I found this most recent article, Star Wars Episode VI - Life in 1983, to be pretty funny. Some funny ha-ha, some not. Some funny-I-thought-that-just-happened-yesterday. Time, she's a crazy mistress, no?

Anyway, with the release of the unaltered Original Trilogy DVD's, including the amazing culmination of the saga in Return of the Jedi, I thought I'd reminisce about the Unaltered Moose, circa 1983.


In the summer of 1983, I was 14. This was the year of my first semi-halfway slow dance girlfriend, and later that year I would become a freshman in highschool.

Like most teenagers, I liked the assortment of 80's bands ranging from Van Halen, Journey and Iron Maiden to the more culturally hip Alarm, Bauhaus and U2. Contrary to popular opinion, in my circles you were made fun of for listening to too much Michael Jackson. I mean - the dude had one glove. It didn't make any sense back then, either.

I had a mullet. It was a pretty cool mullet - shaved tight on the sides, spiked on top, shoulder length in the back. I was totally hot. Seriously. No really.

Which brings up another point: although the vernacular was rife with anachronistic pitfalls of the day, the common cool-speak was not to say "awesome", "rad", "tubular", "gnarly" or any of the Valley Girl sound bytes, like "Like", or "totally", or "Oh ma gah, gag me with a spoon." The "Like" prefix to every other word actually became the bane of our common day speech patterns later....like...much later. Like in the 90's, and it was like totally uncontrollable and now like we can't stop like using it like. It was like totally not as used in the 80's.

If you were cool, you used words like "righteous", "shweet", "excellent", "wicked", "serious" and, a little later, "trippy". I never once said "gag me" with anything. Oh my god. I might have occasionally...occasionally let loose with an "awesome", but it actually had to be "awesome" to say it. You couldn't say stupid stuff like "totally awesome macaroni, mom!" or "that video arcade was awesome!" No, it had to be something large and universally accepted as an awesome spectacle. The live version of "Trees" by Rush was "awesome". A tornado or something...that was awesome. But not ..like...your shoes or something. Dropping the A-Bomb could be an uncool as it was cool.

Which brings us to the fashionable way to express dismay for a lack of coolness, such as "uncool", "bogus", and the equivalent of a coolness excommunication - being called a "poseur".

We all had our favorite things to wear. Jean jackets were big. Pins of various bands on your lapels and jackets. I went from being primary color boy (picture red Mork from Ork suspenders over a sky blue Shirt with a yellow t-shirt underneath), to being dark vintage trenchcoat boy the next year...so style was in flux.

Mind you, this is a full 18 months or so before "Miami Vice", which completely jacked up the entire color scheme, and pretty much separated the classes. Cool rich kids had their linen pants, ribbed t-shirts in pastel colors and no socks, cool poor kids had their torn jeans, Cure t-shirts, and sneakers that had the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address written on them in various Sharpie colors.

In the summer of 1983, it was exactly in the middle of my "primary colors" phase. So there I am in my white high-waisted painter's pants, sky blue Polo, yellow t-shirt for accent, big wide red suspenders, and some sort of moon boot like thangs. Any my mullet. And Wayfarer's. OK fake Wayfarer's. Oh, I forgot to mention that all of us started turning our Polo collars up that year, like this. My friend and I stood in line for nearly 3 hours in the Texas summer heat dressed like this, and we looked completely normal. We all pretty much looked just like this. No punks beat us up. They were dressed just like us.

So I thought I would take a look at the other highlights from the article and give you the eye witness report from a child of the 80's.



Ronald Reagan proposes to develop technology to intercept enemy missiles called Strategic Defense Initiative -- nicknamed "Star Wars."

Say what you will of Mr. Ray Gun, in the same way any person in their formative years views the president as a kindly old man, I really loved Ronnie. He had cool hair, a twinkle in his eye, and in many ways, he was a great president. Not to mention he kept busting out Star Wars references. He named his missile defense program after it, and he even dubbed the former Soviet Union the "Evil Empire"¨. I wonder if he ever got Georgeˇ¦s permish. Regardless, at this time in history, after rebounding from the first assassination attempt since JFK, the old cowboy was hugely popular.

An estimated 100 million people watch the controversial TV movie "The Day After" which depicts the aftereffects of nuclear war.

Another funny, not so funny moment. You had to live in the 80's to get this, but it's not so different from today. In the 80's, pop culture was full of references to "the bomb" (before that became a good term) and World War III. It was like every day, from 1961 to 1989, someone expected someone else to press the Big Red Button. So when this movie came out, it freaked some people out. I remember my dad came in the room and, clueless as ever, asked what was going on. I half-convinced him it was a newscast, and we were under nuclear attack. When his eyes grew wide and I saw him checking his wallet to make sure we had enough gas money to evacuate, I gave him the classic "or not." He didn't find it humorous. Psh. He would have done the same to me :0)

McDonald's introduces the Chicken McNugget.

