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The 1980s (pronounced "nineteen-eighties", shortened to "the '80s" or "the Eighties") was a decade that began January 1, 1980, and ended December 31, 1989.
The decade saw a dominance of conservatism and free market economics, and a socioeconomic change due to advances in technology and a worldwide move away from planned economies and towards laissez-faire capitalism compared to the 1970s. As economic deconstruction increased in the developed world, multiple multinational corporations associated with the manufacturing industry relocated into Thailand, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Japan and West Germany saw large economic growth during this decade. The AIDS epidemic became recognized in the 1980s and has since killed an estimated 39 million people (). Global warming became well known to the scientific and political community in the 1980s.
The final decade of the Cold War opened with the US-Soviet confrontation continuing largely without any interruption. Superpower tensions escalated rapidly as President Reagan scrapped the policy of détente and adopted a new, much more aggressive stance on the Soviet Union. The world came perilously close to nuclear war for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but the second half of the decade saw a dramatic easing of superpower tensions and ultimately the total collapse of Soviet communism.
Developing countries across the world faced economic and social difficulties as they suffered from multiple debt crises in the 1980s, requiring many of these countries to apply for financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Ethiopia witnessed widespread famine in the mid-1980s during the corrupt rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam, resulting in the country having to depend on foreign aid to provide food to its population and worldwide efforts to address and raise money to help Ethiopians, such as the Live Aid concert in 1985.
By 1986, nationalism was making a comeback in the Eastern Bloc, and the desire for democracy in socialist states, combined with economic recession, resulted in Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, which reduced Communist Party power, legalized dissent and sanctioned limited forms of capitalism such as joint ventures with companies from capitalist countries. After tension for most of the decade, by 1988 relations between the communist and capitalist blocs had improved significantly and the Soviet Union was increasingly unwilling to defend its governments in satellite states.
The 1980s was an era of tremendous population growth around the world, surpassing the 1970s and 1990s, and arguably being the largest in human history. During the 1980s, the world population grew from 4.4 to 5.3 billion people. There were approximately 1.33 billion births and 480 million deaths. Population growth was particularly rapid in a number of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian countries during this decade, with rates of natural increase close to or exceeding 4% annually. The 1980s saw the advent of the ongoing practice of sex-selective abortion in China and India as ultrasound technology permitted parents to selectively abort baby girls.
The 1980s saw great advances in genetic and digital technology. After years of animal experimentation since 1985, the first genetic modification of 10 adult human beings took place in May 1989, a gene tagging experiment which led to the first true gene therapy implementation in September 1990. The first "designer babies", a pair of female twins, were created in a laboratory in late 1989 and born in July 1990 after being sex-selected via the controversial assisted reproductive technology procedure preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Gestational surrogacy was first performed in 1985 with the first birth in 1986, making it possible for a woman to become a biological mother without experiencing pregnancy for the first time in history.
The global internet took shape in academia by the second half of the 1980s, as well as many other computer networks of both academic and commercial use such as USENET, Fidonet, and the Bulletin Board System. By 1989, the Internet and the networks linked to it were a global system with extensive transoceanic satellite links and nodes in most developed countries. Based on earlier work, from 1980 onwards Tim Berners Lee formalized the concept of the World Wide Web by 1989. Television viewing became commonplace in the Third World, with the number of TV sets in China and India increasing by 15 and 10 times respectively.
Top Gun was released on May 17, 1986. Upon its release, the film received mixed reviews from film critics, but despite this, its visual effects and soundtrack were universally acclaimed. Four weeks after its release, the number of theaters showing it increased by 45 percent. Despite its initial mixed critical reaction, the film was a huge commercial hit, grossing $357 million globally against a production budget of $15 million. Top Gun was the highest-grossing domestic film of 1986. The film maintained its popularity over the years and earned an IMAX 3D re-release in 2013, while the retrospective critical reception became more positive. Additionally, the soundtrack to the film has since become one of the most popular movie soundtracks to date, reaching 9× Platinum certification. The film won both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for "Take My Breath Away" performed by Berlin. In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". A sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, in which Cruise and Kilmer reprised their roles, was released 36 years later on May 27, 2022, and surpassed the original film both critically and commercially. (Full article...)
The following are images from various 1980s-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1Stage view of the Live Aid concert at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium in the United States in 1985. The concert was a major global international effort by musicians and activists to sponsor action to send aid to the people of Ethiopia who were suffering from a major famine. (from Portal:1980s/General images)
Image 7The Grateful Dead in 1980. Left to right: Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh. Not pictured: Brent Mydland. (from Portal:1980s/General images)
Image 16The world map of military alliances in 1980: NATO & Western allies, Warsaw Pact & other Soviet allies, Non-aligned countries, China and Albania (communist countries, but not aligned with USSR), ××× Armed resistance (from Portal:1980s/General images)
After criticism that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) received, Spielberg chose to make a more lighthearted film for the next installment, as well as bringing back several elements from Raiders of the Lost Ark. During the five years between The Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade, he and executive producer Lucas reviewed several scripts before accepting Jeffrey Boam's. Filming locations included Spain, Italy, West Germany, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (Full article...)
