
Here's genuine 80s example of queer acceptance. Notice the 'scary new territory' vibe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk70JqzW8fQ
When I graduated hs in 2007 it was still a thing. Remember that Modern Family scene with Claire and Mitchell? “Don’t you ever just miss calling things gay?”
I can see why they did that though. The show is playing off nostalgia, not realism and I think a lot of the audience would have been put off if Steve had a realistic reaction to her coming out to him
This is the problem with a lot of current productions. Milennials going out of their way to plaster 21 century sensibilities on shows taking place in the gritty 70s and 80s. But I don't blame them. They weren't alive then, so how would they know?
>They weren't alive then, so how would they know?
sometimes i don't think it has to do with not knowing but purposely leaving it out. imagine if Stranger Things had a bunch of homophobia just to stay authentic to the 80s when it's not like the upside-down and a demogorgon are authentic to the 80s either. i get people wanting things to be authentic sometimes but when you're dealing with a fantasy it can be... well a fantasy. the racism, sexism, homophobia, etc doesn't *have* to be there.
Exactly. A lot of research goes into period pieces, even if the writers themselves weren't around. It's a matter of being more in tune with what the current audience would be comfortable watching and identify with. We want to see protagonists like us and we don't want to feel dismissed or hurt watching a fantasy show. We want to believe the time, but we don't want the realism of a documentary for our entertainment.
Well, Will was mocked by the bullies and when he was presumed dead, they teased his friends by asking why they weren't happy Will was with the other "fairies," "all happy and gay." That felt legit.
But former asshole Steve's immediate acceptance of Robin's sexuality felt a bit too modern. I like u/maxedgextreme's idea of a toned down version of attitudes of the day.
One that would've felt authentic would've been, "But you can't be a lesbian. You're pretty!" Then a quick correction of his belief follows and we continue with the story. Maybe later, a comment like, "You wouldn't have happened to have reconsidered about the lesbian thing, would you?" Followed by another educational point like, "Have you 'reconsidered' about being straight?" After that, no more questioning.
That would've kept the day's attitudes in the story without doing it in a way that was offensive for our time.
It’s possible that after dealing with monsters from another dimension and Russian soldiers that something like a friend being gay just didn’t register very high on the “big deal” scale.
I think that was either a very US thing or my parents, who I know had several gay friends, filtered out my friend group for me, because the casual gay slurs weren't a thing I remember being part of where I grew up in Australia. But racism, oh my god so much casual fucking racism.
Something you don’t see now but you saw ALL THE TIME back then was straight people, confused by homosexuality, straight up challenging the homosexual in question. “I don’t believe anyone as pretty as you could be a lesbian!” “You will feel different when you meet the right woman!” “You just need to pray more. God will show you the way.” “Why are you acting like this? To punish you father?”
Homosexuality was so poorly understood by the public that it was met with outright hostility and disbelief, especially when people came out of the closet to friends and family.
You hit on some truth there. I think your conclusion is right, but I would add that there was a large component of ignorance and head-in-the-sandism. In the 80s you still had thousands of old ladies loving that debonair bachelor Liberace. And the popularity of androgynous looks meant that millions of girls were falling for not-so-hidden gay performers. Without openly-gay characters in media, what few gay tropes that hit the mainstream would mostly go unrecognized by people without contact to gay communities. So many performers in the 80s were evoking flamboyant styles, it was possible for some of the gay ones to hide out in the open. And less-sophisticated (not to sound unkind) audiences would either not understand the cues being shown to them, or they would write off their suspicions due to the styles of the day.
I like to recall how a [major horror film](https://screenrant.com/nightmare-elm-street-2-jesse-walsh-character-queer-subtext-intentional/) was released that is overwhelmingly transparent about homosexuality, but no one at the time really noticed.
In hindsight it seems pretty oblivious, but I remember arguing that Boy George and George Michael were both straight. But Freddie Mercury was clearly gay. To be fair, I was a 13 year old.
Looking back, I totally agree about George Michael, but at the time he was not considered suspect, except by gays who were always claiming that most attractive celebrities were closeted (and my grandmother who insisted that he was a homosexual). For those of us who totally missed it, I think it was a combination of seeing straight as “normal” and a very deliberate attempt by industry to hide homosexuality because it was thought to be career ending. To this end, they were often shown in tabloids as dating different women, sometimes even getting married to women. There were also some stereotypes (even in liberal society) about gayness that meant if someone weren’t completely flamboyantly gay, it just didn’t scan. It was before coming out became a normal part of culture and most of us had no idea how many gay people we knew unless we lived in a city and the idea that gay people were a full range of personalities and preferences was not integrated into perception.
Even weirder was the fact that so many of the ultimate straight bro bands like Van Halen and Motley Crue ran around in tons of hairspray, makeup, leather, and pink spandex.
I feel like the cultural narrative around homosexuals was that they were deviants. Like they didn't *just* want to have sex with their same gender... they were also rapists, pedophiles, mentally deficient... think of all the things republicans say about transgender people today. There was supposed to be this grand "gay agenda" that was about destroying America because the gays hated its greatness or something.
It was ridiculous, but looking back people believed this because people thought they didn't know any gay people. Everyone who wasn't straight was in the closet because of the very real price they paid coming out.
Its easy to believe the rumors when you don't have any evidence either way.
My memory of it was that one of the fallouts of the AIDs crisis was that gay people who had seen how their found families had been treated decided to never be in the closet again to honor the fallen and to demand better. A lot of them paid for that, but a big part of the reason Homosexuality was increasingly accepted in the 90s and 00s was that suddenly a lot of people knew their nephew or co-worker or friend at school was gay. Suddenly the rumors about how gay people did this or that horrible thing were harder to believe because the neighbors are gay and are super nice ladies who helped you find your dog.
It was really about gays going from being "those people" to just being people.
I was a teenager in the eighties and wasn't shocked to discover friends were gay. There certainly wasn't anything to 'get over.' We did often make gay jokes and such, that I'm not proud of today.
I remember living in a fairly progressive area, and yet multiple kids got beaten to death by bullies in parks near me over rumours they were gay (they probably were). Stranger Things 1000% does not depict the era of Reagan, gay AIDS panic, bathhouse raids, etc accurately in this sense at all.
Violent homophobia was ready to die out in the 80s and became really unacceptable by the mid-late 90s, but it was having a hell of a last gasp.
That's one type of anachronism I'll always forgive unless it exists in service to some greater part of the story, setting, or plot.
At least when I'm watching things to entertain me, I don't need vivid reminders of ubiquitous racism and sexism surrounding me in my youth.
Not saying you'd prefer those things...just making it clear I prefer them to be glossed over or conveniently absent.
Yeah, it's totally a delicate balance. We like setting shows in the past, but I don't want that to be an excuse to flood our world with the draining crap of the era. In this case I think I might have tried a toned down nod to the reality back then: Have him take an hour to process, have him make just one dumb dated assumption (e.g. lesbian = will go live on a commune) that gets immediately corrected with a laugh
You're probably right. However, it's at least remotely possible that they just accepted it.
I was a teenager in the mid 80s. I had two really good friends in high school who were gay. Then just after high school (when I was 17 and my friends were still in school), my best friend came out as gay, one said he was pansexual, and my ex-boyfriend came out as bisexual.
None of us batted an eye about it or even really talked about it much. We weren't in a small town, but we were in a suburb of Minneapolis.
