1980s retro movement

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The 1980s retro movement is a perceived pop culture phenomenon of the 2000s, in which certain aspects of 1980s pop culture have revived as an apparent celebration of the earlier era.[1][2]

[edit] Movies and television

Many of the most prominent instances of this retro phenomenon can be seen in movies and television shows. Movies such as The Squid and the Whale and Donnie Darko are set in the 1980s, whereas movies such as the American Pie franchise have been seen as reviving movie trends that were popular in the 1980s (in this case "gross-out" comedy). American Pie 3 (aka American Wedding) features a dance off to 1980s hits. Hit movies from the '80s like The Breakfast Club were released as a High School Reunion series along with Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Sixteen Candles. MTV also honored The Breakfast Club on the 2005 Movie Awards.

There have also been DVD releases and/or revivals of 80s television shows such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite, He-Man, Voltron, The Transformers, Care Bears and Wacky Packages, and Wonder Showzen has featured parodies of shows such as Care Bears, G.I. Joe, and He-Man.

[edit] Music

1980s-style bands such as The Killers and Franz Ferdinand have found great success in the pop-punk, emo and numetal dominated mid-2000s. Much smaller comebacks by real 80s bands such as Mötley Crüe and Duran Duran have also occurred. The ascent of crunk and snap music, club music has returned to the forefront of popular Hip hop music, after the predominance of alternative and gangsta rap in the 1990s.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a PlayStation 2 game taking place in 1986, features several albums worth of 80's tunes.

[edit] Other events related to 1980s nostalgia

[edit] Television and movies

• The Nickelodeon movie Jimmy Neutron used songs like "Kids in America" by Kim Wilde and "We Got The Beat" by the Go-Go's.
• In December 2005, Larry King Live interviewed the cast of Roseanne, a sitcom that premiered in 1988, and later interviewed with her family in 2006.
• The popular Cartoon Network shows Futurama, Robot Chicken, and Family Guy often made references to events and pop culture in the 1980s and also featured many guest stars from the era.
• The 1999 drama The Suburbans satirized the 80s revival hype.
• Big hair, including the Mullet, returned in some areas as well as an excess of colorful makeup and rouge.
• The hour-long television drama and primetime soap become popular again. Desperate Housewives has been compared to Dynasty both in the structure of storylines and in the widespread popularity of those shows.
• 1980s-inspired motifs and designs have become fairly regularly used in popular culture.
• Revival of interest in 1980s John Hughes movies, a la Not Another Teen Movie.
• Overprocessed, loud, slow music has come increasingly back into fashion, echoing 1980s hair metal.
• Napoleon Dynamite featured a community stuck in the 1980s. The fashion, hairstyles, decor, and appliances were all of Eighties-vintage. The character of Uncle Rico was constantly expressing his nostalgia for his high school days "back in '82."
• The 1981 Disney film The Fox and the Hound had a sequel released in 2006.
• The Transformers is currently scheduled to be released as a motion picture in 2007.
• The Smurfs is currently scheduled to be released as a motion picture in 2009.
• The 1988 movie Hairspray is scheduled for a remake and Mr. Bean's Holiday will be released reviving the Bean franchise.
• The Movie Miami Vice, based on the 1980s TV show of the same name was released in 2006.
• * Pee Wee's Playhouse and Saved by the Bell have become a part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.
• The TV Show Grounded For Life Often Shows Sean, Claudia, And Eddie In Flash Backs Of Their High School Days.

[edit] Advertisements

• Kellogg's uses the Dead or Alive song "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" in their commercial.
• Swiffer commercials also featured 80s music in their commercials such as Devo's "Whip It" and more recently "One Way or Another" by Blondie.
• Many other commercials feature '80s music in their commercials such as commercials by Ritz.
• Pizza Hut uses a parody of the Go-Go's song "We Got the Beat" in their commercial with "We Got the Meat"
• Trio's "Da Da Da (I Don't Love You, You Don't Love Me)" and Styx's "Mr. Roboto" were used in Volkswagen commercials in the late 1990s.
• PepsiCo uses Lionel Richie's "All Night Long" in an ad for Mountain Dew MDX energy soda.
• A commercial by Mazda features graphics that resemble Space Invaders, with cars that fly through the air much like the space crafts in Space Invaders.
• The Atari 2600 Pac-Man sound was used in an ad for Taco Bell in the summer of 2006.
• Bubbleicious runs a commercial filmed in 2006 that features kids dressed in 80s fashions, listening to 80s boom boxes, and so forth.

