From time to time the issue of nostalgia is put back on the table. A business that moves millions, from more or less subtle exploitations like ‘Stranger Things’ or ‘It’ to spectacular sticker albums like the latest superhero movie. It is clear that, based on accumulating winks that do not leave Proustian madeleines without evoking, alluding to the childhood of thirty-somethings (and more) is the most lucrative creative option of the moment.
But… are the eighties worth returning to them over and over again? We all agree: ‘Back to the Future’ is impeccable, and the Nocilla a national treasure. And the childhood of each one is the best childhood in the world, which for that is theirs and no one else’s. But… are the eighties really the end of pop culture? We do not have the answer, among other things because ten years go a long way and judging them with a stroke of the pen is foolish. But in the face of so much euphoria, we come to Gargamel, with the low and the dodgy memory.
What we can do, to compensate for so much fever for the eighties without a critical sense, is to remember 8 filth from the cinema and television of the time, those that you will not see even in the deleted scenes of the nostalgic ‘Ready Player One’ by Steven Spielberg. From freaks and fads to blockbuster movies and one-day flowers that your memory has mercifully allowed to fade into the mists of the past.. Welcome to the Decade of Horrors, aerobics, ‘Lady in Red’ and ‘Flashdance’.
The sitcoms
The decade opened and closed with two masterpieces: one of the sitcoms that shaped the genre as we know it today, ‘Cheers’ (since 1982) and the one that annihilated it forever, ‘Seinfeld’ (since 1989). But in between, things got conventional, conservative, repetitive and aesthetically intolerable, with hits like ‘The Cosby Hour’, ‘Full Parents’, ‘Webster’, ‘Punky Brewster’, ‘Arnold’ or ‘Problems Grow’. Or in more terms hard corehorrors of the underworld like ‘A robot at home’.
Of course, there was still a lot to suffer, despite the devastating cleaning work of ‘Seinfeld’, although the eighties offered us wonders like ‘The Golden Girls’ or ‘Roseanne’. ‘Household Things’ and ‘Saved by the Bell‘ started in 1989, without going any further. No, if the nineties are not saved either.
The law looked
In 1982, Pilar Miró was appointed General Director of Cinematography and with the law that she approved shortly after defined a type of cinema and shaped an industry that marked Spanish cinema in the eighties and almost since then. It is true, it renewed a series of obsolete structures of the Franco regime (abolition of political censorship, creation of the ICAA, establishment of X rooms…) but it also destroyed genre cinema, the highest grossing and which kept the industry afloat. .
She gave a death blow to the career of directors like Jesús Franco, who always had harsh words for her. His law established subsidies of up to 50% of the budget of the films to finance productions charged to a Protection Fund. For this purpose, films by new filmmakers and experimental ones were valued, that is, outside commercial cinema, popular comedy, sexy horror and other styles considered not very artistic.
Money was given to films that had not yet started shooting, which led producers to ignore the impact on the box office, to stop thinking about the public and, in the medium term, to inflate salaries and favor partisanship and the cronyism. The accumulation of grants allowed financing without resorting to private capital, which inflated budgets in a toxic way, giving rise to a model that took decades to emerge.
Saturday morning cartoons
The saturday morning cartoon is the term with which American-produced cartoons were known (although Korean and Japanese studios were often used to speed up production to reduce costs) that They spread like a plague through all the televisions in that country thanks to the syndication. Cable television and the profitability of sports broadcasting in the same time slot would kill them well into the 1990s, but not before they left an indelible mark on the pop culture of the decade, often adapting toy or movie-born franchises. of success.
You know many of these series, because they would soon be seen all over the world: from ‘The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ to ‘The Real Ghostbusters’ (or those of Filmation with the monkey with a tie), going through ‘GI Joe’ or the ‘Masters of the Universe’. But if those examples already seem weak, repetitive and listless, wait until you plunge into the abysses of Saturdays in the morning: the disgusting ‘Rambo: The Force of Freedom’, the intolerable ‘Rubik, the Magic Cube’, the spectacularly infected ‘Rock ‘n Wrestling’, starring Hulk Hogan, or the devastating ‘Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos’. Not even the most stubborn fanaticism for the EGB fixes this.
The burrs of Spielberg’s success
Of course Spielberg is the greatest. Of course he bequeathed to us, via his own films or producing them through Amblin, some of the most wonderful entertainment of the decade. But the explosive success of many of them, in many cases changing the entertainment industry forever, had their unintended effects. To begin with, Spielberg himself initialed some inexcusable horrors. That abyss that is ‘Hook’ is from 1991, but he was already taking a run in ‘Always’, the worst film of all his filmography, from 1989.
