I think as someone who is an ancient dessicated husk and was alive in the 80s, I should probably remind folks that the 80s didn't look like the set of Family Ties.
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Do people not recall the name ingrained smell of cigarettes, leaded Petrol and snow drifts of canned drink ring pulls?
aug 25, 2025, 10:04 pm • 1 0 • view
I didn't see a family sitcom that even came close to reflecting my childhood until TITUS...
aug 25, 2025, 7:57 pm • 0 0 • view
It looked more like the set in married with children
aug 25, 2025, 7:54 pm • 1 0 • view
It looks like Napoleon dynamite at best
aug 25, 2025, 7:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Unironically Stranger Things has a lot to answer for in this regard
aug 25, 2025, 8:23 pm • 1 0 • view
aug 25, 2025, 10:41 pm • 53 1 • view
I feel like there was a government mandate that all new builds install that same faux-wood panelling
aug 25, 2025, 8:07 pm • 3 0 • view
A lot of it was left over from the 60s and 70s. Ppl weren't about to throw out "perfectly good" fake wood paneling just because the calendar changed. I'm seeing same misconceptions with "Y2K aesthetic" the aughts were mostly kitschy faux-"country" clutter. Not silver plastic, goggles & frosted tips.
aug 25, 2025, 10:57 pm • 1 0 • view
The wood paneling was like a house from another era that hadn't been remodeled. So you'd end up living in something with wood paneling and like orange shag carpet from the 70s. In SoCal all the houses were just stucco ranch or two story style houses with white paint and brown carpet.
aug 25, 2025, 8:15 pm • 3 0 • view
Yep, the reality is that you likely lived in a house that belonged in a different era. As someone who grew up in SoCal, I'm very familiar with this.
aug 25, 2025, 8:28 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah and just pointing out that the interiors were really basic. Like if you want the aesthetics then look at the houses in movies of the era where they weren't trying to do an 80s retro aesthetic. The house in Poltergeist or E.T. actually look authentic because they are.
aug 25, 2025, 8:36 pm • 0 0 • view
Sorry meant to say that all the houses built in the actual 80s.
aug 25, 2025, 8:16 pm • 1 0 • view
The actual 80s pictures are way too bright. Most people used incandescent lighting, and very few used 100 W bulbs. I remember feeling like I was blind in most of my friends homes: my dad had rigged our house with fluorescent fixtures everywhere he could fit them, and 100 W bulbs everywhere else.
aug 25, 2025, 8:56 pm • 0 0 • view
The brown also comes from the revolting amount of indoor smoking.
aug 25, 2025, 8:31 pm • 22 0 • view
Yeah. I'm p sure my grandmother begrudged not being able to smoke when she was asleep, which was about the only time she didn't smoke. No coincidence almost everything in her house was brown. The walls were white... originally. There were nicotine stains around the picture frames if you moved them.
aug 25, 2025, 11:48 pm • 9 0 • view
This this this this. The 80's was a LOT more brown and everything smelled like damp cigarettes. Literally me in 1983:
aug 25, 2025, 10:18 pm • 3 0 • view
and yes, you're seeing shine on the couch: it's ziplocked.
aug 25, 2025, 10:20 pm • 2 0 • view
I can smell the wood in those images
aug 25, 2025, 9:50 pm • 0 0 • view
Been rewatching stranger things and it’s honestly pretty good about staying accurate to the right side image (except for the mall in season 3, but malls did start looking like that in the later parts of the decade…)
aug 25, 2025, 8:35 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah I remember hearing that Winona Ryder was actually calling them out on inaccuracies when they happened. Like "No that song hadn't come out yet. This didn't exist why are you using it?" kind of stuff which, bravo to her if true.
aug 26, 2025, 4:42 am • 1 0 • view
I remember getting kinda annoyed that the arcade games in season 2 had obviously flat panel screens, but can suspend disbelief… besides it’s really difficult to film crt displays.
aug 26, 2025, 2:11 pm • 1 0 • view
Lots of houses were brown from smoking. Optimus Prime DIED. We watched Christa McAuliffe EXPLODE on live TV. Us 80s kids may have survived that, but it was not "cool" or "OK" in a way that anyone should want to go back.
aug 25, 2025, 8:24 pm • 0 0 • view
I assure you, people do not have the ability to make that distinction. So many people thought New Zealand literally looked like Lord of the Rings, and were aghast when there were gas stations and brown people there.
aug 25, 2025, 7:53 pm • 11 0 • view
TBF, there are lots of bits of NZ that look like LOTR Like the view from my top garden of Mordor
aug 26, 2025, 5:18 am • 0 0 • view
There are a lot of short people with hairy feet but
aug 25, 2025, 9:43 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah! Not a single scratchy cardigan to be seen.
aug 25, 2025, 8:09 pm • 2 0 • view
And the 80s outside of America didn’t look like this even more We were transitioning from punk to new wave, from LPs to Walkmans and CDs were just around the corner Sports was getting boycotted, nukes less worrisome Mostly the 80s was weed, Japanese bikes and screwing anything that moved, for me
aug 26, 2025, 5:13 am • 1 0 • view
Where's all the brown. The 80s were the brownest decade since the Middle Ages
aug 25, 2025, 7:54 pm • 0 0 • view
from what i can gather it was mostly cigarettes, tv preachers and the police kicking people in the head
aug 25, 2025, 7:54 pm • 4 0 • view
My God it stank of cigarettes Our school buses, where i grew up in Scotland, functioned as normal coach style buses, the rest of the day and the smell of stale cigarettes would rise out of the seats. Each seat had an ashtray in the back for the person behind.
aug 25, 2025, 8:02 pm • 2 0 • view
And beer. Those coaches stank of cigs and beer. Half the time they didn't even bother cleaning out the ashtrays before it was sent off to take us to the swimming baths or whatever.
aug 25, 2025, 8:12 pm • 0 0 • view
The brown colour to everything that was either hiding the cigarette smoke stains, or /was/ cigarette smoke stains.
aug 25, 2025, 9:29 pm • 1 0 • view
What's really funny about this is that people who actually make media about retro media/hardware with an 80s/early 90s aesthetic tend to have and use Long 70s rooms or sets, *not* New Wave.
aug 26, 2025, 1:59 am • 0 0 • view
So many undiagnosed mental health conditions... I mean like... schools literally full of them. Today you get your ADHD/AuDHD/etc. diagnosis and off you go... back in the 80's... just lazy and misbehaving.
aug 25, 2025, 8:15 pm • 1 0 • view
I was born in 1980 and can confirm. It looked a lot like now but with more pastels and huge shoulder pads and massively-teased permed hair and women wearing those weird translucent plastic "jelly" shoes.
aug 25, 2025, 7:59 pm • 3 0 • view
Porn 'staches were making their way out. Don Johnson was wearing a pink t-shirt under a white sports coat. If you were a kid you probably still woke up early on Saturday mornings for cartoons even if you couldn't wake up even earlier for school during the week.
aug 25, 2025, 8:01 pm • 0 0 • view
This is a coca cola commercial look
aug 25, 2025, 7:57 pm • 1 0 • view