[edit] Music

• With the ascent of crunk and snap music, club music returns to the forefront of popular Hip hop music, after the predominance of alternative and gangsta rap in the 1990s.
• Rihanna (herself only born in 1988) partially uses the lyrics and background music from the 1981 Soft Cell hit "Tainted Love" in her 2006 hit song "SOS (Rescue Me)".
• Walt Disney Records publish an album by a band called Devo 2.0 which sing their One Hit Wonder Whip It as well as original hits.
• Mobb Deep's song "Got It Twisted" samples Thomas Dolby's song "She Blinded Me With Science"
• Eric Prydz samples Steve Winwood's "Valerie" for the song "Call on Me," which continues the trend of dance acts using 80's hits as a sample loop.
• Dance acts covering 80's hits between 2002 and 2004, which prior to that many hard rock and metal acts had already done at the start of the revival, started by a Limp Bizkit cover of George Michael's "Faith.".
• Freestyle, a hip-hop influenced type of dance music popular with Hispanic Americans in the 80's, finds a revival on Latin radio stations across the country.
• Bowling For Soup, a popular band of the 2000s, released a song titled "1985", a very popular song among pre-teens in the mid-2000s. It's also popular among nostalgic fans in their late 30s and early 40s. The song is about the longings of a bored 40-ish mother of teenagers for the dreamy days of her early 20-ish youth before she settled down. Its video also parodies many popular music videos of the era.
• Electroclash, a common trend in 80s music which features very generic computer-like sounds, reappeared in popular music.
• In 2003, the band No Doubt releases a cover version of the song, It's My Life, originally performed by Talk Talk in 1984.
• The Minutemen has a song from the 1980's titled "Corona" used as the theme song for Jackass. That song never became a huge hit until the success of Jackass.

[edit] Computer and video games

• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a PlayStation 2 game takes place in 1986; and its prequel Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories for PSP, which takes place in 1984.
• The Classic NES Series is released to Game Boy Advance in 2004 and is favored by classic gaming enthusiasts.
• Kingdom Hearts 2 features a world on Tron which was a movie released in 1982. The developers wanted to reach the gamers that were nostalgic.
• Tron 2.0 was released in the 2000s along with other remakes of popular 80s videogames including NARC despite being unrelated to the original.
• Nostalgia for Old-Skool video games and arcade culture, particularly emulators, particularly the MAME system became popular as a result.
• Several well known video game publishers with arcade game background, such as Sega, Irem, Taito, etc during the 80s released compilation games, namely Capcom Generations. Many of them were released prior to the retro movement, as the retro movement became popular, many of these compilation games' secondhand prices skyrocketed, significantly higher for the Sega Saturn compared with the same title released on the Sony PlayStation notably on the 1998 game Image Fight & X-Multiply which commands $10 extra for the former console over the PSX.
• Most of the games featured on the Plug-and-Play mini-consoles feature games from the 1980s, some series include Namco and Atari. Atari even released an Old-Skool style console for purchase that has games built-in known as the Atari Flashback.
• Nintendo releases New Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo DS. This game is modeled after the 1985 original.
• The retro computer magazine "Retro Gamer", which as all about gaming in the 1980's and the 1990's, is launched in the UK

[edit] Other

• The release of The Wedding Singer in 1998, which was seen by many as premature nostalgia. However, some 1980s retroization has occurred in the earlier portion of the 1990s.
• Slow, escalating return of popular 1980s fashion motifs in popular fashion. This includes the preppie and new wave styles and their repopularization in the 2000s. As well, bright and imposing colors, a much more tailored/imposing/composed look, the prevalence of daringly cut jackets and high waists, and the impending (from 2006 February Fashion Week) reintroduction of leggings and the "puffy" look. Wearing high-heeled boots, specifically tucking one's slacks into them, becomes a popular trend among young women -- which was also a popular trend during the '80s. Hoop Earrings also made a comeback.
• "Fun in the sun" images became popular again.
• 1980s cartoons shirt designs became popular again.
• In the United Kingdom, a chain of 1980s-themed bars (branded as Reflex) have recently gained increasing prominence in various towns and cities.[3] These bars do serve drinks such as alcopops that only gained popularity from the mid 1990s, but the music is entirely 1980s pop with a mix of early 90s pop and the decor is usually indicative of 1980s pop culture icons.
• Many radio stations have "80's flashback" programs featuring danceable 1980's New Wave tracks.
• McDonald's held a campaign where in Kid's Meals, they would have an exclusive toy from the original Mario series.
• Several homages and references to 1980s media by the same developers or publishers have been put in movies, games and TV shows.
• During the American Graffiti skit on I Love the 70s Volume 2, two interviewers said that they "should be talking about the '80s because its retro now, the 70s are ten years too late", but the 70s is still talked about since the 2000s also has the 1990s retro movement as well.
• LEGO re-releases classic 1980s LEGO building sets as "LEGO Legends" in the 2000s.
• Video players for newer video formats such as HD-DVD are using a similar design language to 1980's style VHS VCRs [4].

[edit] See also

• 1980s fads
• Twenty Year Rule