interesting thing about Back to the Future movie

[Guest]

I think you are being blinded by the superficial similarities. Once you actually try to do something on your own the whole experience is going to be deeply qualitatively different.

 

Texting is one example. It's not texting vs cell phones which aren't common. It's the difference between texting/cell phone/email vs a single phone mounted on the wall in the kitchen and long distance being so expensive it never gets used and you try to keep up with friends from camp by sending letters.

 

Forget itunes or buying music online... Best Buy doesn't exist. Walmart and Target haven't made it to your town. You could find a small top forty selection at Zayre or Roses or K-mart or shop at the small store at the mall... and buy the latest music on cassette.

 

Class research... forget google... head to the library and use the card catalog. The resources you really want are almost always unavailable. Fine maybe I'll just but books... Amazon's far in the future. B&N and Borders don't exist. You're shopping at WaldenBooks at the mall and ordering stuff site unseen.

 

Grocery store have much smaller selections... perhaps more local stuff but things like raspberries, avocados, or non iceberg lettuce are rare luxuries. Starbucks has 6 stores in Seattle. Ethnic food is rare.

 

In '85 noone in my extended family or anyone we knew had ever flown on a commercial flight.

 

I think a modern teen would be shocked at how few choices were available and how expensive everything was. Mass culture is pretty homogenized and teen culture even moreso... but the difference today is that there is a huge amount of choice where in '85 it was more the default option or nothing.

OMG... I live in 1985...

[Shred Betty]

Did not read all posts LMaO I'm procrastinating planning school as well but not enough to read all that!!

 

IMO this has WAY more to do with cultural / fashion (not clothes) CYCLES and that "retro" happens to be very in vogue right now!

 

For example you mentioned Star Wars. Well we happened to have all the new star wars movies made recently getting the kiddos all into it, so the generational cycle of the topic being "in" makes sense...

[DawnM]

Another example would be food---my husband and I often reflect upon the fact that we were both raised on salty, canned veggies and that there was not nearly the access to fresh foods or variety that we have now.  We were both born early 70s and lived in well-populated suburban, middle class areas.  Going to a farmer's market would have required travel and happened rarely.  Fresh produce from the supermarket would have been mactintosh or red delicious apples, bananas, iceberg lettuce, etc. We are less well off then our parents, and yet our kids eat a wide variety of fresh fruits and veggies regularly. They have never tasted canned peas.

 

 I didn't know that.

 

I didn't grow up in the US, but moved here for college.  

 

We had vegetable ladies who sat outside our dorms at school or came to my parent's door.  Fresh, organic, just picked that morning, produce.  

[MEmama]

I didn't know that.

 

I didn't grow up in the US, but moved here for college.

 

We had vegetable ladies who sat outside our dorms at school or came to my parent's door. Fresh, organic, just picked that morning, produce.

Yeah, I think this example is more personal than representative of the decade. Like many of the examples here, it certainly wasn't true in my upbringing. Edited August 20, 2016 by MEmama

[HomeschoolingHearts&Minds]

I've never tasted canned peas and I was in high school in 1985. Frozen peas, yes.  My mom didn't feed us food like that when I was growing up. That is what she grew up on and she didn't like it.

 

 

 

Point taken---I graduated in '89 and we had frozen peas also.  My point was that today's supermarkets are very different from supermarkets in '85 and that this affects us culturally.  It's not about the peas. ;)

 

Obviously what people eat is greatly affected by location, access, family culture, etc.  My mom has lived in the same house since I was 2.  In the past 30 years, not only has the house itself changed a lot, but the area around it is in some ways unrecognizable.  

[creekland]

In '85 noone in my extended family or anyone we knew had ever flown on a commercial flight.

 

Wow!  I graduated in '85 and many of my classmates had flown more than once.  Trips to Disney were as common then as they are now.  Some also went to other countries - very similar to now.  Not everyone flew (similar to now), but I can't say I see any differences at all in percentages.

 

I know I was on my first flight well before I knew it.  I was an infant.  I flew more as a child than my kids have actually.  Our family has chosen to do more road trips than I did as a kid, but my parents were teachers so our travel was limited to vacations and summers.  Hubby is self-employed and can work from anywhere (for a period of time anyway), so our schedule is far more free.  He likes to wear a hat embroidered with MWRJ (Men Without Real Jobs).   :lol:

 

I guess I see less differences than other people.   My Dad was a Computer Analyst.   Our first home computer was the Mac+ when it first came out.   It had a hard drive which was external and the size of a Dictionary.   It had internet, you put the phone headset on the modem and if you sneezed the connection would be lost.  The charge was by the minute.  But, I could search journal articles.  I was born in '70, and I've never touched a typewriter, or a dial phone.  

 

We had our first home computer in '83, but that's because my dad worked for IBM for that year and worked with trial projects putting computers in schools.  We first had access to the internet in '84 - back when you quickly went from page to page putting it on your computer, then disconnected (to save money) and went back to read those pages offline.  One paid by the minute.  There wasn't a whole lot available, but it seemed like a lot at the time.

 

Another example would be food---my husband and I often reflect upon the fact that we were both raised on salty, canned veggies and that there was not nearly the access to fresh foods or variety that we have now.  We were both born early 70s and lived in well-populated suburban, middle class areas.  Going to a farmer's market would have required travel and happened rarely.  Fresh produce from the supermarket would have been mactintosh or red delicious apples, bananas, iceberg lettuce, etc. We are less well off then our parents, and yet our kids eat a wide variety of fresh fruits and veggies regularly. They have never tasted canned peas.

