Why 80s Nostalgia Hits Harder Than Any Other Decade
Forty years later, the 80s refuse to take the hint. From MTV to Stranger Things, here’s why this decade became forever.
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Why 80s Nostalgia Still Hits So Hard for Gen X
From mixtapes to mall arcades to Saturday morning cartoons, 80s nostalgia keeps pulling Gen X back. Here’s why the decade still won’t let go.
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Birth of Hip Hop: How NYC Block Parties Built the 80s
From a Bronx rec room in 1973 to Run-DMC selling out arenas, here’s how hip hop crawled out of NYC block parties and took over the 80s — boomboxes, breakdancing, and all.
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The Night Hip Hop Was Born: What Really Happened in the Bronx
The history of hip hop begins on one specific night: August 11, 1973, in the recreation room of an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx. An 18-year-old Jamaican kid named Clive Campbell — who the neighborhood would soon know as DJ Kool Herc — hooked up two turntables, grabbed a microphone,…
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The Dead Hand System: The Soviet Doomsday Machine That Still Exists
Dead Hand system panic, Stanislav Petrov, WarGames, The Day After, and Red Dawn show how 80s nuclear fear seeped into everyday pop culture.
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Cap Guns: The 80s Toy Every Kid Fired in the Backyard
Remember the smell of cap gun smoke? Every 80s kid had a cap gun, a roll of caps, and a backyard full of imaginary battles. From roll caps to ring caps, neighborhood wars to the orange tip era.
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Star 67 Phone Secrets and Caller ID: How Technology Killed Prank Calls Forever
Before caller ID, every phone call was a mystery and prank calls were an art form. The story of *67, *69, and how a little LCD screen killed telephone anonymity forever.
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Drinking From the Garden Hose: The Taste of an 80s Childhood Summer
There’s a specific taste that exists only in the memory banks of people who grew up in the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s. It’s warm and rubbery with a metallic edge, followed immediately by a rush of cold water that was somehow the most refreshing drink you’d ever had. It came from a green garden…
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The Muppet Show: 9 Reasons Jim Henson’s Legacy Still Rules
The Muppet Show still holds up because Jim Henson built a chaotic, funny, brilliantly human variety show that played just as well for adults as kids.
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Harlem Globetrotters: From Saturday Morning Cartoons to Basketball Legends
Before Michael Jordan was soaring through the air, before Magic and Bird made the NBA must-see television, there was another basketball team that dominated the cultural landscape — and they did it with comedy, impossible trick shots, and a Saturday morning cartoon. The Harlem Globetrotters were sports entertainment before anyone used that term, and for…
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Calculator Watches & Transformer Watches: The 80s Wrist Game That Started It All
There was a time when the coolest thing you could strap to your wrist wasn’t a smartwatch that tracked your heart rate and sent passive-aggressive reminders to stand up. It was a calculator watch — a tiny, improbable computer on your arm that could do basic math and made you feel like a secret agent…
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ALF TV Show: The Alien Who Crash-Landed in Prime Time and Never Left
If you grew up in the late 1980s, there’s a decent chance a hairy, sarcastic alien named ALF took up permanent residence in your living room — and maybe a little corner of your heart. The ALF TV show, which premiered on NBC on September 22, 1986, was unlike anything that had ever aired in…