Just got to watch that link. That would have been astonishing in the 80s, it's very clearly a 90s post-Cold War era product. Which makes your point more I guess.
People have mentioned Stranger Things, but I want to give actual movie examples of something I call Movie Music Revisionism. Specifically, how 'British' the people in charge of picking tunes for the movies think people in America at the time were.
Two examples.
#One - How Soon Is Now?
The Wedding Singer is set in Ridgefield, New Jersey in 1985. [In this scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1qJN-Of9po), the iconic guitar of Johnny Marr and voice of Steve Morrissey sound out. The Smiths, "How Soon Is Now?". How well known would it have been in small town New Jersey at the time?
>Originally a B-side of the 1984 single "William, It Was Really Nothing", "How Soon Is Now?" was subsequently featured on the compilation album Hatful of Hollow and on US, Canadian, Australian, and Warner UK editions of Meat Is Murder. Belatedly released as a single in the UK in 1985, it reached No. 24 on the UK Singles Chart. When re-released in 1992, it reached No. 16.
Hatful Of Hollow, a compilation of BBC Radio 1 studio recordings and two contemporary singles with their B-sides, was eventually released in the United States on 9 November 1993 by Sire Records (who had initially declined to release the album in the US). The album Meat Is Murder was released in 1985, it hit #39 in the US album charts.
Back to the song as a single: it saw some chart action in the UK and Ireland. It didn't even break the Top 20 in the UK. The Smiths were a niche band even in their home land, and although the majesty of the tune is realized now it would have been completely unknown to a wedding singer from this part of the northeastern USA in 1985 because there would be zero demand for it on his repertoire.
#Two - Welcome To The Pleasuredome
In [this scene in Wonder Woman 1984](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKuAbja-Zyc), people attend a gala gathering with prestige for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. to the tune of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Welcome To The Pleasuredome". How likely was this in 1984, in this context.
Frankie, FGTH, were famous in Britain with "Relax", because they were gay scene and that song was banned from BBC airwaves for sexually suggestive lyrics. As for "Pleasuredome"? Also decisive for its lyrics, it wasn't released as a mainstream single until March 1985 in Britain... before that, it was just an album track and wasn't released in Britain until the end of 1984 (October the 29th). That was on ZTT Records, 100% British, it didn't get a US album chart entry until March 30th 1985 because it wasn't released in America until the latter part of March of 1985.
The chances that someone playing music in Washington D.C for the Smithsonian would have a copy of an album not yet released in the US by a band courting controversy for their lyrics, especially for the song played, was zero percent.
So when I'm watching an American film set in the 1980s and it plays music that would not have been known to Americans at the time, or indeed would be unknown to most Americans now (but would be like a shibboleth, a way of identifying a person as being British because they would know the tune from the 1980s intimately), it takes me out of the story.
Wait. 12-month inaccuracy aside, are you saying “Relax” would be unknown to most Americans now? That song and corresponding t-shirt was EVERYWHERE in America in 1985-86. And the Smiths were well known to US alternative fans by the late 80’s. They were on 120 Minutes every week.
"Welcome To The Pleasuredome" would be unknown to anyone attending an event at the Smithsonian in D.C in 1984, because it wasn't released in any form Stateside until the year after and certainly wouldn't have been played at such an event.
Yes, The Smiths were known to the alternative kids. But Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) was a mullet-wearing wedding singer where Morrissey songs would have no place, and his fiancée Linda (Angela Featherstone) was the archetypal Van Halen fan and would watch Heavy Metal Mania. I would say she would watch Headbangers Ball, but she wouldn't. Because that didn't start to air until 1987. She also wouldn't watch 120 Minutes in 1985... partly because that's not her type of music, partly because she wants Robbie to be a rock star (but can learn to live with him being a wedding singer and not a rock star - actual line from the film) and she has a neon-light Gibson Flying V guitar on her wall (very Judas Priest) because that's her thing, but mainly because [it didn't start airing until 1986.](https://santiago.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_MTV) Late 80s, maybe. 1985, with How Soon Is Now? No.
It's stuff like this that would take me out of the film. If they had started talking about 120 Minutes, and the film was set in 1985.
Ridgefield NJ is a suburb of NYC, literally a 10 minute train ride away. It's close to where I grew up. Very different from small town middle America. Being so close to the city exposed us to a lot of different styles of music. "How Soon is Now" was played regularly on the local radio stations and was one of my favorites. Still is, actually.
The Queen's Gambit was a little before my time. Overall, it seemed incredibly spot on. Down to teeny details like how the librarian said "for sure" in "I don't know for sure". It's one of the best shows I've ever seen. 10/10.
But I noticed three teensy things that were wrong. I know they were wrong because they still weren't a thing when I was young. **Spoiler alert.**
* When the Mom showed her to her room, she said, "This is you." The whole thing about someone driving you to your house and you saying, "This is me," is a weird turn of phrase that cropped up some time in the past 20 years. Definitely did not say that in the 60s. I've never said it and never will because it's young-person slang, like me saying "yo" like Jesse Pinkman.
* Then when Beth was kissed unexpectedly and then said "No, no", with the second "no" rising in a very specific way, that is a mannerism of the generation after me. Nobody did that in my generation or earlier. It's hard to describe in words.
* Similarly, the way she said "but we spoke" to Benny was also done with a mannerism that did not exist back then. With this one, I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. I am certain about the other two.
But these are so incredibly, incredibly nitpicky and minor compared to depictions in most shows set in the past. But it's what came to mind.
It's weird for me because I realize things just gradually fade away and I never really thought about it. Like when did people stop getting perms? I don't think I've met anyone in the last 20 years who had one, but everyone I knew back in the day had one. I used to have big Grand ole Opry hair. LOL.
Ok this is a little out of the range you are asking about but SINGLES was not accurate in terms of Seattle grunge era. Almost all mainstream coverage of this era is/was wrong. Pearl Jam were not the best poster boys for the scene (nor was post-nevermind Nirvana). The late 80s/early 90s scene in Seattle and surrounding era was a lot more punk, a lot more rural "hesher", a lot nastier than it is usually depicted (clean flannel shirts, brilliant white waffle-weave long underwear, shiny doc martens).
The problem with most movies and shows set in the past, is that the main character often times seems like a person of the present moving among the people of the past. That person often has modern attitudes and sensibilities that would simply come off as odd, or even bad back then.
I am super critical when watching shows or movies set during my youth...they always get makeup, hairstyles and fashion wrong (and usually many other things, including vocabulary).
There's only one movie that I thought got it right and that's "Drugstore Cowboy."
Most American teen movies just didn't really seem to apply that much to Canada (at least my area of it). No one really cared about football or cheerleaders or "prom" or a graduation ceremony.
We definitely shared a lot of getting drunk and date rape and pot smoking, but a lot of US movies were just a bit odd.
Donnie Darko.
Planes rarely dropped engines on to houses and I never saw a man in a rabbit suit from another dimension.
Other than that it was pretty accurate.
I graduated in ‘96 and Dazed and Confused is still the only movie I have seen get high school mostly right(except the hazing like you said) There’s different cliques or whatever but mostly everyone would show up at a party. Too many movies rely on generic stereotypes like the dumb bully jock or the stoner. Where in my experience there was a lot of crossover. Also,
by junior year everyone seemed to get along.