Even back then, we had the same reaction. "Are you sure this is chicken?"

Swatch offer their first watches.

For most of my teen years I wanted one of these over-priced plastic Swiss watches. Now you can buy something better at a convenient store counter for 5 bucks.

"M*A*S*H" ends after 10 years on CBS TV, the first longest running TV series ever. Over 125 million Americans tune in to watch the final episode.

My dad, having been in the Navy during the Korean War, really loved this show. Me, I was sad to see it go, but let's face it - Harvey Korman was funnier than Hawkeye.

TV shows debut: "Mama's Family," "The A-Team," "Fraggle Rock," "He-Man," "Love Connection," "Scarecrow and Mrs. King." Mini-series: "V" and "The Thorn Birds."

"V", even back then, was goofy. All these shows were horrible. This is not a statement of hindsight. I hated them all back then - all except one - Kate Jackson in Scarecrow and Mrs. King was a hottie back in the day. And who woulda figured there was life after Tron for Bruce Boxleitner, who went so far undercover after his stint as a secret agent he seemingly wouldn't resurface until Babylon 5.

Atari releases Star Wars, a vector graphics-based game based on the popular film franchise. Nintendo releases Mario Bros.

My friend had an Atari. Rich friends had Ataris. Poor friends went to rich friends houses to hog them.

Sally Ride becomes first American woman in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger.

I can't say I remember this much, but I remember vividly that day in 1986 - it was one of those moments.

Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program launched in U.S.

Another in a string of completely ineffective campaigns to reach the youth culture. For any teenagers reading, just like we don't get you, they didn't get us. It's the circle of life.

Microsoft Word is first released.

No one but NO one, believe it or not, had Windows back then. Everyone I knew either had IBM's, Apple IIe's, or most popular, Commodore 64's. I remember this was the first year I started programming. I wrote games and applications for a class at school in BASIC, on a TI-994-A, and stored my programs on - Anyone? CD? Try again. 3.5 inch disk? Puh-leeeze. 5 and a quarter floppy? Bzzzzzzzzzz. We stored them on cassette tapes. Yep. Regular tape recorder, regular cassette tapes, which connected to a reader on the PC. We're talking bytes here. Not KB, certainly not MB. Bytes. To print, all of shared a single printer that had to be connected to that PC to work. No networking back then. It was a thermal dot-matrix printer that printed on long 3-inch wide silver strips of thermal paper in dots so far apart it didn't matter anyway. You couldn't read it, and worse, the image on the thermal paper would degrade in about a day. And by cracky, we liked it.

Tom Brokaw becomes lead anchor for "NBC Nightly News."

He was young once. I remember it was like dueling wa-wa's when he and Barbara Walters were covering major stories.

President Ronald Reagan signs a bill creating a federal holiday on the third Monday of every January to honor American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

And I remember our extreme disappointment when we found out it didn't mean a day out of school. It's only later when you realize the real importance of holidays. When you're a kid, you just want to know it means you can sleep in.

USSR leader Yuri Andropov invites Maine schoolgirl Samantha Smith to visit the Soviet Union after he reads her letter in which she expresses fears about nuclear war.

Yuri Andropov was one of the faces we feared during the Cold War. I remember how freaked out we all were when the USSR shot down a Korean Airliner that strayed off course to end up in Soviet airspace. Killed everyone on board - because they got lost. Can you imagine that happening today? Fortunately, Andropov kicked it soon after he got into office. The next guy wasn't any better. But it was a weird time in which, following the long tenure of Breznev, we watched a succession of short-lived Soviet heads of state. With each new leader, everyone was afraid of it getting worse.

Celebrity deaths include Tennessee Williams and Gloria Swanson.

Celebrity Birth? How about Kate Bosworth - Lois Lane from Superman Returns. Yeah. She's just getting born, and I'm wearing a mullet. I'm old.

Cost of a movie ticket was $3.15, while gas was $1.16 a gallon. . A first class stamp is .20.

Believe it or not I remember my dad raising hell about having to pay more than a dollar for gas.

Top grossing films: Return of the Jedi, Tootsie, Trading Places, WarGames, Superman III, Flashdance, Octopussy, 48 Hours, Mr. Mom, National Lampoon's Vacation, Jaws 3-D, and Risky Business.

Seriously, ALL the best movies came out in 1983 -..um - except Flashdance. Missed that one. For - like...23 years. And yes, we were all a-twitter about the title of the James Bond movie.

Other movies released: Valley Girl, Scarface, Silkwood, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Yentl, The Right Stuff, The Outsiders, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Educating Rita, Eddie and the Cruisers, The Dead Zone, The Big Chill, and A Christmas Story.

