"}\u00a0I think the reason we see so much 80\u2032s nostalgia is just because new ideas were valued so much more. New things feel special and the pop culture landscape of the 80\u2032s was absolutely packed with ideas so new it still feels hard for me to fully appreciate, and I was there!
Imagine Super Mario being so new people were calling it \u201cINSANE!\u201d and joking that it was \u201cON DRUGS\u201d because a plumber ran around jumping on turtles.
Imagine people being wowed by the idea of both supernatural elements and sci-fi technology in the same franchise: that\u2019s what Ghostbusters normalized and that too was so unusual at one time it was \u201ccrazy!!!\u201d to reviewers.
Toys that transform between robots and cars??? UNBELIEVABLE. Kids and adults couldn\u2019t believe that a toy could possibly have moving parts that intricate and not cost an entire paycheck.Imagine a world where even fucking *Garfield* is new. Garfield! Not just new but seen as almost EDGY for his sarcastic personality! People weren\u2019t used to a cartoon cat smugly insulting his owner! That\u2019s why he made a million zillion dollars, because people thought that was the freshest most hilarious shit in Sunday strips at one time!
You know why there\u2019s a billion takes on a zombie apocalypse now? Because, while the concept goes back to the 60\u2032s, the broader public had never considered the doomsday horror potential of a mass zombie outbreak scenario or the \u201csurvival fantasy\u201d aspects until 1978\u2032s \u201cDawn of the Dead.\u201d
Gremlins was the first horror-comedy about nasty little creatures running amok. Films like\u00a0\u201cChild\u2019s Play\u201d and\u00a0\u201cNightmare on Elm Street\u201d were some of the first mainstream cases of a wisecracking horror villain. E.T. was the first successful fantasy science fiction drama about child protagonists befriending a benevolent paranormal entity. 1979\u2032s \u201cAlien\u201d on the other hand successfully wrung tense psychological horror from the concept of a \u201cspace monster\u201d just when most audiences were dismissing the idea as corny and juvenile. The \u201cTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,\u201d though intended as parody characters, were the first mainstream case of anthropomorphic animals marketed as \u201ccool\u201d action heroes instead of completely jokey characters like \u201cMighty Mouse.\u201d Nobody had ever seen a dark puppet fantasy like Labyrinth before. Nobody had ever seen anything like the Cenobites before. Little Shop of Horrors was adapted to a Broadway musical in 1982 and was such a hit they got the Rick Moranis film into theaters only four years later.
The 80\u2032s feel like the last decade with such a ratio of new, novel concepts and bold decisions that actually took off to just endless remakes, sequels and homages. Shit came out in the 80\u2032s that invented whole subgenres, character archetypes and everyday household concepts everybody just takes as a given now. This sort of slowed down over the course of the 90\u2032s, and then Pokemon was possibly one of the last things that was like mind-blowingly world-changingly \u201cdifferent\u201d in the eyes of the most audiences. Now I have a hard time thinking of any entertainment media from over the last 22 years that made half that big a difference, and even less over the last 10. :(