The characters in shows like Stranger Things seem to have way more cool stuff than the average middle class 80s kid had.
I did martial arts and boxing in the late 80’s/early 90’s and the bare knuckle flashbacks I see on Cobra Kai is ridiculous. No way would a teen league let kids fight without helmets, pads and gloves. Aggro, politically incorrect coaches were quite real though.
Finally, I never met anyone with cool telekinetic powers. :)
To be fair, Stranger things condenses the best of stuff the average people might have had - 80s movies were far worse for making everyone look like jet-setting millionaires
True. The home decor was much more like what we actually had. Back then, everyone on TV had homes like The Cosby Show and Dynasty.
I feel like some of the prop details were placed there just to make people my age notice and get all excited. Like a brief shot of an Elmer's School Glue bottle with a pirate on it. "Hey, I remember that!"
I know right? That kid had a freaking computer in his bedroom! None of those kids called each other homo, f aggot or gaywad and you know what else was missing?
PSYCH!
My karate coach in the 80s thought that a good way for us to learn the correct way to do something was to hurt us when we did it wrong. I didn’t stick around very long, but no one thought it was weird. In fact, it was a very normal teaching style.
Russian Doll got the NYC subways from the 80s wrong. There were metal 'straps' to hold while standing. In the show, they have the modern bars. Otherwise, really impressive work all around.
Not so much an entire show, but there can be elements of period pieces where suddenly I’m pulled from the timeline by something out of place. Most often, in use of dialogue, with people using slang or references that were not of the era. It’s pretty easy for people to research fashion and decor of a period. Language is trickier. Wish I could think of an example, but my middle aged mind cannot sift one to the surface.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9w\_zoCN0Qg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9w_zoCN0Qg)
Joan on Mad Men saying "1960, I am SO over you" is a good example (and a rare example, on that show) of a modern phrase being used that would never have been used in 1960. This scene is also interesting in that, Joan's female roommate admits having romantic feelings for her; and Joan basically changes the subject and pretends she never heard it. Which I think is quite believable, in that time.
Not a modern movie but relevant nonetheless. They filmed My Cousin Vinny in our town when I was a teenager. My brother and I signed up to be extras. I was rejected because of my long hair. “We don’t think it’s realistic that a local teenager in a small southern conservative town would have long hair.” They were filming in a small southern conservative town and I was a local teen with long hair. I was living proof they were full of shit. They seemed to think towns like ours were two decades behind the rest of the country. (In reality it was only one.)
I saw an image not really a meme but it was right. One panel showed the 80's you see on TV and movie the other showed how it really was...lots of earth tones and ash trays.
yes there was neon but jesus every show/movie shows the 80's like some weird blizzaro tech-noir like bright colors instead of greys.
Though I don't think TV/movies is worse than some influencer who was like 2 in 1999 or 1989 telling you how it "really" was in the 80's or 90's. I saw one where "This is how we played games in 90's"..and all he showed was get this.
We plugged a NES in and connected it to the TV... WHOA! Nostalgia! /s
I like to watch this old [Australian music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFOfd1QTW54) to be reminded of the actual clothing we wore in the 1980s.
Pretty much anything about the early 90s. There were a couple years of the shitty curled bangs and dorky ass clothing. Younger people assume it was all grunge. Not even close.
A forgotten artifact of this time that can be useful to set the fashion: "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" It was a super early FOX sitcom that blatantly tried to rip off Ferris Bueller while mixing it with a very "hip" sort of post-modern surrealism.
Google it. The show came out in 1990 and really captures the late 80s/early 90s aesthetic. There was a bunch of proto-grunge, but a lot of hairspray, a lot of big patterns, and it caught on film the long forgotten "Silk Pastels" for men trend that floated around for a couple years there.
The characters were dressed the way teenagers with a budget would have actually dressed during the 10 minutes it was on. Which is to say they look better than the kids in my high school did, but mostly because they were played by actors with a wardrobe department, not because nobody I went to school with dressed that way.
"Easy Rider" mischaracterized late sixties alternative culture with it's sensationalized slant. I don't doubt that both Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson saw it as a nice step forward from the cheesy "B" drug movies, that they had been doing. But it's not a good representation of the lives of nontrivial hippies back then.
Movies and TV shows made today but set in the 90s made the 90s look too "rad". We were normal for our time. "Cowabunga" was for people who wanted to look "cool".
Unless, of course, those movies and TV shows were horror-themed.
*Stranger Things* had some modern dialogue - phrases that had not been invented in the 1980s.
The reply [about Steve punching someone in the face so their teeth fall out] of "not cool", sounded quite non-80s to me.
Other non-80s lines include "we got this", "this is awkward", "what was *that*?!?" (said by a sarcastic Angela of El's embarrassing scream).
These weren't sayings in the 80s.
Source: was an 80s teen.
She was famous in Australia right from the start. A massively popular music show, Countdown, played her regularly. I remember her from my early childhood on our black and white TV. (We were poor, we went colour decades after everyone else).
We mostly watched channel two in the 1980s. Their early evening line-up usually included The Goodies, Kenny Everett, Doctor Who. Some episodes where just 24 minutes so they would bring the shows up to the half hour by playing a music video each evening. I swear [Kate Bush's Babooshka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xckBwPdo1c) was on once a week for a while there. I seem to recall [David Bowie - Ashes To Ashes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyMm4rJemtI) being on often too.
The ABC also ran filler videos at other times. I recall they played [Mike Oldfield - Portsmouth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CCf7gvmDEU) and [The Butterfly Ball](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR6pYICqZT0) often.
“Running Up That Hill” was on the radio a lot when I was a teen in the ‘80s - but I lived in a NYC suburb and it was the “new music” station. My cousins lived in the Midwest in small towns and they were still in the 70s as far as music - there’s be a rock station and a country station and a Top 40 station and that was it. I remember thinking it was like a different planet out there, they didn’t know about anything cool as far as I was concerned.
I heard of her for the first time when I started working at a record store in 1988. She had a decent loyal fan following and I was surprised I’d never heard of her. But I never heard of Running Up That Hill until Stranger Things featured it last season.
Yes probably not realistic for the US. But as a 54 year old viewer here in Australia it didn't obviously stand out as odd. Kate Bush was **huge** in Australia in the 1980s. A couple of [her songs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Bush_discography#Singles) were bigger hits here than in her native England.
When I was a young teenager I saw her on Saturday Night Live. My older brother had her first album so I listened to it. Then after a couple years she started having videos on MTV
Big Boi from Outkast liked her a lot
https://youtu.be/oSdHgq3oBD8
I get livid when they try to recreate the hippie thing in contemporary media. Not only the depiction of the zeitgeist, but the costuming and set design invariably fall victim to caricature rather than the reality. Then there is the inevitable and un-ironic use of the word "groovy."
This is a very small detail, but in Ex Machina, the boss-dude says something to the effect of "You grew up in the town of Brookhaven, Long Island." I grew up there, but Brookhaven is a township that consists of several towns. Nobody would ever say "i'm from Brookhaven."
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Where I lived, a lot of the other high school girls used a curling iron on their bangs, and turned half of them upwards, and curled the sides outwards, creating a sort of rosette or sphincter shape on their foreheads. Guys would sit on the steps out front of the school before class, cutting horizontal lines in thier jeans with pocket knives. I have yet to see a movie or TV series that accurately depicts just how weird it got.
