Common Misconceptions About Life In The 1980s

In the ’80s, bigger was better. Giant shoulder pads, oversized blazers, and, of course, big, big hairdos: these were the staple fashion statements of the decade. So what did every style icon need? Hairspray — and a lot of it. But then in 1985 came a big blow for fashion fans everywhere: a hole was discovered in the ozone layer above Antarctica, and what was to blame? Their beloved hairspray.

Much of the publicity surrounding aerosols and the ozone layer happened in the ’80s, so many of us still think the decade’s bouffant hairstyles were to blame. However, scientists were way ahead of us and had figured out the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons back in the 1970s. Manufacturers had actually stopped using them in their products, including hairspray, and then the U.S. government banned their usage in anything except medical products like inhalers.

Being a kid back in the ’80s was pretty fun: all-day bike rides out with your friends, walking to school on your own, way less parental supervision. But then “stranger danger” began to take hold. Several child abductions in the early part of the decade got unprecedented amounts of media attention, including the infamous disappearance of young Adam Walsh.

But was there really an epidemic of child abductions in the 1980s? No. While cases like Adam Walsh’s were undoubtedly tragic and horrifying, the media coverage made it seem like this was far more common than it really was. For instance, in 1985 the Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI had said there were 67 stranger abductions that year, while the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children claimed 142.

Conventional wisdom is that grunge killed hair metal when Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in the early ‘90s. Almost overnight, the dark Seattle sound of Kurt Cobain’s outfit, as well as Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden, made the flamboyant ’80s metal bands such as Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, and Poison seem like a relic of the past.

Yes, grunge became insanely popular, but it didn’t render hair metal bands instantly obsolete. The good metal bands kept plying their trade in the ‘90s and ‘00s, while the bad ones went away, with Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider claiming that the proliferation of lesser bands had already started the decline of the genre long before grunge ever came along.

These days, ’80s fashion has a pretty bad reputation. If you’re invited to an ’80s themed party, you’ll probably see all kinds of garish colors, enormous shoulder pads, even more enormous hairdos, and neon leg warmers. For many people, they remember it now as a pretty awkward and unflattering time.

The answer, of course, is no. People generally didn’t make a habit of looking like Madonna in a music video as they took the train to work! Sure, when they hit the town, some people liked to make a statement, and bright, bold shapes and colors were in. In fact, as CNN put it, “The 1980s was possibly the boldest decade in modern fashion history, a magical era of over-the-top silhouettes, teased perms and saturated colors.”

When you think of typical ’80s hairstyles, one likely sticks out above all others: the mullet. This hairdo, characterized by the hair being cut short on top but left long in the back, dominated the 1980s and even some of the early ‘90s. Countless celebrities sported it, including Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies, Patrick Swayze in Road House, and Richard Dean Anderson in MacGyver.

Hold on, so the mullet, the most ’80s hairstyle ever, wasn’t even called the mullet in the ’80s? That’s right: the term was coined in 1994, when the Beastie Boys released a song called “Mullet Head.” The Oxford English Dictionary even credits the iconic hip-hop trio with giving the mullet its name! Thank you Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA.

Ronald Reagan was President of the United States from 1980 to 1988, and his legacy is complicated, to say the least. In 2015 The Guardian’s Rory Carroll asked, “Was he a government-shrinking, undocumented immigrant-bashing, climate change-denying, abortion-curbing political granddaddy of today’s Republican presidential hopefuls? Or a liberal peacenik who could moonlight as a Democrat?”

In reality, during his two terms in office, Reagan’s popularity waxed and waned just like any President. His average approval rating was 52.8 percent, according to The Washington Post. This makes him the sixth favorite President, behind JFK, Eisenhower, Bush Sr., Clinton, and even Lyndon Johnson!

The 1980s saw the first wave of video game fever. Kids everywhere were hitting the local arcade to play new coin-operated games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Then Nintendo introduced the world to Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong. But while children were loving this cool new craze, adults didn’t like it one bit.

However, most of these worries were simply blown out of proportion. Grown-ups began imagining arcades as dark, dangerous dens of drugs, sex, and other illicit activities, but really, this was just another classic example of the media creating panic over a new trend.

In the ’80s, citizens of certain areas began to become very wary of an innocuous object they would pass on the street every day: the humble payphone. People began fearing that these glass booths weren’t primarily being used by upstanding members of the public to make calls; they believed the criminal element had co-opted them.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune in 1993, Joseph J. Amendala explained that this belief in the ’80s was actually incorrect. While phone calls paid for by coins in an Illinois Bell phone booth couldn’t be traced, cals placed in any other phone booth “create the same call record of the date, time, duration, and receiver of the telephone call as any other home or business phone.”

