People Celebrating The 80s

Time to get back to the future! In this special edition from the editors of People, we celebrate the year Marty McFly and Doc Brown turned a DeLorean into a time machine. 1985 was the year of The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire, of Princess Diana's iconic twirl with John Travolta at the White House, and of Live Aid and Farm Aid when the music world came together to do good. On TV we were watching The Golden Girls, Moonlighting (Hello, Bruce Willis!), Dynasty, and Dallas. We look back at Star Tracks and Heart Monitor from 1985 to see what the most memorable celebrities of the day were up to, and who was falling in or out of love, as well as the biggest news of the year. This 96-page photo-filled issue also includes People's Ultimate Pop Culture Quiz: How well do you remember 1985?

From greed to glasnost, the 80s were the decade when brash was beautiful and the only sin was not to win. Madonna declared there was nothing wrong with being a Material Girl and Cindy Lauper spoke for all girls who just wanted to have fun. Did we say, Girls? Yes, the word took on new self-empowering meanings. At the same time Princess Diana went from shy schoolteacher to worlds most famous woman to thoroughly modern mom as her marriage slid from fairy tale to farce. In the lavishly illustrated keepsake, youll relive all the highs and woes of a decade that mad Bill Cosby the king of prime-time, the Berlin Wall a pile of rubble, cable TV and the fax machine ubiquitous and two otherworldly characters world famous? Michael Jackson, he of the white glove, and ET, phoning home across the cosmos.

The 80's: If we remember correctly, they happened somewhere between disco and grunge, after platform shoes but before Friends. President Ronald Reagan sat in the Oval Office; Sixteen Candles and Raiders of the Lost Ark played at the multiplex; and, on the small screen, the invention of MTV meant that image, more than ever, could make a star. This was good news for Madonna, Duran Duran and Boy George and great news for A Flock of Seagulls. PEOPLE Celebrate the 80's takes you on a trip down memory lane with the stars, fads and moments you'll never forget.

A humorous and nostalgic trip through a typical 80s childhood. Told through the eyes of a normal (ish) British kid from the Birmingham suburbs. A time when urban exploration on your bike was a day long adventure, a Wimpy birthday party the equivalent of a party on a celebrity yacht, Diamond White was a teenage rite of passage and people still wrote love letters and dreamed of winning the pools. Where no one did anything online and the only phones at home were landlines that probably had a lock on. 80s Kid tells the story of a different world, even though it wasn't that long ago.

Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past. In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama). Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.

Travel back to the future with dozens of 1980s favorites Before the internet, in the days of Rubik's Cubes, the Iran-Contra scandal, and Wall Street's booms and busts, movies captured the spirit of our times. Now you can revisit those great films with LIFE Movies of the 1980s, packed with glowing photos and behind-the-scenes stories from the pages of Life magazine.

Offers portraits and brief profiles of critics, actors, writers, dancers, business people, artists, photographers, composers, film directors, singers, lawyers, entertainers, and scientists now in their eighties.

(Keyboard Presents). No single decade revitalized the keyboard as a focal point as much as the 1980s. Now, the editors of Keyboard magazine have culled that era's most insightful articles and combined them with a wealth of insight to create this landmark book. Features 20 interviews with noted players and producers like Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes, Depeche Mode's Vince Clarke, Peter Gabriel, and The Human League, as well as such visionary pioneers as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Frank Zappa.

Some see the 1980s as a Golden Age, a "Morning in America" when Ronald Reagan revived America's economy, reoriented American politics, and restored Americans' faith in their country and in themselves. Others see the 1980s as a new "Gilded Age," an era that was selfish, superficial, glitzy, greedy, divisive, and destructive. This multifaceted exploration of the 1980s brings together a variety of voices from different political persuasions, generations, and vantage points. The volume features work by Reagan critics and Reagan fans (including one of President Reagan's closest aides, Ed Meese), by historians who think the 1980s were a disastrous time, those who think it was a glorious time, and those who see both the blessings and the curses of the decade. Their essays examine everything from multiculturalism, Southern conservatism, and Reaganomics, to music culture, religion, crime, AIDS, and the city. A complex, thoughtful account of a watershed in our recent history, this volume will engage anyone interested in this pivotal decade.