I can tell you what the eighties were like in a small town in Michigan. It would be quite a bit different if I lived in California or New York City or another country. It took a lot longer for fads and fashions and pop culture to circulate before the internet.
We had a hand-me-down TV with dials - one for VHF and one for UHF. We had to rubber band the dials to make them stay in place. We got PBS, ABC, NBC and CBS and a TV station out of Toledo that became Fox I think but only came in sometimes. Sometimes you could hear it but all you saw was fuzz. I was such a big Heathcliff fan back then (actually a Cleo fan but she was on Heathcliff's show) I would watch the fuzz waiting for the picture to come back in.
Fox was just getting started in the mid-eighties. It didn't have original prime time programming until 1987 and even then it was only one night, Sunday. My memory is that it mainly ran syndicated shows and seemed "cheap" compared to the "Big Three."
My dad and grandparents always watched 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. The newscasters still seemed to most people like really honest, dependable, serious, intelligent and unbiased people. I can still list the anchor's names from memory. Dan Rather, Tom Brookaw, and... okay my family must not have been big ABC viewers because I did have to look Peter Jennings up but the name was instantly familiar. The women in the field tended to not be granted the same standing as their male co-anchors back then but I can name a few of them too, Barbara Waters and Connie Chung spring to mind. Diane Sawyer stands out too.
My favorite Saturday morning cartoons were Alvin and the Chipmunks, Muppet Babies, Pound Puppies, Kidd Video, Galaxy High and My Little Ponies. If you got up really early (which my friend Elizabeth did whenever I stayed over) you could watch Woody Woodpecker and Popeye and other cartoons like that which I didn't like at all. After Saturday Morning Cartoons, usually WWF (now WWE) wrestling came on or some sport. It was such a letdown for me every week - so much fun and then so much boringness.
My cousins had cable and watched things like Pinwheel, You Can't Do That on Television and Double Dare on Nickelodeon. I wasn't very jealous. I didn't like those shows. When my dad got cable in 1988 or so, I did watch a lot of MTV though. Music videos were so cool!
Kids would get yelled at on the school bus for bringing boom boxes on with them. I remember them playing Living on a Prayer and You Give Love a Bad Name. I really wanted a radio/cassette player of my own but I didn't get one until I was in fifth grade or thereabouts so I didn't even know Sting was a person rather than a band when people mentioned him at school! I did know The Bangles (I remember roller skating to Walk Like an Egyptian at the roller rink) and Michael Jackson (my ballet teacher had us practice jetés to his Thriller album on the record player and one of the girls in school had a Michael Jackson doll when we played Barbies) and Madonna (everyone was talking about how she didn't shave her armpits) and Whitney Houston (I remember listening to How Will I Know at a Girls Scouts YMCA lock-in).
I sent away for a "portable tape player" by saving up UPC symbols from Kotex products. Receiving that peach box of Kotex samples with the inspiring quotes and the cool scribble design seemed so amazing to me! How did they know that I was a teen (or close enough)? It came with a peach plastic carrying pouch as well as a little catalog of free stuff you could send away for. I cut out all the inspirational quotes and stuck them on my bedroom wall.
I was in the third grade when the Challenger disaster happened. The fourth graders had a TV in their room especially for the launch. I can still remember a fourth grade teacher, Ms Martin I believe her name was, come into our room frozen in shock and announcing that the Challenger blew up. I can't remember the rest of the day. We were all in shock. We had been reading about the mission for months in our Weekly Reader (a classroom publication). Christa McAuliffe being on board was such a huge deal! A teacher! She was going to send us lessons from
space!
On to happier topics. Along with Weekly Reader we got book order pamphlets fairly regularly in school like Troll and Scholastic. You could of course wait for the school book fair but I was desperate to get the next Little House book so we ordered one whenever we had the money to do so.
I was super jealous of Samantha Smith. She wrote a letter to Gorbachev about wanting peace and became super famous. (This is my child self speaking, looking her up she died in a plane crash in 1985 and she wrote to Yuri Andropov not Gorbachev who wasn't even in power back in 1982 - childhood memories are like that I guess, I remember a kid being famous but not much beyond that obviously).
My friends had posters of the two Coreys: Corey Haim and Corey Feldman on their bedroom walls from Tiger Beat, Teen Beat and Bop. Kirk Cameron was also huge, along with Johnny Depp and Michael J. Fox. Jonathan Brandis was beginning to gather steam. I never got any of those magazines but I did subscribe to Barbie magazine (I remember a tip about drinking a glass of water before Thanksgiving dinner so you wouldn't eat too much and a comic strip about Barbie's aerobic class done with dolls). My family also got Cricket magazine (which is a great magazine and still around) and I think Zoobooks for a while (and maybe Ranger Rick). Later I subscribed to YM myself like a big girl. I think I may have gotten Seventeen for a year as well. Sassy eventually became my magazine of choice though - it was so alternative!