 

This is regional too.  We ate from our garden and froze the extra - just as my parents did in their youth (though they did more canning than freezing).  We do the same now.  Even if we hadn't had gardens in our youth, vegetable stands were pretty much everywhere as others would make extra cash by selling their extras.  I see the same driving around now - and I don't live in the same area I grew up in.  We rarely bought veggies unless we couldn't grow them or buy them from others who grew them.  We'd run out sometime in the winter, so spring was the season of store bought veggies.  It still is.

 

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What I find fascinating are my parent's stories of their life in college.  It's incredibly different than what I experienced or what my kids experience now.  My experience is very similar to my kids'.  My parents had dress codes and hazing and strict segregated living (by gender), etc.  There wasn't much diversity of other sorts either.  Parties were still around, but official "college" life was very different.

[Another Lynn]

OMG... I live in 1985...

 

:laugh:       :svengo:       :grouphug:

[Ellie]

I loved BTTF, we usually sit down every few years and watch all of them, then get into a big argument about time travel, lol.

 

"Every few years"? Heck, I watch the whole trilogy at least *once a year*.  In fact, I just finished about a week ago. :D

 

The second one is my least favorite. :p

[elegantlion]

I graduated from high school in 1985. There are some things that have not changed as dramatically. I remember our prom, one girl wore a short dress, everyone else was in those long taffeta dresses. Technology has changed, but not in the way the movies predicted. We're still driving on rubber tires on concrete/asphalt highways, but station wagons are way out of style. Minivans were just getting popular in our area. 

 

I remember our school offering the FIRST computer class, which I did not take because I had no interest in working with computers (pauses to laugh really loud). 

 

Teens were having sex in our area, lots of it, really. The country felt way bigger so what was going on with AIDS seemed very divorced from my midwest suburban lifestyle. 

 

We got to cruise malls (ah, the memories). I remember lamenting when malls closed that what were kids going to do now. Going to the malls before they closed was one cheap way to hang out,  cruising around the parking lots when they closed was another. 

 

I think ds could do 1985 better than I could have done 1955. 

 

As far as language, have you seen the unedited Goonies? I had forgotten how much cursing was in that movie. I've noticed that in other 80s movies, can't remember which ones. 

 

I lived near a large airport, so lots of airline employees lived in the area. I didn't fly until high school, yet there were lots of kids going places all the time. I so wanted my dad to work for an airline. 

 

The weird show to watch is Star Trek and realize the tablet technology didn't really exist even with Voyager and DS9 were on the air originally. We were still dealing with 15" CRT monitors that took up the entire table. 

[ktgrok]

Goodness, I swore like a sailor in the late 1980s, and I was in middle school! My son swears much less than I did. (I hear him talking to his friends, not that he would swear in front of me on purpose, nor did I in from of my parents.)  Sex was all around....Madonna, remember? 

 

I think things like needing to share a phone, long distance being expensive, no internet, being able to wander the neighborhood without adults, etc would be the bigger things. 

 

(oh, and there was scary metal music back then too, for sure)

[redsquirrel]

Point taken---I graduated in '89 and we had frozen peas also.  My point was that today's supermarkets are very different from supermarkets in '85 and that this affects us culturally.  It's not about the peas. ;)

 

Obviously what people eat is greatly affected by location, access, family culture, etc.  My mom has lived in the same house since I was 2.  In the past 30 years, not only has the house itself changed a lot, but the area around it is in some ways unrecognizable.  

 

I totally agree it's not about the peas, lol.  But the 1970s is when eating started to change. My mom wasn't a hippie, for sure, but the health food movement did make itself known in our house. I didn't grow up drinking soda or kool aid or eating white bread, for example. She belonged to the food co-op.  

Around 1985 is right when supermarkets started becoming much more modern.  It was about ...1986 that my tiny one horse town got a Grand Union super store.  The chain has since gone out of business, but that was the first time I saw what is clearly the 'new' suburban grocery store. It had an olive bar, lots of 'foreign' food, a 'health food' section etc.  So I have to imagine that if we got that in 1986 or it could have been 1987, but no later, then they were becoming fairly common. It wasn't exactly a cutting edge type town.

 

We also lived for a time in Rochester for a time, I have very little memory of it, and that is the hometown of Wegmans. My mom said that even when I was very little their stores were huge and offered tremendous variety. She says you used to be able to buy car tires there, lol.  

 

And again, for everyone offering difference between 2016 and 1985, I don't say they don't exist. I think that my kids would have an easier time fitting in to the world of 1985 than I would have had fitting into 1955. I think the time period between 1955-1985 produced much, much more cultural change than the years between 1985-2016.  IOW, if you made the same movie now, about a kid going back 30 years into the past, the 'fish out of water' aspect of the story gets weaker.  I'm not saying there aren't jokes to be made, not at all.  Lots of gags about big hair and acid washed jeans...but my kids wear jeans. An no one would think twice about purple underwear. It would seem more familiar, more knowable than the world of 1955 would seem to me at the same age.

 

[HomeschoolingHearts&Minds]

Goodness, I swore like a sailor in the late 1980s, and I was in middle school! My son swears much less than I did. (I hear him talking to his friends, not that he would swear in front of me on purpose, nor did I in from of my parents.)  Sex was all around....Madonna, remember? 

 

I think things like needing to share a phone, long distance being expensive, no internet, being able to wander the neighborhood without adults, etc would be the bigger things. 

 

(oh, and there was scary metal music back then too, for sure)

:iagree: I cleaned up my language a whole lot when I had kids.

 

The 80s were known for all kinds of skanky music videos, glam rock, metal, etc.  I would say that popular music really hasn't changed much at all---in fact, there are lot of covers being done of 80s songs, aren't there?