Your 80s childhood sucked

May 6, 2024 7:55 AM

Chris Biggs' shorts on 80s classics - oh the memory of cigarettes and Strawberry Shortcake!
posted by dorothyisunderwood (31 comments total)

My '80s childhood sucked, but that's mostly because I grew up in a military dictatorship.
I guess pop culture was pretty bad, too.
posted by signal at 8:08 AM on May 6 [17 favorites]

See saw = wooden pain plank.

I love this.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:41 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

I'm so glad I watched these instead of working. So many memories. So many bad memories.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:58 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

My '80s childhood sucked, but that's mostly because I grew up in a military dictatorship.
I guess pop culture was pretty bad, too.

This is a regular reality check in our house, too.

Me: Being an 80's kid was terrible because you'd beg for a playset for Christmas and the whole thing would turn out to be crappy cardboard.
Comrade Doll: One Christmas in Romania, I got a set of handkerchiefs as my only gift.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:06 AM on May 6 [12 favorites]

Not to derail too much but ^^ this is the reason my husband hates farms and farmers markets. “I didn’t leave communism to PICK MY OWN BERRIES AND PAY TO DO SO!”
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:10 AM on May 6 [20 favorites]

Not sure what's funnier, that most of these things aren't exclusive to the 80s or that commenters are having a misery-off. What's worse than Cabbage Patch Kids? Getting actual cabbage for a gift!
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:12 AM on May 6 [23 favorites]

Well, the 80s portion of my childhood sucked because it was when I was a teenager, so I had both acne and the constant threat of Mutually Assured Destruction via nuclear holocaust to deal with.

(The 70s portion was a bit better.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:16 AM on May 6 [7 favorites]

My 80s childhood was OK, except for the satanic murder in my town and divorced parents who talked smack about each other and feral bullies who would stalk me on the way home from elementary school.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:19 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

I made it through part of the 4th video and quit, the shtick was already old.

My 80's childhood consisting of all the same stuff he's crying about was awesome.
posted by oddman at 9:20 AM on May 6 [6 favorites]

Bruegel's Children's Games is a pretty good benchmark, with faves like "pushing a wall" and "stirring excrement with a stick" and, curiously omitted, "not dying of dysentery, cholera or the plague."

Honestly the 80s weren't so bad.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:31 AM on May 6 [7 favorites]

See saw = wooden pain plank.

The metal see-saws have less flex, so you can really rock someone's world with those, much more than on the wooden ones.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:31 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

you can really rock someone's world

that's a lot of words for "render infertile"

edit: technically, one extra word
posted by elkevelvet at 9:34 AM on May 6 [8 favorites]

I was well into adulthood in the 1980s -- "Sorry, ma'am, we're all out of Thriller for the day. Could I interest you in something new? Her name's Madonna..." -- but I enjoy a good serving of funny schadenfreude.
posted by pracowity at 9:44 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

I love his translation, expressed as an list of thrilling events for adults, of just how wildly exciting it would be when the school janitor threw down all the tennis balls that had got lodged on the roof during the year.
posted by rongorongo at 10:09 AM on May 6 [4 favorites]

Free balls! It’s like Christmas in April!
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:15 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]

As an uncoordinated little nerd child who fainted when she got overheated, I fucking hated Field Day though. The trick was to pick the first two events so you could lose quickly and then fart around in the shade reading Beverly Cleary books and avoiding getting pulled into a tug o' war game.

I kind of miss riding in the back of the pickup truck though, that was fun. Mostly because I had no concept of how close to death I was at all times.
posted by emjaybee at 11:25 AM on May 6 [10 favorites]

Look if you didn't want the Simon game to be so stressful for you, maybe you shouldn't have sucked so bad at Simon.

(/s)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:04 PM on May 6 [5 favorites]

I kind of miss riding in the back of the pickup truck though, that was fun. Mostly because I had no concept of how close to death I was at all times.