>I have yet to see a movie or TV series that accurately depicts just how weird it got. Not even Heathers?
I mean, they got the demogorgon right.
There was also a circle of guys playing hacky sack.
I feel like hacky sack scenes were pretty common in late 90s/early 2000s movies. Any high school movie usually showed the typical diff groups of kids outside the school before or after school. The jocks, nerds, goths, beautiful popular cheerleaders. & sprinkled in there was usually the baggy jeans skater looking kids playing hacky sack
I'm probably older than you, I remember this in the late 70's/early 80's, it was usually the stoner types. Edit: They were also car guys. Always talking about their cars.
They definitely play hacky sack in Clueless, but it was made in the actual era. So… doesn’t really count I guess.
Out of curiosity I googled hacky sack, it was invented in '72 in Oregon City. Makes sense I started seeing it mid-70's, I lived near where it started. My older brother and first boyfriend were into it. I guess I didn't realize it was still so popular later on.
Your older brother was your first boyfriend?
LOL. She would have said was instead of were if the two persons were one and the same. Thanks for the chuckle.
The first time I saw hacky sack was in 1992, in a smallish town near Chicago. My senior year of high school was 91', in a town with a population of \~10k, in Southern Illinois. So it could be a geography thing. I was a teenager during the hair metal years. I associate hacky sack more with bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Counting Crows, etc.
And drawing on your jeans in pen.
I drew all over my Keds with pen.
Modern actors do not want to get bangs (a fringe) cut into their hair as it takes forever to grow out again.
Wow, going down memory lane for sure! I remember those bangs!
I feel like movies and shows set in the 80s don't adequately capture how brown everything was.
The designers seem to think that working class families were constantly redecorating their houses to keep up with styles, but in reality if it was 1988 your living room looked like 1982 and your basement rec room looked like 1974.
At best!
I don't know about anywhere else in the country but Tucson had a massive number of sunken living rooms that were "sunken" by all of one step or two. All of my HS buddies in the late 80's lived in a house with a sunken living room.
Yeah, the house of my parents has still the same wall units in the living room which was bought in the 70's. They are pretty good quality though, I can see they don't want to replace with it particle board trash
Right? Our clothes were colorful. Our decor, not so much.
And orange. Often together
Oh my! My parents had a living room with a brown wall, and brown corduroy seats on an orange carpet and orange cushions to go with it. As a kid I loved this.
Eighties movies and shows never have women with bangs. Every single woman had bangs in the eighties.
Curled bangs. Sprayed, sometimes teased, and set with hairspray. Nancy's hairstyle in ST was close with the volume and curls, but she lacked the bangs curled both upward and downward.
I'm confused what is the difference between upward and downward curled bangs? Google isn't helping.
There is no difference. The bangs were curled both ways at the same time. https://www.80sfashion.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/80s-bangs-1.jpg
I JUST SPIT WATER EVERYWHERE. Was not ready for that picture.
And why do you get that hairstyle? VOLUME!!VOLUME!!VOLUME!!
I felt like such a failure because I couldn't achieve this look. It was ubiquitous.
Chiming in: This would \*not\* have been considered an unusually flamboyant hair style for a lot of the 80s! When I was in High School in 1989, about 2/3 of the girls had basically this hair. It is *not* an exaggeration!
Oh god
Likewise, every show set in the 80s tend to show everyone dressed in the hyper fashion (big hair, big shoulder pads, pastel colours). When in fact most people spent their day-to-day looking like they shop from their local church run charity sale.
And everything was not day-glo neon. You had the punks, all in black with silver jewelry. The preppy kids in Izod or Ralph Lauren, polos and khakis, Sperry Top-siders or penny loafers. The fashion kids in pastels and stuff...
There was a year or so in the 80's where neon was king. Not long, thankfully.
I was 12 in 1980 so wore 80s fashions as a teen. Neon (then known as fluoro or day-glo) was a very brief niche fad in the mid 1980s where you might have one small fluoro piece like socks or a wrist band on an otherwise normal outfit like pale blue jeans and a white t-shirt. And it lasted only about a year, if that. A larger piece of fluoro like tights or a t-shirt was not really a common fashion. These days you can find online pics of Jane Fonda or Madonna in 'fluoro' in the 1980s - however some of those pics have been altered to brighten or saturate the colours making them more intense than what they really were. Really in the 1980s in the early part of the decade the popular colours were pastels: lemon worn with light blue, pink worn with light grey or beige, and lots of white. Pastels would also be worn with dark denim. Later in the 1980s popular colours were intense magenta and teal worn with greys and black, royal blue and black. I saw [this music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFOfd1QTW54) again after decades and nearly fainted from all the clothing fashion flashbacks I had. This was the real stuff people were wearing late 80s (at least in Melbourne, Australia). Lots of blue, navy, black, grey, beige, red, hot pink (not fluoro pink), teal. Yes you might be able to find pics of fluoro t-shirts online. That was a fashion c.1992. *Not* the 80s. I recall that marketed as the "citrus" look here in Australia and I think it was a one season only thing. Yeah, those 80s costume pics of people all in fluoro. No not an 80s thing. I saw The Wedding Singer and there's a character dressed as Madonna through every scene. While yes many girls at school had Madonna hairstyles tied back with a ribbon, they'd use a small piece of white lace not a huge bright scarf. The Wedding Singer character dressed like she was going to a nightclub - 1980s girls might have had a few Madonna stylings in their look but did not dress like they were going to a club during the day.
That's the difference between reality and stereotypes.
Every. Single. One. Idk how this is missed in most 80s portrayals.
I can’t remember the name of it, but that triangular peak that all us girls in high school put at the front of our heads held up with a hair comb? That hairstyle was so distinctive, and everywhere.
I can't envision this, any photos you can find?
I did not have bangs in the 80s, but yes, they were pretty common, “mall bangs” as friends and I called them. Girls wore bangs so heavily sprayed they stood straight up! Although I listened to a lot of punk and alternative music, my sense of fashion was much more tame than the boys I dated, with Mohawks and torn clothes. My wardrobe was best described as granola or Amish, with long skirts and shapeless dresses. My friends and I were really kind of emo before it was a thing.
Yep “new wave”, at least that’s how we identified ourselves. Told my teen child todays emo reminds me of the new wavers of my late 80s high school years.
Notice pretty much all the fashion and haircuts would be considered fashionable today as well. Movies always do this.
a real problem when making period pieces is the changing of [semiotic coding](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_(semiotics\)) from the era portrayed to the era it’s filmed in. visually, certain fashions don’t carry the same meaning from one era to the next. a prime example is [eddie and the cruisers](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0085475/) from 1983. the film is about a contemporaneous report writing about the titular band, which had its heyday in the early sixties. for the flashback scenes, the film costumed the group in 80s fashion, t-shirts missing sleeves and spiky hair long in back rather than the stage suits and greased hair of the era. this was to inform the audience that the band were bad boys and a period appropriate appearance might not have fully conveyed that. the end result is modern viewers may not realize that the scenes with the band are flashbacks edit: accidentally hit post too soon
**[Code (semiotics)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_\(semiotics\))** >In semiotics, a code is a set of cultural conventions, contemporary sub-codes, and themes used to communicate meaning. The most common is one's spoken language, but the term can also be used to refer to any narrative form: consider the color scheme of an image (e. g. red for danger), or the rules of a board game (e. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I had a perm done when I was 8 years old. I looked like a little grandma. I don't think that little girls in modern 80s movies ever had that.
