# Do you think the 80s had more in common with the 70s or 90s?



## TheSpinningDoctor

I might vote on the 80s being more like the 70s, but only up until circa 1987. I've been hearing by a lot of people that 1988 was when the 80s were heading straight towards the 90s, but the transition wasn't really done until around 1992, which is the first year in which grunge (though started in late 1991 with Nirvana and a few others) and gangsta rap got popular. Musically, technologically, cars, and maybe even TV-wise, I'd say the 80s were definitely more like the 70s. I see very little similarities between 1984 and 1994.


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## Ren2878

Up until 1986/1987, the 70's.


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## decadeologist101

The lifestyle and economy seemed more similar to the earlier 90s
Malls and arcades were big parts of life 
The 70s had a lot more protests, the Vietnam war, the last days of the hippies.....
TV was more similar to the 70s however
Musically the 80s were unlike both but the adult contemporary of the 90s was 80s like
Attitudes were more similar to the late 70s but not at all like early 70s


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## decadeologist101

TheSpinningDoctor said:


> I might vote on the 80s being more like the 70s, but only up until circa 1987. I've been hearing by a lot of people that 1988 was when the 80s were heading straight towards the 90s, but the transition wasn't really done until around 1992, which is the first year in which grunge (though started in late 1991 with Nirvana and a few others) and gangsta rap got popular. Musically, technologically, cars, and maybe even TV-wise, I'd say the 80s were definitely more like the 70s. I see very little similarities between 1984 and 1994.


I don't see many similarities between 1974 and 1984 either. Where the 80s have commonalities with the 70s is the later 70s. The first half are day and night different. The first half had the Vietnam War, remnants of the hippies and the counterculture era.


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## TheSpinningDoctor

decadeologist101 said:


> I don't see many similarities between 1974 and 1984 either. Where the 80s have commonalities with the 70s is the later 70s. The first half are day and night different. The first half had the Vietnam War, remnants of the hippies and the counterculture era.


It seems that as years go by, less and less differences happen. For instance, I think that 2000 and 2014 are still very different from each other, but the differences aren't as big as the difference between 1986 and 2000. 1986 was a dinosaur by 2000 ('86 had no internet, people were using brick phones, sporting big hair, the Berlin Wall was still standing, etc). If you wore mid 80s clothes in 2000, you would look like a clown.


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## tanstaafl28

The 80's were their own decade. As was the 70's and the 90's. I don't see them as the same thing, and I lived through them.


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## Thalassa

The 80s were more like the 70s. Gender roles in many ways were still strongly followed, women often still wore things like dresses and pantyhose, toy commercials were sexist as hell, New Wave actually started in the late 70s, and VHS was more similar to Beta Max than DVD...same with cassettes being more similar to 8 track than CD. People still regularly bought vinyl and watched variety shows, variety shows making a comeback in the late 00s under the influence of reality tv. 

I don't think the 80s resemble the 90s much at all until about 1988.

Also politically the 80s were more conservative.

It's probably why I think the world has changed so much within my lifetime. Technologically and socially.


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## Thalassa

tanstaafl28 said:


> The 80's were their own decade. As was the 70's and the 90's. I don't see them as the same thing, and I lived through them.


I think this is partly true too. The 80s weren't exactly like anything, not even retro 80s 21st century come backs, though the 00s had some similarities to the late 80s they were also utterly different. 

For Gen Y the 80s and 90s had a lot of Nickelodeon and Disney, but even 80s Nick was more 60s/70s risque (you can't do that on television) versus the more kid friendly censorship of the early to mid 90s. 80s Disney was also mainly cleaned up reissued classics from the 40s-60s.

There was also that big 50s retro thing in the 80s, what about that, I had a poodle skirt.

60s beach culture was still very big in the 80s. I learned how to shag, but I also lived in the South.


