It Was The 1980s...
For those who didn't live it, this is for you.
There are many things you'd hate. Except for the radio there was no free music. If you had 100 albums or cassette tapes in your library you were considered "serious" about your music and each one cost you about $8. If you were serious about movies you paid $500 for your VCR and blank tapes to record shows from cable were $5-8 each. Actual VHS movies were $100 in the early days. Cable TV was expensive and brought you up to about 40 channels from the 6 you could get on regular TV. Getting porn films was the same but it was possible to rent every movie made by your favorite porn star and still only watch about 2 movies a month. If you knew how RCA cables worked you could rent a second VCR and make a copy for your own library
Video games were .25 a game and we watched kids who had "a problem" drop as much as $30 in a day. If you had a few grand you could buy a personal computer and play cruder versions of arcade games using your keyboard rather than a joystick. Basically you had to work for your music, movies and video games and that would cost money requiring jobs, especially if you were over 18 as there was an expectation you'd move out of your parents house.
But it wasn't all bad. A high school kid could fund a couple decent rifles like AR-15s or HK-91s with his part time "after school and weekends" job. You could expect to buy 1,000 rounds of 5.56 or 7.62x51 for less than $100 because US military surplus ammo was everywhere. I paid about $250 for my CAR-15 and $400 each for my HK-91 and Hk-93, the latter were pretty expensive for the times.
Even though you paid for rentals, the video store was still a fun experience. You got together with a couple of your friends and picked out one or two movies and that was your night. Pizza, popcorn, the works...and if you had your crap together some girlfriends. It was the 80s version of "The Ed Sullivan Show" experience I suspect.
You went to the mall every single weekend and spent most of the day at the mall. You weren't there to buy anything, but it was a safe bet you'd be eating lunch at the food court and it probably had a Cozzoli's Pizza. You were there because every kid was there. It truly was our mecca.
You went to the movies once a week. There were some awesome movies and there were some awful movies, there were even some awesomely awful movies. Didn't matter, it was sorta like going to the mall, it was almost a rule. Thankfully it was only about $3 to see a movie and for another $3 you could get popcorn and a coke. Red Dawn was a truly awesome movie if you saw it on the big screen with your buddies and you had popcorn and cokes.
There were some truly retarded fashion options available from trying to look like Duran Duran or keeping up with the latest video jacket options worn by Michael Jackson. Fortunately jeans and a t shirt or a polo still worked just fine and if you really wanted to be comfortable all day track suits were an option. The first $100 Nike Airs arrived in the mid 80s if you were dumb enough to fall for that crap. Thankfully Adidas could still be had for $20 and if you really wanted comfortable shoes Reeboks were there if you knew about them. Members Only jackets were cool for about 6 months and some of us wore them much longer than we should have. We won't talk about plastic parachute pants.
It was possible to buy really great Mexican fast food. Taco Bell had not yet monopolized every local chain with their alpo brand taco and chemical cheese nachos. There was that "New Coke" fiasco but things got sorted out eventually.
Girls were trying to emulate Madonna (I should stress this is the 80s Madonna and not Menopause Madonna) and while we liked them kinda slutty it was still a vast improvement over girls trying to be Brittany Spears (the crazy variety) or Paris Hilton. There was the unfortunate "valley girl" syndrome but thankfully it didn't last very long. But even if a girl was a little ditzy, a spandex mini skirt absolved many shortcomings. For both good and bad, aerobic fashions were popular.
Every Halloween the entire neighborhood trick or treated and most kids ditched the plastic bucket for a pillow case. Some of us were so efficient that we'd fill it a couple times before people turned off the lights. The worst thing that could happen to you on Halloween night was you might get shaving creamed. The following monday the school cafeteria looked like the NY stock exchange as kids brought the stuff they hated (for me it was anything with coconut) and exchanged it for stuff they liked. Suddenly D students could do complex math and even compute fractions.
A high school kid with a part time job could afford to pay the "add on" costs to be on their parents auto insurance plan even though it wasn't required by law to drive. A kid could buy a $100 beater that ran and with the help of the auto shop class at school restore it to "cool wheels" in a single school year. If you had a motorcycle, you automatically got a girlfriend without even trying. Sadly I never had a motorcycle and I used to be mystified by the success of those who did.
Sure we almost all got nuked in 83 during Able Archer but we didn't know a thing about it until years later. We were just getting over the Iran hostage crisis when the Marine barracks in Lebanon were bombed in 83 and that was the worst example of Islamic terrorism we'd seen. And sure we got suckered into sending food relief to Ethiopia so they could grow up strong enough to drag US soldiers through the streets almost ten years later. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some other bad stuff but all in all, I'm glad I was in high school then vs. the 70s or 90s.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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I always wondered why it was so easy.
Just play the record backward to hear the messages... 
Originally Posted by duece71
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