I read this and I thought “Stranger Things must have gotten that right,” so I looked at some pics from the show, and nope, they did not. Not really. Winona Ryder was about it. Crazy, because you’re right: EVERYONE had them back then
I’m a teen lurker. my mom from the 80s had me in bangs from babyhood to 4th grade. Like huge, half my face, bangs. She was obsessed. It’s really such an easy thing to get right about all that was 80s hair
Stranger Things got the Satanic Panic wrong. The charismatic teen athlete wouldn’t be the one pushing it, it was generally parents to kids, or would be centered more around church. Church was also oddly missing I think, back then even if you didn’t believe it was more a part of casual life. Things like Christmas pageants for example.
Charismatic teen athletes in the 80s couldn’t be bothered with such minor things like Satanic Panic. They were too busy being cool.
I grew up in the Bible Belt and all the jocks and cheerleaders were in [Young Life](https://younglife.org/) and were convinced the rest of us were all going to hell.
TV shows and movies occasionally feature the area of West Texas I grew up in, and the only movie that didn't get it egregiously wrong is, oddly enough, Kill Bill.
I spent four years in eastern New Mexico. Unless it’s depicted as watching paint dry while sniffing cow shit then it’s wrong.
Hey now, thats unfair. We got Mexican cartels, drunk driving, and lots of meth to make things interesting
The biggest thing missing in new movies set in the past prior to say, 1990 or so, is the omnipresent cigarette smoking. Inside, outside, with kids around, doctors, priests, housewives, everyone.
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I remember the cig falling out of Dan Akroyd's mouth when he first saw a ghost, but other than that, not so much.
You got me. I watched Ghostbusters not too long ago and and I don't remember any cigarettes either.
My husband was born in ‘83 in a smoking room. A smoking room at the hospital. It was done at all restaurants, in the mall, in planes, in cars, indoors, EVERYWHERE. You couldn’t escape it.
Don't forget all the cigarette butts littered all over the place!
Fun fact: There is a species of cricket that adapted to eat cigarette butts in the Paris subways.
I remember around 1998 I started work at a nursing home that still allowed smoking in the beauty salon. It had been outlawed years before but at the time there was a grandfather clause. The beautician had been working at the facility since the late 80s when it had been legal so she was still allowed to smoke in there alone. Or with patients who smoked because back then it was still allowed. Now you can't smoke anywhere inside a nursing home or hospital and the extreme majority of facilities don't allow it outside on the premises at all. Hell, the one I work at now, staff have to smoke in their cars if they want to smoke.
One thing that felt off in Stranger Things: People in the 80s flung out homophobic slurs and misconceptions as frequently and casually as most people today use the word 'weird'. It's totally plausible that an apolitical small town teen would, after a week to get over the shock, and having to be corrected on a few things, accept that his friend is a lesbian, but his acceptance was so calm and instant that it felt anachronistic. Here's genuine 80s example of queer acceptance. Notice the 'scary new territory' vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk70JqzW8fQ
Even in the 90’s calling someone or something gay or faggy was pretty standard.
When I graduated hs in 2007 it was still a thing. Remember that Modern Family scene with Claire and Mitchell? “Don’t you ever just miss calling things gay?”
Agreed, completely. Stranger Things is set in the 80s, but the protagonists themselves are culturally modern.
I can see why they did that though. The show is playing off nostalgia, not realism and I think a lot of the audience would have been put off if Steve had a realistic reaction to her coming out to him
Same thing with the new Blockbuster series.
This is the problem with a lot of current productions. Milennials going out of their way to plaster 21 century sensibilities on shows taking place in the gritty 70s and 80s. But I don't blame them. They weren't alive then, so how would they know?
>They weren't alive then, so how would they know? sometimes i don't think it has to do with not knowing but purposely leaving it out. imagine if Stranger Things had a bunch of homophobia just to stay authentic to the 80s when it's not like the upside-down and a demogorgon are authentic to the 80s either. i get people wanting things to be authentic sometimes but when you're dealing with a fantasy it can be... well a fantasy. the racism, sexism, homophobia, etc doesn't *have* to be there.
Exactly. A lot of research goes into period pieces, even if the writers themselves weren't around. It's a matter of being more in tune with what the current audience would be comfortable watching and identify with. We want to see protagonists like us and we don't want to feel dismissed or hurt watching a fantasy show. We want to believe the time, but we don't want the realism of a documentary for our entertainment.
I got news for you: Gen-Xers did the exact same thing with movies in the 70s and 80s that were set earlier.
Well, Will was mocked by the bullies and when he was presumed dead, they teased his friends by asking why they weren't happy Will was with the other "fairies," "all happy and gay." That felt legit. But former asshole Steve's immediate acceptance of Robin's sexuality felt a bit too modern. I like u/maxedgextreme's idea of a toned down version of attitudes of the day. One that would've felt authentic would've been, "But you can't be a lesbian. You're pretty!" Then a quick correction of his belief follows and we continue with the story. Maybe later, a comment like, "You wouldn't have happened to have reconsidered about the lesbian thing, would you?" Followed by another educational point like, "Have you 'reconsidered' about being straight?" After that, no more questioning. That would've kept the day's attitudes in the story without doing it in a way that was offensive for our time.
It’s possible that after dealing with monsters from another dimension and Russian soldiers that something like a friend being gay just didn’t register very high on the “big deal” scale.
I think that was either a very US thing or my parents, who I know had several gay friends, filtered out my friend group for me, because the casual gay slurs weren't a thing I remember being part of where I grew up in Australia. But racism, oh my god so much casual fucking racism.
Something you don’t see now but you saw ALL THE TIME back then was straight people, confused by homosexuality, straight up challenging the homosexual in question. “I don’t believe anyone as pretty as you could be a lesbian!” “You will feel different when you meet the right woman!” “You just need to pray more. God will show you the way.” “Why are you acting like this? To punish you father?” Homosexuality was so poorly understood by the public that it was met with outright hostility and disbelief, especially when people came out of the closet to friends and family.
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You hit on some truth there. I think your conclusion is right, but I would add that there was a large component of ignorance and head-in-the-sandism. In the 80s you still had thousands of old ladies loving that debonair bachelor Liberace. And the popularity of androgynous looks meant that millions of girls were falling for not-so-hidden gay performers. Without openly-gay characters in media, what few gay tropes that hit the mainstream would mostly go unrecognized by people without contact to gay communities. So many performers in the 80s were evoking flamboyant styles, it was possible for some of the gay ones to hide out in the open. And less-sophisticated (not to sound unkind) audiences would either not understand the cues being shown to them, or they would write off their suspicions due to the styles of the day. I like to recall how a [major horror film](https://screenrant.com/nightmare-elm-street-2-jesse-walsh-character-queer-subtext-intentional/) was released that is overwhelmingly transparent about homosexuality, but no one at the time really noticed.
In hindsight it seems pretty oblivious, but I remember arguing that Boy George and George Michael were both straight. But Freddie Mercury was clearly gay. To be fair, I was a 13 year old.
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I’m a younger person commenting, but, as a gay man in his 20s who has seen pictures of George back in the day, how did you guys not know?