The 1980s saw the invention of the Sony Walkman and portable boomboxes, meaning people could listen to their tapes on the go and even record their own. Mixtapes became all the rage. It was a whole new world for music fans who up until then had only really been listening to records on a turntable or tuning into their favorite radio stations.

Nope, the music industry actually wasn’t happy with tapes becoming so dominant — at least not initially. They were seen as a drainer of profits, as record sales started dipping in the late ’70s. The industry was worried that people were illegally copying music onto blank cassettes. In fact, the phrase “Home Taping Is Killing Music –- And It’s Illegal” was slapped on many album covers.

The ’80s was ground zero for what today is referred to as “Satanic Panic.” There was a belief among mainstream America that the Devil had infiltrated the minds of heavy-metal-listening teens all across the country. It led to the West Memphis Three being wrongfully convicted on murder charges because of their gothic dress sense and taste in bands, and a host of allegations being made of ritualistic satanic abuse at, of all places, daycare centers.

In reality, of course, there were no Satanists lurking around every corner, and certainly none in the daycare system. Instead, evangelical Christianity was on the rise in the ’80s, preaching to anyone who would listen that real-life demons existed and that the Devil was trying to corrupt their children through music, film, and television.

In 1985 Coca-Cola did the unthinkable: it changed the formula of its classic soda. Not only that, but it launched “New Coke” as a replacement for the tried-and-tested drink, not simply another option. Consumers didn’t like New Coke’s sweeter, more syrupy taste and even staged protests against it, including publicly pouring the offending soda down sewer drains.

You see, Coca-Cola didn’t just alter its iconic soda on a whim. It did so after 190,000 blind taste-testers claimed that New Coke tasted better! What the company didn’t bank on, though, was that America had a strong emotional attachment to the familiar taste of Coke, and when it was taken away entirely, people freaked out.

These days, people of a certain age will complain, “They never show music on MTV any more.” Back in the ’80s, though, MTV was at its peak of cultural importance and popularity. When the first-ever 24-hour music channel launched in 1981, it immediately became destination viewing, and overnight the music video — which had been previously unheard-of — turned into one of the most important, and artistically significant, aspects of the music business.

In case you couldn’t guess, though, this isn’t what actually happened! When MTV debuted, it wasn’t even a part of the cable package in L.A. or New York, and there were only 120 videos to show. Conservative networks refused to carry the channel, with author Craig Marks telling NPR, “They thought that MTV was a bunch of coked-up rock’n’roll fiends.”

No movie character embodies the ’80s image of corporate excess better than Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko. In Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, released in ’87, Douglas’ ruthless broker says, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That attitude has become synonymous with the decade in many people’s minds. The pursuit of wealth became all-consuming, the number of millionaires in the country increased, and Madonna danced through the pop charts with her ode to capitalism, “Material Girl.”

According to National Review’s Richard McKenzie, “The 1980s in America were actually a decade of unusual generosity.” For example, in 1980 U.S. citizens gave $65 million to charity, but by the time ’89 rolled around, donations had ballooned to more than $100 million. Could it simply be that people were making more money in the decade, and therefore gave more away?

In the ’80s, parents were super worried about one thing when they sent their kiddies trick-or-treating on Halloween: psychotic neighbors poisoning, or otherwise tampering with, the candy! You see, in 1974 a Texas man named Ronald O’Bryan had laced pixie sticks with cyanide and gave them to five children, but only his son ate the candy. The boy died, and in 1984 O’Bryan was executed for his crime.

As pointed out by sociologists Gerald T. Horiuchi and Joel Best, though, “Many, if not most, reports of Halloween sadism are of questionable authenticity.” In other words, these things tended to be urban legends, playing on the fears of already-scared parents. According to the CBC, there have only been 200 reported cases of Halloween candy-tampering in the last 60 years; the vast majority of these turned out to be hoaxes.

In the 1986 comedy Gung Ho, Michael Keaton’s auto plant foreman convinces a Japanese company to buy his failed Pennsylvania car factory. The plant being closed had devastated the local economy and robbed good men of their jobs, you see. But the Japanese businessmen then proceed to screw the workers over by paying them less and denying them a union.

Wouldn’t you know it, though, that’s not entirely accurate! What Went Right in the 1980s author Richard McKenzie wrote, “During the '80s, national production of goods and services actually rose in constant-dollar terms by close to a third.” He added, “The industrial production index had risen during the '80s in line with the overall economy and stood at an all-time high in 1990.”