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Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (Japanese: 王立宇宙軍~オネアミスの翼, Hepburn: Ōritsu Uchūgun: Oneamisu no Tsubasa) is a 1987 Japanese animatedscience fiction film written and directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga, co-produced by Hiroaki Inoue and Hiroyuki Sueyoshi, and planned by Toshio Okada and Shigeru Watanabe. Ryuichi Sakamoto, later to share the Academy Award for the soundtrack to The Last Emperor, served as music director. The film's story takes place on an alternate world where a disengaged young man, Shirotsugh, inspired by an idealistic woman named Riquinni, volunteers to become the first astronaut, a decision that draws them into both public and personal conflict. The film was the debut work of anime studio Gainax, whose later television and movie series Neon Genesis Evangelion would achieve international recognition, and was the first anime produced by toy and game manufacturer Bandai, eventually to become one of Japan's top anime video companies.
Yamaga and Okada had become known through making amateur fan-oriented short films, particularly the Daicon III and IV Opening Animations, but their pitch for Royal Space Force argued that growing the anime industry required a shift away from works that pleased fans on a surface level but reinforced their isolation, advocating instead for a different type of anime that attempted to engage with fans as human beings who shared in the alienation issues of a larger society. The making of Royal Space Force involved a collaborative year-long design process using many creators, including some from outside the anime industry, to construct an elaborately detailed alternate world described as neither utopian nor dystopian, but "an attempt to approve existence". Science fiction writer Ted Chiang, author of "Story of Your Life", the basis for the film Arrival, would later describe Royal Space Force as the single most impressive example of worldbuilding in books or film. (Full article...)
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The Care Bears Movie is a 1985 animatedmusicalfantasy film directed by Arna Selznick from a screenplay by Peter Sauder. It was the second feature film from the Canadian animation studio Nelvana after the 1983 film Rock & Rule, in addition to being one of the first films based directly on a toy line and the first based on Care Bears. It introduced the Care Bears characters and their companions, the Care Bear Cousins. The voice cast includes Mickey Rooney, Georgia Engel, Jackie Burroughs and Cree Summer. In the film, an orphanage owner (Mickey Rooney) tells a story about the Care Bears, who live in a cloud-filled land called Care-a-Lot. While traveling across Earth, the Bears help two lonely children named Kim and Jason, who lost their parents in a car accident, and also save Nicholas, a young magician's apprentice, from an evil spirit's influence. Deep within a place called the Forest of Feelings, Kim, Jason and their friends soon meet another group of creatures known as the Care Bear Cousins.
American Greetings, the owners of the Care Bears characters, began development of a feature film adaptation in 1981. Later on, the card company chose Nelvana to produce it and granted them rights to the characters, in addition to financing the film along with cereal manufacturer General Mills and television syndicator LBS Communications. Nelvana's founders were producers, with fellow employee Arna Selznick directing the film. Production lasted eight months, with a production budget of at least $2 million, and took place in Canada, Taiwan, and South Korea. Carole King and John Sebastian contributed several songs for the film. Though major American film studios passed on the project, newly established independent distributor The Samuel Goldwyn Company acquired the distribution rights to the film and soon spent a record $24 million promoting it. (Full article...)
Americana is a 1981 American drama film starring, produced, edited and directed by David Carradine. The screenplay and story, written by Richard Carr, was based on a portion of the 1947 novel, The Perfect Round, by Henry Morton Robinson. The novel's setting was originally post-World War II, but the screenplay involved the post-war experiences of a Vietnam War veteran, obsessed with restoring an abandoned carousel.
In 1981, the film won The People's Choice Award at the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.[disputed–discuss] Financing the film himself, Carradine shot most of the footage for the film, which was co-produced by Skip Sherwood, in 1973 with a band of 26 people, mostly his family and friends, over the course of 18 days. Problems with financing and distribution kept the film from being released until 1983. The film was well received by audiences, but met with primarily negative criticism. (Full article...)
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The Evil Dead is a 1981 American independentsupernatural horror film written and directed by Sam Raimi (in his feature directorial debut). The film stars Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker, and Theresa Tilly as five college students vacationing in an isolated cabin in the woods, where they find an audio tape that, when played, releases a legion of demons and spirits. Four members of the group suffer from demonic possession, forcing the fifth member, Ash Williams (Campbell), to survive an onslaught of increasingly gory mayhem.