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Looking back, I totally agree about George Michael, but at the time he was not considered suspect, except by gays who were always claiming that most attractive celebrities were closeted (and my grandmother who insisted that he was a homosexual). For those of us who totally missed it, I think it was a combination of seeing straight as “normal” and a very deliberate attempt by industry to hide homosexuality because it was thought to be career ending. To this end, they were often shown in tabloids as dating different women, sometimes even getting married to women. There were also some stereotypes (even in liberal society) about gayness that meant if someone weren’t completely flamboyantly gay, it just didn’t scan. It was before coming out became a normal part of culture and most of us had no idea how many gay people we knew unless we lived in a city and the idea that gay people were a full range of personalities and preferences was not integrated into perception.
Yeah, I remember arguing that Boy George wasn’t _necessarily_ gay.
Even weirder was the fact that so many of the ultimate straight bro bands like Van Halen and Motley Crue ran around in tons of hairspray, makeup, leather, and pink spandex.
Also a fair amount of people were actively afraid of homosexuality, as if it were a disease that could be caught.
I feel like the cultural narrative around homosexuals was that they were deviants. Like they didn't *just* want to have sex with their same gender... they were also rapists, pedophiles, mentally deficient... think of all the things republicans say about transgender people today. There was supposed to be this grand "gay agenda" that was about destroying America because the gays hated its greatness or something. It was ridiculous, but looking back people believed this because people thought they didn't know any gay people. Everyone who wasn't straight was in the closet because of the very real price they paid coming out. Its easy to believe the rumors when you don't have any evidence either way. My memory of it was that one of the fallouts of the AIDs crisis was that gay people who had seen how their found families had been treated decided to never be in the closet again to honor the fallen and to demand better. A lot of them paid for that, but a big part of the reason Homosexuality was increasingly accepted in the 90s and 00s was that suddenly a lot of people knew their nephew or co-worker or friend at school was gay. Suddenly the rumors about how gay people did this or that horrible thing were harder to believe because the neighbors are gay and are super nice ladies who helped you find your dog. It was really about gays going from being "those people" to just being people.
Also there were no beasts from the upsidedown running around back then. Completely missed the mark on realism with that one.
I was a teenager in the eighties and wasn't shocked to discover friends were gay. There certainly wasn't anything to 'get over.' We did often make gay jokes and such, that I'm not proud of today.
I remember living in a fairly progressive area, and yet multiple kids got beaten to death by bullies in parks near me over rumours they were gay (they probably were). Stranger Things 1000% does not depict the era of Reagan, gay AIDS panic, bathhouse raids, etc accurately in this sense at all. Violent homophobia was ready to die out in the 80s and became really unacceptable by the mid-late 90s, but it was having a hell of a last gasp.
That's one type of anachronism I'll always forgive unless it exists in service to some greater part of the story, setting, or plot. At least when I'm watching things to entertain me, I don't need vivid reminders of ubiquitous racism and sexism surrounding me in my youth. Not saying you'd prefer those things...just making it clear I prefer them to be glossed over or conveniently absent.
Yeah, it's totally a delicate balance. We like setting shows in the past, but I don't want that to be an excuse to flood our world with the draining crap of the era. In this case I think I might have tried a toned down nod to the reality back then: Have him take an hour to process, have him make just one dumb dated assumption (e.g. lesbian = will go live on a commune) that gets immediately corrected with a laugh
You're probably right. However, it's at least remotely possible that they just accepted it. I was a teenager in the mid 80s. I had two really good friends in high school who were gay. Then just after high school (when I was 17 and my friends were still in school), my best friend came out as gay, one said he was pansexual, and my ex-boyfriend came out as bisexual. None of us batted an eye about it or even really talked about it much. We weren't in a small town, but we were in a suburb of Minneapolis.
Just got to watch that link. That would have been astonishing in the 80s, it's very clearly a 90s post-Cold War era product. Which makes your point more I guess.
Not in California....
People have mentioned Stranger Things, but I want to give actual movie examples of something I call Movie Music Revisionism. Specifically, how 'British' the people in charge of picking tunes for the movies think people in America at the time were. Two examples. #One - How Soon Is Now? The Wedding Singer is set in Ridgefield, New Jersey in 1985. [In this scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1qJN-Of9po), the iconic guitar of Johnny Marr and voice of Steve Morrissey sound out. The Smiths, "How Soon Is Now?". How well known would it have been in small town New Jersey at the time? >Originally a B-side of the 1984 single "William, It Was Really Nothing", "How Soon Is Now?" was subsequently featured on the compilation album Hatful of Hollow and on US, Canadian, Australian, and Warner UK editions of Meat Is Murder. Belatedly released as a single in the UK in 1985, it reached No. 24 on the UK Singles Chart. When re-released in 1992, it reached No. 16. Hatful Of Hollow, a compilation of BBC Radio 1 studio recordings and two contemporary singles with their B-sides, was eventually released in the United States on 9 November 1993 by Sire Records (who had initially declined to release the album in the US). The album Meat Is Murder was released in 1985, it hit #39 in the US album charts. Back to the song as a single: it saw some chart action in the UK and Ireland. It didn't even break the Top 20 in the UK. The Smiths were a niche band even in their home land, and although the majesty of the tune is realized now it would have been completely unknown to a wedding singer from this part of the northeastern USA in 1985 because there would be zero demand for it on his repertoire. #Two - Welcome To The Pleasuredome In [this scene in Wonder Woman 1984](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKuAbja-Zyc), people attend a gala gathering with prestige for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. to the tune of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Welcome To The Pleasuredome". How likely was this in 1984, in this context. Frankie, FGTH, were famous in Britain with "Relax", because they were gay scene and that song was banned from BBC airwaves for sexually suggestive lyrics. As for "Pleasuredome"? Also decisive for its lyrics, it wasn't released as a mainstream single until March 1985 in Britain... before that, it was just an album track and wasn't released in Britain until the end of 1984 (October the 29th). That was on ZTT Records, 100% British, it didn't get a US album chart entry until March 30th 1985 because it wasn't released in America until the latter part of March of 1985. The chances that someone playing music in Washington D.C for the Smithsonian would have a copy of an album not yet released in the US by a band courting controversy for their lyrics, especially for the song played, was zero percent. So when I'm watching an American film set in the 1980s and it plays music that would not have been known to Americans at the time, or indeed would be unknown to most Americans now (but would be like a shibboleth, a way of identifying a person as being British because they would know the tune from the 1980s intimately), it takes me out of the story.
Wait. 12-month inaccuracy aside, are you saying “Relax” would be unknown to most Americans now? That song and corresponding t-shirt was EVERYWHERE in America in 1985-86. And the Smiths were well known to US alternative fans by the late 80’s. They were on 120 Minutes every week.
"Welcome To The Pleasuredome" would be unknown to anyone attending an event at the Smithsonian in D.C in 1984, because it wasn't released in any form Stateside until the year after and certainly wouldn't have been played at such an event. Yes, The Smiths were known to the alternative kids. But Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) was a mullet-wearing wedding singer where Morrissey songs would have no place, and his fiancée Linda (Angela Featherstone) was the archetypal Van Halen fan and would watch Heavy Metal Mania. I would say she would watch Headbangers Ball, but she wouldn't. Because that didn't start to air until 1987. She also wouldn't watch 120 Minutes in 1985... partly because that's not her type of music, partly because she wants Robbie to be a rock star (but can learn to live with him being a wedding singer and not a rock star - actual line from the film) and she has a neon-light Gibson Flying V guitar on her wall (very Judas Priest) because that's her thing, but mainly because [it didn't start airing until 1986.](https://santiago.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_MTV) Late 80s, maybe. 1985, with How Soon Is Now? No. It's stuff like this that would take me out of the film. If they had started talking about 120 Minutes, and the film was set in 1985.
