Stranger Things and Top Gun both return this week, which got us thinking a lot about the '80s. With Stranger Things, we've been looking into the "real"-life story behind it, and with Top Gun, we saw that some people really weren't into the movie at the time.
We looked at other '80s movies too, like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, and also music and video games from the decade. The '80s were also a time of new tech from Apple and Sony, food trends (terrible food trends), and scary politics that might have killed us all.
Here's look back at the facts we learned. The links all lead to full articles with much more info, so click every one that interests you, and with luck, maybe we'll never have to deal with '80s nostalgia again.
Cameron Crowe spent a year posing as a high school student, to write a book about kids' sex lives.
It's called the Montauk Project, and there are people today who (falsely) claim the government experimented on them as kids, resulting in monsters and portals.
At a 1985 summit, Reagan asked if the USSR would help the US if aliens attacked, and Gorbachev replied, "No doubt about it."
Soundtracks had always existed in some form, especially for musicals, but following this release in the late '70s, for a few decades, these albums really became a thing.
A German inventor claimed Sony ripped off his invention, and though courts laughed at him, Sony ended up paying him off.
"Lemmings," featuring goofy mass suicide, pleased no customers.
“Cruise and McGillis spend a lot of time squinting uneasily at each other and exchanging words as if they were weapons, and when they finally get physical, they look like the stars of one of those sexy new perfume ads. There's no flesh and blood here."
When Manuel Noriega fled to the Vatican embassy following America's invasion, they played music through loudspeakers to intimidate him into surrendering.
Hopper gave up Eleven to the evil scientist in season one, and then we all just forgot about that, with him becoming her surrogate father.
These are the compositions of Nintendo's Koji Kondo, whose first game was 1983's Punch-Out!!!.
The production filmed them all flying for real, but the footage was unusable, thanks to all the vomit.
Quality aside, the pizza proved too slow and too expensive to work in the McDonald's menu.
We're due for 2000s nostalgia now, but this century's pop culture has been so derivative—and 20-year-old properties never went away to give us a chance to miss them.