Raimi, Campbell, producer Robert G. Tapert, and their friends produced the 1978 short filmWithin the Woods as a proof of concept to build the interest of potential investors, which secured US$90,000 to begin work on The Evil Dead. Principal photography took place on location in a remote cabin in Morristown, Tennessee, in a filming process that proved extremely uncomfortable for the cast and crew. The film's extensive prosthetic makeup and stop-motion effects were created by artist Tom Sullivan. The completed film had its world premiere at the Redford Theatre in Detroit on October 15, 1981, and attracted the interest of producer Irvin Shapiro, who helped screen the film at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Horror author Stephen King gave a rave review of the film, which resulted in New Line Cinema acquiring its distribution rights and giving it a wide theatrical release on April 15, 1983. (Full article...)
The story is a tale of redemption for paroled convict Jake and his blood brother Elwood, who set out on "a mission from God" to prevent the foreclosure of the Roman Catholic orphanage in which they were raised. To do so, they must reunite their R&B band and organize a performance to earn the $5,000 needed to pay the orphanage's property tax bill. Along the way, they are targeted by a homicidal "mystery woman", neo-Nazis, and a country and western band—all while being relentlessly pursued by the police. (Full article...)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released in Japan on 11 March 1984. The film received critical acclaim, with praise being directed at the story, themes, characters and animation. It is the second-highest-ranked Japanese anime in a survey published by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2007. Though it was made before Studio Ghibli was founded, it is often considered a Ghibli work, and is usually released as part of DVD and Blu-ray collections of Ghibli work. (Full article...)
Walt Disney Pictures purchased the film rights for the story in 1981. Price and Seaman wrote two drafts of the script before Disney brought in executive producer Steven Spielberg and his production company, Amblin Entertainment. Zemeckis was brought on to direct, and Canadian animator Richard Williams was hired to supervise the animation sequences. Production was moved from Los Angeles to Elstree Studios in England to accommodate Williams and his group of animators. While filming, the production budget rapidly expanded, and the shooting schedule ran longer than expected. (Full article...)
Set in rural Yorkshire during the summer of 1920, the film follows a destitute World War I veteran employed to carry out restoration work on a Medieval mural discovered in a rural church while coming to terms with the after-effects of the war. (Full article...)
Meena Panchu Arunachalam produced Guru Sishyan under the production company P. A. Art Productions. The screenplay was written by her husband Panchu Arunachalam. The cinematography was handled by T. S. Vinayagam, the editing was by R. Vittal and C. Lancy, and the art direction was by B. Chalam. The film is Gautami's debut role in Tamil cinema, and the first film in which Rajinikanth and Prabhu co-starred. Filming took place primarily in Mysore and Chennai, and was completed in 25 days. (Full article...)
Walt Disney planned to put the story in a proposed package film containing Andersen's stories, but scrapped the project. In 1985, while working on The Great Mouse Detective (1986), Clements and Musker decided to adapt the fairy tale and proposed it to Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, who initially declined due to its similarities to a proposed sequel to the 1984 film Splash, but ultimately approved of it. Ashman became involved and brought in Menken. With supervision from Katzenberg, they made a Broadway-style structure with musical numbers as the staff was working on Oliver & Company (1988). Katzenberg warned that the film would earn less since it appealed to female viewers, but he eventually became convinced that it would be Disney's first blockbuster hit. (Full article...)
Harold Becker and David Lean were originally to direct before Spielberg came on board, initially as a producer for Lean. Spielberg was attracted to directing the film because of a personal connection to Lean's films and World War II topics. He considers it to be his most profound work on "the loss of innocence". The film received positive reviews, with praise towards Bale's performance, the cinematography, the visuals, Williams's score and Spielberg's direction. However, the film was not initially a commercial success, earning only $22 million at the US box office, although it eventually more than recouped its budget through revenues in foreign markets, home video, and television. (Full article...)
Inseminoid (titled Horror Planet in the United States) is a 1981 British science fictionhorror film directed by Norman J. Warren and starring Judy Geeson, Robin Clarke and Stephanie Beacham, along with Victoria Tennant in one of her early film roles. The plot concerns a team of archaeologists and scientists who are excavating the ruins of an ancient civilisation on a distant planet. One of the women in the team (Geeson) is impregnated by an alien creature and taken over by a mysterious intelligence, driving her to murder her colleagues one by one and feed on them.
Inseminoid was written by Nick and Gloria Maley, a married couple who had been part of the special effects team on Warren's earlier film Satan's Slave. Filmed between May and June 1980 on a budget of £1million, half of which was supplied by the Shaw Brothers, it was shot mostly on location at Chislehurst Caves in Kent as well as on the island of Gozo in Malta, combined with a week's filming at Lee International Studios in London. Composer John Scott completed the film's electronic musical score over recording sessions that lasted many hours. (Full article...)
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