Pop Culture

Back to the Decade of Distaste

The Sun-Herald, 5 December 2004

Last weekend, 2000 people flocked to Luna Park to see old-timers like Go West, Wa Wa Nee and Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley, in a concert appropriately called Living in the 80s. “They looked and sounded older,” said June, 34, a veteran Spandau Ballet fan, “but it still felt like I was wearing lace gloves and legwarmers again.”

Perhaps the eighties revival was inevitable. Just as the coolest trend of the real eighties was the sixties revival, we are now looking back fondly at what Girl magazine calls “the most tasteless era ever”. Times are different, but the pop culture has returned.

Next year, those 30-somethings who enjoyed Living in the 80s can see return concerts from Blondie (yet again) and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, presumably playing the inescapable Money for Nothing.  Duran Duran are the latest 1980s pop idols to reform, with a new tour and a new album. But as bass player John Taylor insists: “We didn't get back together to play Hungry Like the Wolf.”

 “We longtime fans know that the band's tour is going to be successful because of people my age turning out to hear the old songs,” wrote online reviewer Taya Longworth, “and the band is most likely counting on that too. Either way, this is a harmlessly nice comeback, but it proves the old saying true: you can't go back home.”

Bob Geldof begs to differ. Last month, the legendary musician and humanitarian formed Band Aid 20, comprised of current pop stars, to re-record Band Aid’s 1984  charity song Do They Know It’s Christmas?. The new version has been almost universally panned. Critics, suggesting that it was always an awful song, wonder why a fresh new song wasn’t written for the new stars.

One reason: nostalgia. "When Robbie [Williams] was singing he was quite teary, because he had grown up with the song,” Geldof said.

Band Aid 20 aren’t the only ones returning to the past. In the next two years, we will be treated to big-screen revivals of television shows like The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team, The Fall Guy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is even talk of reviving popular movie characters like Rambo and Indiana  Jones, in the hope that faded (and aging) stars can be megastars once again. Crocodile Dundee in LA obviously taught them nothing.

“It’s just naturally the way the business works,” says Scott Tipton of Toynami, which has produced action figures in recent years based on 1980s Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Thundarr. “Everybody who was watching this stuff as kids is now grown up. They’ve got some disposable income and they’re looking to recapture some of their childhood. I think you’ll see the same thing in about another 15 years on [Mighty Morphin]  Power Rangers.”

For now, the kids are happy living someone else’s past. The 1980s is being "discovered" by teenagers, in the same rose-coloured way that Gen-X teens "discovered" the sixties. When I interviewed 18-year-old film star Lindsay Lohan in June, she spoke enthusiastically about eighties high-school films. "I'd still like to make a movie like Ferris Bueller's Day Off," she said. "That's one of my favourite movies. My Dad had loved it, and my Mom had loved it, so they showed it to me."

Recalling the movies that teens used to watch back then, the question arises: “What were we thinking?” The crass (and very popular) Porky's series, for example, makes the American Pie movies look classy. Compared to Rambo or most 1980s Dolph Lundgren flicks, dumb action films like XXX aren’t so bad. Perhaps some day Lohan will see that her own, recent high-school comedies are far superior to the overhyped Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Hollywood’s new movies are also reminiscing. In one scene of Suddenly 30, Jennifer Garner saves a dull party by making the DJ play Michael Jackson’s Thriller, inspiring everyone join in the dance. (Of course, they all remember the steps perfectly.) The message: pop music was better in the eighties. Kids might believe that; they can’t remember Starship or Samantha Fox. The cynics among us recall a decade where musical pickings were so sparse that radio’s “Classic Hits” format was invented. True, the decade had its share of great songs, but nobody bought them if they didn’t have good videos.

I can accept that every middle-aged hipster from the Human League to Cyndi Lauper has toured Australia in the past year. I can accept that radio stations constantly play Wham! and the Go Gos. I can even accept that, when former U.S. President Ronald Reagan died in June, his years in office were glamourised by the media as a golden age, rather than a time of Cold War insecurity.

But it’s difficult to accept that the dopey skin flick Revenge of the Nerds (1984) is being remade, or that the original is now considered a “classic”. Or that action director John Woo is making a live-action version of He-Man, based on Mattel’s Masters of the Universe toys and the appalling cartoon series. The eighties revival would be fine if there was some quality control.

Comic books are also looking back to those pre-internet days. “I'm proud to say we've taken Voltron in a direction the [television] cartoon never went,” says Marie Croall, writer of the Voltron comic-book. “We don't write for kids, we just write what the story dictates.”

This is kiddie nostalgia, but “grown up” like its original audience. When the last Doctor Who series was made in 1989, it was still a kids’ show. A revival, currently under production, will be darker and “sexier”. Even The A-Team movie has been conceived as a gritty adventure, unlike the silly TV show. The eighties is back – but apparently, it’s matured over the years.

Of course, the decade had its moments. The best bits – Live Aid, Glasnost, Minder– were worth living through. Those who are tiring of the eighties, however, will just have to wait for the equally inevitable nineties revival.