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## tanstaafl28

fourtines said:


> I think this is partly true too. The 80s weren't exactly like anything, not even retro 80s 21st century come backs, though the 00s had some similarities to the late 80s they were also utterly different.
> 
> For Gen Y the 80s and 90s had a lot of Nickelodeon and Disney, but even 80s Nick was more 60s/70s risque (you can't do that on television) versus the more kid friendly censorship of the early to mid 90s. 80s Disney was also mainly cleaned up reissued classics from the 40s-60s.
> 
> There was also that big 50s retro thing in the 80s, what about that, I had a poodle skirt.
> 
> 60s beach culture was still very big in the 80s. I learned how to shag, but I also lived in the South.


I was 10 in 1980 and 19 in 1989. The 80's was the decade of consumerism, as far as I remember. Personal/home electronics really came into their own, as did personal computing. "Reganomics" made it seem as though the economy was on the rebound (even though it only really put off our debt on the next generation) consumer confidence began to grow again. The shopping mall, as the cultural center of our society, hit its peak during the 80's. The opening credits to "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" really shows the shopping mall in all it's glory.


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## Thalassa

tanstaafl28 said:


> I was 10 in 1980 and 19 in 1989. The 80's was the decade of consumerism, as far as I remember. Personal/home electronics really came into their own, as did personal computing. "Reganomics" made it seem as though the economy was on the rebound (even though it only really put off our debt on the next generation) consumer confidence began to grow again. The shopping mall, as the cultural center of our society, hit its peak during the 80's. The opening credits to "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" really shows the shopping mall in all it's glory.
> 
> View attachment 151730


I remember malls being a big huge deal. I remember teenagers went there to hang out, and as a kid my friends and I then wanting to be like them. My family also dragged me to the mall a lot. They were these amazing places with music stores and accessories, but my grandparents always wanted to hang out in the department stores. I had no knowledge of consumerism then.


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## CaptSwan

It had more in common with the 90's... If you think about it, the 70's were the backlash of the 60's; so, the 90's were the backlash of the 80's. From the gross excess of the 80's; we land to the 90's: anguish and all it had.


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## Brian1

The 80s were very much their own decade, and still are. The reason why Reagan is such a great president, is that we were still locked in a Cold War, that technically, he led us through and helped win. And with that sentence I still think I like Genesis' portrayal of him in Land of Confusion. He tried to co opt the Nuclear Freeze Movement. 99 Luftballons, that's made because no one thought they'd live to a ripe old age, we were going to die by blowing each other up. And a lot of music videos comment on this. Also the 80s are when computers were in their infancy. My brother owned an arcade machine of Ms. PacMan. I think the 2000s -10s are the realization in adult form, that infant time period. Going back to Reagan, he's very removed from even the 90s, because, he was still operating under that White Rule and Aparthied was good, because Thatcher was conservative, and Mandela was a communist. And a communist was still a communist, was still a communist. And we don't live in Reagan's world anymore, we live in Mandela's world. Madonna, I think, her and Michael Jackson, are more connected to 70s disco like the Bee Gees. And Nirvana was really the cutoff of when the 80s ended, because, he didn't have a massive hairdo, his beats were guitar driven, not dance moves. The 80s were their own decade, and I don't think they have a lot in common with the 70s or the 90s. Each decade I think is its own time capsule.


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## Ren2878

This thread is about which decade the 80's were closer to, not exactly like.


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## decadeologist101

Ren2878 said:


> This thread is about which decade the 80's were closer to, not exactly like.


The 80s resemble the later half of the 70s but not the part of the 70s when the Vietnam War was going on and there was a draft. It's nothing like 1970-1973/74.
This part of the 70s is worlds away from the 80s


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## Glenda Gnome Starr

The draft ended in 1972. The North Vietnamese took Saigon in 1975.
But to the 1980s. The beginning of the 1980s were more like the late 1970s (obsession with obtaining oil because the price had gone up). The decade started with Jimmy Carter as president and with hostages in Iran. 