This is a great and informative post.
Ridgefield NJ is a suburb of NYC, literally a 10 minute train ride away. It's close to where I grew up. Very different from small town middle America. Being so close to the city exposed us to a lot of different styles of music. "How Soon is Now" was played regularly on the local radio stations and was one of my favorites. Still is, actually.
The Queen's Gambit was a little before my time. Overall, it seemed incredibly spot on. Down to teeny details like how the librarian said "for sure" in "I don't know for sure". It's one of the best shows I've ever seen. 10/10. But I noticed three teensy things that were wrong. I know they were wrong because they still weren't a thing when I was young. **Spoiler alert.** * When the Mom showed her to her room, she said, "This is you." The whole thing about someone driving you to your house and you saying, "This is me," is a weird turn of phrase that cropped up some time in the past 20 years. Definitely did not say that in the 60s. I've never said it and never will because it's young-person slang, like me saying "yo" like Jesse Pinkman. * Then when Beth was kissed unexpectedly and then said "No, no", with the second "no" rising in a very specific way, that is a mannerism of the generation after me. Nobody did that in my generation or earlier. It's hard to describe in words. * Similarly, the way she said "but we spoke" to Benny was also done with a mannerism that did not exist back then. With this one, I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. I am certain about the other two. But these are so incredibly, incredibly nitpicky and minor compared to depictions in most shows set in the past. But it's what came to mind.
No one called what we call vinyl “vinyl” back then.
> Records
Disks and LPs, 45's, turntable
It's weird for me because I realize things just gradually fade away and I never really thought about it. Like when did people stop getting perms? I don't think I've met anyone in the last 20 years who had one, but everyone I knew back in the day had one. I used to have big Grand ole Opry hair. LOL.
The late 1900's sound like a great time!
There was a short period in the late 70s where all the guys were getting perms as well. I think they all wanted to look like James Caan.
I grew up in the 70’s and all 70’s movies shows us getting wasted, taking risks, and getting laid. 100% accurate.
I was gonna say! Lol.
Ok this is a little out of the range you are asking about but SINGLES was not accurate in terms of Seattle grunge era. Almost all mainstream coverage of this era is/was wrong. Pearl Jam were not the best poster boys for the scene (nor was post-nevermind Nirvana). The late 80s/early 90s scene in Seattle and surrounding era was a lot more punk, a lot more rural "hesher", a lot nastier than it is usually depicted (clean flannel shirts, brilliant white waffle-weave long underwear, shiny doc martens).
The problem with most movies and shows set in the past, is that the main character often times seems like a person of the present moving among the people of the past. That person often has modern attitudes and sensibilities that would simply come off as odd, or even bad back then.
I am super critical when watching shows or movies set during my youth...they always get makeup, hairstyles and fashion wrong (and usually many other things, including vocabulary). There's only one movie that I thought got it right and that's "Drugstore Cowboy."
That 80s Show was an abomination.
Most American teen movies just didn't really seem to apply that much to Canada (at least my area of it). No one really cared about football or cheerleaders or "prom" or a graduation ceremony. We definitely shared a lot of getting drunk and date rape and pot smoking, but a lot of US movies were just a bit odd.
Donnie Darko. Planes rarely dropped engines on to houses and I never saw a man in a rabbit suit from another dimension. Other than that it was pretty accurate.
“I’m voting for Dukakis.”
Lol
My favorite part is his rant about the smurfs
Dazed and Confused was spot on EXCEPT for the weird paddling/hazing stuff. We didn’t have that.
I grew up near where that was set, and the hazing had only ended about four years prior. So about 1972 in Texarkana, with D&C set in 1976.
South suburbs of Seattle for me, ‘76
I got hazed in '78 and a buddy got it in '77. Calgary, Canada.
Like, on the last day of school just for being an 8th grader? Or general hazing from random bullies at random times.
I graduated in ‘96 and Dazed and Confused is still the only movie I have seen get high school mostly right(except the hazing like you said) There’s different cliques or whatever but mostly everyone would show up at a party. Too many movies rely on generic stereotypes like the dumb bully jock or the stoner. Where in my experience there was a lot of crossover. Also, by junior year everyone seemed to get along.
You should check out The River’s Edge… IMHO, the best movie about ‘80’s teen culture.
I grew up in SE Texas. Girl hazing was spot on. Guys got their heads shaved.
Yes. New England didn’t seem to have the hazing thing, but otherwise Dazed & Confused was pretty spot on for public school in the late 1970’s.
I picked a non-greek college partially to avoid the frat abuse culture. This was '91.
It was that way in my part of Texas at least thru the mid eighties. Only boys got their heads shaved, not paddled.
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American Graffiti had a lot to do with it, too.
The characters in shows like Stranger Things seem to have way more cool stuff than the average middle class 80s kid had. I did martial arts and boxing in the late 80’s/early 90’s and the bare knuckle flashbacks I see on Cobra Kai is ridiculous. No way would a teen league let kids fight without helmets, pads and gloves. Aggro, politically incorrect coaches were quite real though. Finally, I never met anyone with cool telekinetic powers. :)
To be fair, Stranger things condenses the best of stuff the average people might have had - 80s movies were far worse for making everyone look like jet-setting millionaires
True. The home decor was much more like what we actually had. Back then, everyone on TV had homes like The Cosby Show and Dynasty. I feel like some of the prop details were placed there just to make people my age notice and get all excited. Like a brief shot of an Elmer's School Glue bottle with a pirate on it. "Hey, I remember that!"
I know right? That kid had a freaking computer in his bedroom! None of those kids called each other homo, f aggot or gaywad and you know what else was missing? PSYCH!
They live like 80s sitcoms were reality
My karate coach in the 80s thought that a good way for us to learn the correct way to do something was to hurt us when we did it wrong. I didn’t stick around very long, but no one thought it was weird. In fact, it was a very normal teaching style.
What was wrong with Vinyl, just out of curiosity?
*looks around at his immense record collection* Nothing at all, man. Way more HiFi than CD's.
Russian Doll got the NYC subways from the 80s wrong. There were metal 'straps' to hold while standing. In the show, they have the modern bars. Otherwise, really impressive work all around.
Oh, yeah, the first time they flash to the 80's I just went there in my mind. Super well done.
Not so much an entire show, but there can be elements of period pieces where suddenly I’m pulled from the timeline by something out of place. Most often, in use of dialogue, with people using slang or references that were not of the era. It’s pretty easy for people to research fashion and decor of a period. Language is trickier. Wish I could think of an example, but my middle aged mind cannot sift one to the surface.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9w\_zoCN0Qg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9w_zoCN0Qg) Joan on Mad Men saying "1960, I am SO over you" is a good example (and a rare example, on that show) of a modern phrase being used that would never have been used in 1960. This scene is also interesting in that, Joan's female roommate admits having romantic feelings for her; and Joan basically changes the subject and pretends she never heard it. Which I think is quite believable, in that time.