It's still legal (with some caveats) in lots of US states, so you can still get your risky pleasures legally in much of the country.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:20 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Whereas my 80s childhood was "You better be grateful for your Cabbage Patch Kids because kids in Russia are playing with cabbages!"
posted by straight at 12:30 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Would you rather encounter a Care Bear or Communism in the woods?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:52 PM on May 6 [4 favorites]

Those bicycle pedals he's trashing are classic MKS Sylvans, one of the best touring platform designs ever created. I've had them on three different bikes and insist on them to this day for my long distance riding. They are so, so very comfy. My childhood bike pedals were black rubber, so I'm not sure what he's getting at.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 3:52 PM on May 6 [6 favorites]

I kind of miss riding in the back of the pickup truck though, that was fun. Mostly because I had no concept of how close to death I was at all times.

The real fun was riding in the back of the pickup standing up and leaning on the front cab.
posted by freakazoid at 4:05 PM on May 6

One summer a neighbor bought a Subaru Brat with the two little seats in the bed, facing backwards. They got tired pretty quick of having me ask about going for a ride. For a 11-year-old it was the best car thing ever.
posted by maxwelton at 4:39 PM on May 6 [3 favorites]

The real fun was riding in the back of the pickup standing up and leaning on the front cab.

I was hitchhiking and caught a ride in the back of a dump truck with a bunch of people once. I'd been sitting but stood up to look over the side, and immediately got hit in the head by a low tree branch. I was really lucky to have nothing worse than a large lump and a bit of blood, that could have been really bad.

So while I have lots of happy memories of riding in the back of vehicles and perched on tractors and so on, it was only later that I caught on to the danger involved.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:40 PM on May 6

I once picked up a hitchhiker, as a teenager, who rode in the back of my truck. He stood up, leaned over the side of the cab, and had a conversation with my passenger through the open side window - at 70-mph.
posted by jordantwodelta at 6:36 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

In the early 80s my dad worked scab through a strike at the local meat packing plant and then he got laid off and didn’t work for a year and a half and then he moved four hours away and it was another year and a half before we could move to be with him and we were on food stamps and I went to a private school 20 miles away where my family was treated like poor white trash and the trauma of all that stuff lingers even today.

So, yeah. The 80s sucked. But not in the way those videos said they sucked.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 8:29 PM on May 6 [3 favorites]

46! Oh my sweet summer youtuber. The 80s were my teen years exactly (12-21), and this guy is an authority on 80s stuff like I'm an expert on driving with an open container or the finer subtleties in the early works of Black Oak Arkansas. I didn't watch all of them (we need a transcript like we get with 40-page top-40 lists), but without stuff like VertiBird and Big Trak I just can't sustain interest!

Though ironically, the first few toys I thought of were actually from the 70s.
posted by rhizome at 1:58 AM on May 7 [2 favorites]

I kind of miss riding in the back of the pickup truck though, that was fun. Mostly because I had no concept of how close to death I was at all times.

So my father did something really smart when we had a pickup: he put a cap on the bed of it, and then threw a bunch of old sofa cushions back there. Then that became the place to stow the kids on car trips - especially when such car trips involved my brother and his friends en route to Little League games. So we got the riding in the back of the pickup truck, but safe.

It also briefly came in handy when we went on a camping trip with a set of aunt/uncle/cousins. One night my parents had the idea to sleep in the truck when there was a rainstorm and we discovered our tent leaked; we had two cots that my parents had been using while my brother and I slept on the ground, but the leak and some more rain would have been a problem. My father suggested he and my mother could sleep in the bed of the truck so my brother and I would get the cots. ....He forgot to consider that the cap was metal, and the rain on the truck cap kept them up all night; my father compared the noise to "mice in combat boots".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:43 AM on May 7

Mostly because I had no concept of how close to death I was at all times.

Covers large and recurring sections of my late 70s/early 80s US childhood.

The second hand smoke may get me yet.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:46 AM on May 7

I kind of miss riding in the back of the pickup truck though, that was fun. Mostly because I had no concept of how close to death I was at all times.

This was in the 1990s, but me and my brother had to ride in the back of my dad's tiny Sonoma pickup like 70 miles down a highway from some construction site out in BFE after a day spent pouring concrete, soaking wet and freezing. That experience helped me get a 3.7 GPA in college though, so I guess it wasn't all bad.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:44 AM on May 7

Trigger warning this thing! Blech.
posted by lextex at 8:44 AM on May 8