Ronald Reagan was an outsize personality who had a great speaking voice but who didn't know much about nutrition. He said that ketchup was a vegetable. He also didn't know much about foreign policy. He sent weapons to Iran and to Iraq simultaneously, even though those two countries were fighting a protracted and very bloody war against each other. The Iran-Contra scandal occurred during that time. Archbishop Oscar Romero and four churchwomen were murdered early in the 1980s by U.S.-trained death squads. The United States was providing military aid and training to troops throughout Central America who were busily killing their own people, by claiming that they were "stopping communism." All but one person was killed by U.S. trained forces in El Mozote, El Salvador. The only survivor was a woman named Rufina Amaya. She hid and witnessed the military killing men, women, children, and babies. She saw her own children murdered. She was the sold survivor who told the story. Just recently, she passed away. At the end of the 1980s, U.S. trained military... um... thugs in El Salvador massacred a bunch of Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenaged daughter. That actually created a huge fuss in the U.S. Congress because many members of Congress had been educated by Jesuits. The United States was also sending military aid to Nicaraguan contras who were fighting against their own government. There was rumor that those contras also acted as drug smugglers. What made that whole scenario strange was that the United States maintained diplomatic relations with the democratically elected government of Nicaragua while, at the same time, plotting its demise. The United States was sending military aid and giving training to dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, as well. When the Falklands war started between Great Britain and Argentina (a territorial dispute), the U.S. government didn't know what to do because there were no communists involved.

Communism was the Big Bad Boogeyman. That unhealthy obsession with communism from 1946 until the end of the 1980s resulted in disaster... decaying infrastructure, stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and the use of third world countries as pawns in proxy wars between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Many of the current enemies of the United States were created by U.S. policy made during those years. Communism is now passe so we have to find new enemies because the United States government seems to be addicted to war and violence. The massive buildup of nuclear weapons during the 1980s helped to crash the Soviet Union and it nearly destroyed the U.S. economy. The Soviet Union was also fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan, which also contributed to its demise. Hmmm, sound familiar???

The U.S. economy sucked during the early 1980s, just as it sucked during the late 1970s.

In 1987, there was a stock market crash that linked it more to the 1990s and the dot com collapse.
Fashion was big and bold. People had Big Hair and they wore huge glasses that swallowed their faces. I saw a picture of myself in my Big Glasses. That was one funny sight! Despite being big, bold, and excessive, fashion was a definite improvement over the 1970s (and we won't even talk about the 1960s, which was a total fashion train wreck).

The 1980s ended with President George H.W. Bush. He gave us hope with 10,000 points of light but then, in 1991, he started the brief but pointless Gulf War to liberate an oil well for Kuwait.

It always seems to be about the oil...

These are my recollections and I lived through these years, having graduated from college in 1978 and from graduate (journalism) school in 1983.


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## Bugs

I grew up early childhood in the 80s and later in the 90s. I notice there was a smooth transition from the late 80s to the early 90s. I would say this period was more alike than any other.


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## RobynC

The late 1980's have similarities to the early 1990's; the early 1980's looked like the late 1970's (even in the early 1980's there was still disco). By around 1984-1985 the 1980's came into their own and continued to around 1988-89.


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## donnie darko

More like the 90s I voted, but I would make a caveat and say only up to 1996.


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## donnie darko

TheSpinningDoctor said:


> I see very little similarities between 1984 and 1994.



Actually, this doesn't seem far from the 80s at all.


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## donnie darko

fourtines said:


> The 80s were more like the 70s. Gender roles in many ways were still strongly followed, women often still wore things like dresses and pantyhose, toy commercials were sexist as hell, New Wave actually started in the late 70s, and VHS was more similar to Beta Max than DVD...same with cassettes being more similar to 8 track than CD. People still regularly bought vinyl and watched variety shows, variety shows making a comeback in the late 00s under the influence of reality tv.
> 
> I don't think the 80s resemble the 90s much at all until about 1988.
> 
> Also politically the 80s were more conservative.
> 
> It's probably why I think the world has changed so much within my lifetime. Technologically and socially.



Actually women/girls still wore dresses a lot in the 90s. I'd say the whole revolution of everyone wearing jeans (kind of boring, if you ask me  ) started in the early-mid 2000s. I view the 90s as a conservative decade too. Even if we had a Democratic president (Clinton), he was about as right wing as they get.


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