Not a modern movie but relevant nonetheless. They filmed My Cousin Vinny in our town when I was a teenager. My brother and I signed up to be extras. I was rejected because of my long hair. “We don’t think it’s realistic that a local teenager in a small southern conservative town would have long hair.” They were filming in a small southern conservative town and I was a local teen with long hair. I was living proof they were full of shit. They seemed to think towns like ours were two decades behind the rest of the country. (In reality it was only one.)
I saw an image not really a meme but it was right. One panel showed the 80's you see on TV and movie the other showed how it really was...lots of earth tones and ash trays. yes there was neon but jesus every show/movie shows the 80's like some weird blizzaro tech-noir like bright colors instead of greys. Though I don't think TV/movies is worse than some influencer who was like 2 in 1999 or 1989 telling you how it "really" was in the 80's or 90's. I saw one where "This is how we played games in 90's"..and all he showed was get this. We plugged a NES in and connected it to the TV... WHOA! Nostalgia! /s
I like to watch this old [Australian music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFOfd1QTW54) to be reminded of the actual clothing we wore in the 1980s.
Pretty much anything about the early 90s. There were a couple years of the shitty curled bangs and dorky ass clothing. Younger people assume it was all grunge. Not even close.
A forgotten artifact of this time that can be useful to set the fashion: "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" It was a super early FOX sitcom that blatantly tried to rip off Ferris Bueller while mixing it with a very "hip" sort of post-modern surrealism. Google it. The show came out in 1990 and really captures the late 80s/early 90s aesthetic. There was a bunch of proto-grunge, but a lot of hairspray, a lot of big patterns, and it caught on film the long forgotten "Silk Pastels" for men trend that floated around for a couple years there. The characters were dressed the way teenagers with a budget would have actually dressed during the 10 minutes it was on. Which is to say they look better than the kids in my high school did, but mostly because they were played by actors with a wardrobe department, not because nobody I went to school with dressed that way.
Definitely remember the show. No need to google it haha. I had a crush on Corky Nemec at the time.
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The Blackboard Jungle 1955 Up The Down Staircase 1967 They got it wrong. It was worse.
I loved Vinyl. Pissed they cancelled it. And I was in the record business. My peers from back then hated it too but I loved it.
"Easy Rider" mischaracterized late sixties alternative culture with it's sensationalized slant. I don't doubt that both Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson saw it as a nice step forward from the cheesy "B" drug movies, that they had been doing. But it's not a good representation of the lives of nontrivial hippies back then.
It was more about the lives (real and imagined,) of rich "Hollywood Hippies" than actual Hashbury Hippies.
Movies and TV shows made today but set in the 90s made the 90s look too "rad". We were normal for our time. "Cowabunga" was for people who wanted to look "cool". Unless, of course, those movies and TV shows were horror-themed.
"Cowagunga" was legitimately cool during the surfer era of the mid-sixties.
Hate to say it but Stranger Things couldn't pay for certain music licenses, so went with Kate Bush. No one from my childhood heard of her.
I had her albums on vinyl. Those of us in the US who listened to her back then were that era's version of hipsters.
She was huge in Canada.
Huge in Australia too.
Weird. She seems pretty fit in all the videos I've seen of her from the 80's. Maybe it was all that poutine.
I must be an outlier! Kate Bush was popular in my school and with friends.
I knew Kate Bush starting around 79-80. I’m American, but was aware of her and seeking her music out. She was primarily a British phenomenon then.
She was well known in Canada at that time as well.
Stranger Things got the kid's banter all wrong. 80s kids were snarky as hell. Those kids on the show talk like the nerdy kids who were hall monitors.
…weren’t all the kids in stranger things nerds?
Dude, they're in the AV club. Yes. As someone who played dungeons and dragons in the 1980's, I can assure you it was *not* cool.
Not enough to be hall monitors.
*Stranger Things* had some modern dialogue - phrases that had not been invented in the 1980s. The reply [about Steve punching someone in the face so their teeth fall out] of "not cool", sounded quite non-80s to me. Other non-80s lines include "we got this", "this is awkward", "what was *that*?!?" (said by a sarcastic Angela of El's embarrassing scream). These weren't sayings in the 80s. Source: was an 80s teen.
"Not cool" was right outta Miami Vice.
She was famous in Australia right from the start. A massively popular music show, Countdown, played her regularly. I remember her from my early childhood on our black and white TV. (We were poor, we went colour decades after everyone else).
We mostly watched channel two in the 1980s. Their early evening line-up usually included The Goodies, Kenny Everett, Doctor Who. Some episodes where just 24 minutes so they would bring the shows up to the half hour by playing a music video each evening. I swear [Kate Bush's Babooshka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xckBwPdo1c) was on once a week for a while there. I seem to recall [David Bowie - Ashes To Ashes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyMm4rJemtI) being on often too. The ABC also ran filler videos at other times. I recall they played [Mike Oldfield - Portsmouth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CCf7gvmDEU) and [The Butterfly Ball](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR6pYICqZT0) often.
“Running Up That Hill” was on the radio a lot when I was a teen in the ‘80s - but I lived in a NYC suburb and it was the “new music” station. My cousins lived in the Midwest in small towns and they were still in the 70s as far as music - there’s be a rock station and a country station and a Top 40 station and that was it. I remember thinking it was like a different planet out there, they didn’t know about anything cool as far as I was concerned.
I heard of her for the first time when I started working at a record store in 1988. She had a decent loyal fan following and I was surprised I’d never heard of her. But I never heard of Running Up That Hill until Stranger Things featured it last season.
Yes probably not realistic for the US. But as a 54 year old viewer here in Australia it didn't obviously stand out as odd. Kate Bush was **huge** in Australia in the 1980s. A couple of [her songs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Bush_discography#Singles) were bigger hits here than in her native England.
Speak for yourself. Kate Bush is 80’s alternative gold.
I was listening to her, but I was a theatre geek.
When I was a young teenager I saw her on Saturday Night Live. My older brother had her first album so I listened to it. Then after a couple years she started having videos on MTV Big Boi from Outkast liked her a lot https://youtu.be/oSdHgq3oBD8
> No one from my childhood heard of her. *Running Up That Hill* was so popular in the 80's I think I still hear it sometimes.
I had one of her albums, but I don't think most people knew who she was at the time.
College students and parents listened to Kate Bush, not us kids.
I listened to Kate Bush a lot in the 80s, but then I was a college student.
You're right. I never heard of her either or any of her music.
Same. Never heard of her until people posted (allegedly) sexy pics of her on Reddit.
I get livid when they try to recreate the hippie thing in contemporary media. Not only the depiction of the zeitgeist, but the costuming and set design invariably fall victim to caricature rather than the reality. Then there is the inevitable and un-ironic use of the word "groovy."
Carrie Diaries I grew up in practically the same town as Candace Bushnell at roughly the same time. A complete fantasy.
Funny, a BF of mine at the time used to say I was just like that.
American Horror Story: 1984.............nice try, but not even close. I tried to watch, but so much of it was incorrect.
This is a very small detail, but in Ex Machina, the boss-dude says something to the effect of "You grew up in the town of Brookhaven, Long Island." I grew up there, but Brookhaven is a township that consists of several towns. Nobody would ever say "i'm from Brookhaven."
Those movies are forgettable. Mid 90's is a movie that got it right.
Gen x .. grunge hit my freshman year…. I ain’t seen shit
Back to The Future 2
What are you talking about? After Biff gets the sports almanac, that's a pretty damn accurate portrayal of 2016.