Scarface was the bomb. "And now - da leg" All of these movies were great. It's funny to think that The Right Stuff was released to pimp astronaut turned Senator John Glenn for his run for the Presidency. And of course Valley Girl launched as many tired impersonations as you can imagine. We spent a year wanting to tell everyone to shut up. Between "Oh ma gah, like gag me with a spoon" and "Where' the beef?" and "Whatchyoo talkin' bout, Willis?", by 1985 we were ready to beat the next progenitor of a catchphrase to death with their own shoes. It was ...uncool.

Vanessa Lynn Williams becomes the first African-American to be crowned Miss America.

And then all of a sudden she was nekid and de-throned. It was very confusing.

Terms of Endearment wins Best Picture and James L. Brooks wins for Best Director, while British film Gandhi wins 8 Oscars, at the Academy Awards.

Ghandi was an amazing spectacle, and to make it even more special, Sir Ben Kingsley looks exactly the same now as he did in 1983.

Run DMC releases their debut single "It's Like That"/"Sucker M.C.'s."

yeeehhhh booyeeeeeeee. All of a sudden there was an entire new faction of fashion to deal with, specifcally dealing with fresh, white, K-Swiss sneakers and big gold chains.

A-ha, Dinosaur Jr., Megadeth, Phish, Red Hot Chili Peppers form while the Misfits, Thin Lizzy, the Carpenters, the Who and Bauhaus break up.

Out with the older, in with the old.



Hit songs:
"Hungry Like the Wolf" - Duran Duran <-- "Hungry like the Moose. Hungry like the Moose."
"Hold Me Now" - The Thompson Twins <-- Huge hair. Massive. Very flammable band.
"Mr. Roboto" - Styx <-- Don't tell me you haven't once used the words to this song. You haven't? ...ok fine.
"99 Red Balloons" - Nena <-- One line is a nod to Star Trek: "Everyone's a Captain Kirk."
"Blister in the Sun" - Violent Femmes <-- "Big hands you know you're the one."
"Africa" - Toto <-- zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
"Beat It" - Michael Jackson <-- Like I say, we were all a little creeped by the one glove thang. So there ya go.
"Blue Monday" - New Order <-- Missed this one. Dunno. Just didn't make it to my WalkMan. Uh...that's I-Pod in 80's speak.
"Buffalo Soldier" - Bob Marley and the Wailers <-- Yeh mon. Evry-tang was goin to be eye-ree.
"Burning Up" - Madonna <-- uh. Lame. But I was a guy. Still am.
"China Girl" - David Bowie <-- oddly, not lame. That's the 80's for you. Masculinity had a weird definition.
"Cruel Summer" - Bananarama <-- Used to think these girls were hot. Go-Go's were hotter, though.
"Down Under" - Men at Work <--Played literally every 4 seconds. They started a new radio station every 4 seconds just to play this damn song.
"Gimme All Your Lovin'" - ZZ Top <-- Texas was cool from way back.
"Family Man" - Hall & Oates <-- See David Bowie. It was a weird time.
"I'll Tumble 4 Ya" - Culture Club <-- Again. I'm out of excuses for this. It was the 80's, man. We were all gonna die in a nuke meltdown any second.
"New Year's Day" - U2 <-- It's weird even for me to ever think Bono was young.
"Photograph" - Def Leppard <-- Described by a friend as "the perfect rock song". And then he pumped his fists and grimaced. I think I said "excellent."¨ Again, this was totally normal behavior.
"Relax" - Frankie Goes to Hollywood <-- Very controversial in its day, and - well - the uncut version hasn't gotten any less nasty. Nuff said.
"True" - Spandau Ballet <-- We actually managed to realize that this was really a chick song. Still, it snuck under a lot of our radars.



Yep. That was 1983. And the highlight of that year, aside from getting my mullet to curl up just so at the ends, was Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. We didn't refer to it as "Episode VI". To us, it was "Star Wars III", otherwise known as "Jedi", and it was the end of the saga. Back then, we had no Internet to pour over the spoilers and advanced copies of the script. We were going in blind.

And I'm telling you, even though I would hate that today....it was better that way.

And when you hear people talking about "sell-out" and "Ewoks merchandising" etc etc...remember this, because I'm telling you this completely confident in my recollection, because it was a defining cultural moment - All of us - every last one of us - cheered to no end. This was by far one of the finest films of the entire saga. It had the most touching, heart-wrenching, death-defying moments we had seen to date. It was, at that moment, perfect.

It was both, in the vernacular of the day, awesome, and bogus that it would end. For as far as we were concerned, there were no Prequels, and this began the long darkness in a world without Star Wars in the theaters. So - for all you people now, we can relate. Been there, done that, shed tears on our OP T-shirts.

Thankfully, it was totally wicked sweet rockin' like Dokken Star Wars. Like, totally. Seriously most excellent.

DM out