I also subscribed to Especially For Girls. I don't think I got the books they sold, just the cards with information on everything from how to talk to boys to how to do a scalp massage for thicker, stronger hair and they all fit in my Teen Works binder. (I wish I kept some now as I can't remember how to do the scalp massage.)
On the topic of subscriptions, we had Sweet Pickles books which my dad hated. We had a few ValueTale books but I don't think we signed on for all of them. I think we got Doctor Seuss books from a subscription service too and maybe Disney too. My mom also sometimes got books from the Mystery Guild book club. My aunt and uncle also got us four whole sets of Encyclopædia Britannica. (They didn't have any kids of their own.) We had the Britannica Discovery Library, the Young Children's Encyclopaedia, the Britannica Junior Encyclopædia and then the actual Encyclopædia Britannica. They looked very impressive on our bookshelves. I do actually remember reading them from time to time too.
Speaking of things sold door to door, my mom bought a Rainbow Water Vacuum Cleaner from a door to door salesman.
I remember in Michigan we were really hyped up about the Japanese. They were going to overthrow America's power (especially on the car manufacturing front). Japanese kids went to school on Saturday and had no summer vacation. They were really good at math and diligently studied all the time. They were so hard-working they even cleaned their own schools! We were falling behind and total slackers! We worried about the Soviet Union too but it seemed less "you need to
do something" to me back then. (Later when I taught in Japan I found out they get about as much vacation from school as we did, just spread out through the year and the "cleaning" they did was just about as thorough as you can imagine handing a 15 year old a broom and a dustpan would entail.)
Ads targeted at kids were so out of date. There was no way to easily track what kids were saying so three years after no one was saying it advertisements for Bubble Tape were slinging around "Radical" and "Awesome." I can't decide if Madison Avenue tracks trends on Twitter and keeps up now or if I'm too old to know how out of step they still are.
There was a lot of graffiti inspired art. Paint spatters and scribbles and splotches were popular. Glitter too and puff paint. The Bedazzler actually made things look cool. Unicorns on things like your Trapper Keeper and notebooks. And I'm not talking Lisa Frank just yet, the early eighties stuff looked like the art you saw airbrushed on vans.
Jelly shoes were in, rubber bracelets (no stories back then about secret sex meanings - at least not that I was aware of), plastic charms with bells you wore on plastic chains around your neck, frosted denim everything, scrunch socks (layered scrunch socks is two different colors), scrunchie hair bands, side ponytails, crimping (including pressing designs like hearts and stars in your hair), stirrup pants, bangs curled and teased and fluffed up as high as they could go, neons, pastels, mixed patterns like polka dots and stripes, parachute material, Guess jeans, pegging your jeans (folding them over and rolling them up), fishnets, Boy Toy sweatshirts a la Madonna, Pound Puppies and Cabbage Kids had their people beat each other up for Christmas gifts heydays (I still remember Jodie had over twenty of them - including Koosas!), and legwarmers of course some even to match your sweater designs.
I had a Holly Hobbie doll bunk bed and carried a metal Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox to first grade. When we went on our summer road trip to see my mom's family out in California my mom would tuck a sheet across the back seat so we couldn't lose Legos down the seat crack. She would keep us busy with comics (Ewoks, Archie and Muppet Babies), coloring/activity books and car games like bingo. She bought stuff all year long and would tuck them away and give new things to us as we drove along to keep up the surprises. We drove out in my grandma's Lincoln Town Car which was like a limousine! The back seat was huge and it had velour seats (you didn't stick to them like you did to vinyl) and power windows! And a tape deck! We could listen to The Best of Peter, Paul and Mary: Ten Years Together, and Sesame Street's 10th Anniversary Album and collections of folk songs for kids. Of course it stunk like cigarettes because there were ash trays in the armrests and my grandma smoked but despite that it was a dream car. (Yes, we did wear seat belts, lap belts in the back seat, I would scream if anyone tried to back out of the driveway before I got my seat belt on, I was a cautious kid).
Oh, also anime was unknown. I think the first time anime entered into the American consciousness was when Pokemon was dubbed, which was the 90s I think?
True, although Sailor Moon was the first time I knew something was anime and that was a few years before Pokemon (1995 to Pokemon's 1998) but I was in college and able to look stuff up on the brand new internet so I was in the know like that!
Actually Nickelodeon had some anime shows back in the day, we just didn't know it. Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, Maya the Bee and Noozles were all anime shows. (Or Japanimation if we really want to go totally 80s!)
Okay, that is way more than enough rambling from me.
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I can't believe everything you managed to find and purchase for that budget! You know I love Japan and I'm sure you'll have an amazing time there but seriously, stock up on the goodies before you go! 