But there is more, of course, because Amblin not only produced jewelry. Have you forgotten about the decrepit ‘My father’? From ‘Bigfoot and the Hendersons’? From ‘Our wonderful allies’ (seniors and aliens, how can that fail)? From ‘In Search of the Enchanted Valley’ and its fourteen sequels (count them, fourteen)?
And outside of Spielberg’s official aegis, what about all the plagiarisms that unleashed his successes? What’s more unfortunate, ‘My Friend Mac’, ‘Nukie’ or ET’s Brazilian porn movie? And the avalanche of sharks, orcas and bargain killer seals that ‘Jaws’ unleashed? Which of all the dandy copies of Indiana Jones is the most disgusting? And the ones who were trying to imitate Amblin’s tone and style, and that’s what our hair looked like? ‘Short circuit’? ‘The flight of the navigator’? Great regrettable moments of our lives!
the goonies
It is a Steven Spielberg production, but it deserves a separate comment, because not even Cyndi Lauper’s fabulous main theme manages to wash away the memory of one of the weakest films of all those that have been unfairly exalted by eighties nostalgia. Aesthetically unpleasant, shot with dignity but without nerve and with one of the flimsiest scripts in eighties adventure filmspales next to much more solid and less mythologized youth outrage movies like ‘The Secret of the Pyramid’ or ‘Explorers’.
It is the perfect example of all the evil that the EGB Generation has done by exalting hits from the eighties at will. And yes, of course Sloth is great. Sloth would be fine even in a Kirk Cameron movie. But no, he does not save that ridiculous final part of slides, dips and caves that gave legitimacy to a horrible equation: adventure equals screaming people.
The Aurons
After a glorious start to a decade, with deservedly legendary programs such as ‘The Crystal Ball’, ‘The Imaginary Planet’ or, likewise, the Spanish version of ‘Sesame Street’, and after internationally successful animated series such as ‘Dartacán’ , ‘Fútbol en acción’, ‘Around the World with Willy Fog’ or the co-production ‘Ruy el pequeño Cid’, the quality of Spanish children’s productions has plummeted. In 1989, ‘Los Fruittis’ would start a It was an ignonymous era, which was preceded by this gruesome puppet production for TVE that is still hard to forget today.
Although many of his characters, Gallofa and Poti-Poti in the lead, became part of the popular heritage, this aesthetic and technical sindio was burned into the minds of a large number of traumatized children, who stopped believing in the noon of the weekend as a safe zone for leisure. A torture that lasted for 26 episodes and an equally intolerable film titled, depending on who you ask, ‘The tribe of the Aurons’ or ‘The end of innocence’.
Moral Panic
All that is so funny about Rambo and Chuck Norris and the Cannon movies, that is, they are practically a hymn to US imperialism and conservative and nunish morality, although it gives rise to frankly funny films like ‘USA Invasion’ or ‘Death Wish’, it also had its dark side. To give a couple of examples among many (which affected many fields of pop culture, not just cinema… do you remember the Explicit Lyrics stickers on records?), let’s remember the Satanic Panic in the United States and the Video Nasties in the United Kingdom.
There were two waves of censorship camouflaged as moral safeguards that tried to ban and criminalize films and other fiction, especially horror, although not exclusively. The Satanic Panic, for example, saw signs of the Evil One everywhere, in an ultra-religious reaction from America’s most conservative factions that is somewhat comical today, but almost killed off something as patently harmless as ‘Dungeons’ role-playing games. & Dragons’. This panic also put horror movies and heavy music under suspicion.
As for the Video Nastieswas a list of 39 films that were withdrawn from VHS distribution in the UK in 1982, ranging in content from purely exploitative, like ‘The Drill Killer’ to such popular (and innocuous) things as ‘Possession from Hell’ . The Satanic Panic and the phenomenon of the Video Nasties they are pure eightiesAlthough not much is remembered about these dark moments for freedoms because, of course, Spielberg could afford to stretch the limits of ratings by age.
outdated technologies
All of us who lived through the 80s miss VHS, of course we do. How not to: squeaky, explosive, bulky covers. A resistant format, ideal for collecting and exchanging. But being nostalgic for that is foolish, and we are not just referring to the quality of the films themselves.. Anyone who has seen a film by Lucio Fulci restored in 4K knows that interference from tracking they have their charm, but there is no color.
Anyway, the horrible-horrible format of the eighties is not VHS or laserdisc, but CD, and now that the first ones are starting to break down we know why. VHS would be a feral format, but at least they weren’t born as a jackpot for wealthy fans. Coming back, let’s go back to the slate discs. We hate nostalgia, but if you have to be fundamentalist…
In Espinof | Streaming is present, but it seems to me that it still has a lot to learn from the video store