25 nostalgic things you remember from a specific year or decade!

[retrorussell]

Just 25 things you remember from either a specific year or a decade you lived through, like world events, tv show debuts, things you did, people you met, places you went, etc.

I'll start with 1989:
1. Batman debuted in theaters and I went SEVERAL times.  Loved it!  Even collected trading cards with the hard-ass stick of gum, and almost collected the whole series.  Remembered much of the film's dialogue, even!
2. Graduated high school.
3. The seriously awesome games IVAN IRONMAN STEWART'S SUPER OFF ROAD, FINAL FIGHT and STRIDER came out in arcades.  The graphics of the latter two blew my mind to bits!
4. Laughed like crazy at the scene in SKIN DEEP where John Ritter and the boyfriend of the girl he was seeing have a fight in the dark with glow-in-the-dark condoms on.  The WHEN HARRY MET SALLY fake orgasm scene wasn't nearly as funny.
5. The Berlin Wall fell.
6. Ted Bundy was fried by electric chair.
7. GHOSTBUSTERS returns with GHOSTBUSTERS II!  Liked the first one better.
8. The Exxon-Valdez spill in Alaska!  When I accidentally spilled a little pan oil on the floor at work I would make a joke about this incident.
9. Tiananmen Square protests.
10. Calgary won their only Stanley Cup.
11. George H.W. Bush was officially sworn in as the 41st president.
12. Cute actress Rebecca Schaeffer from the Pam Dawber show MY SISTER SAM was murdered by a crazed fan.
13. The Game Boy was released in the US!  I think I got mine the following year.  Brought it to work for when business got slow.
14. The Menendez brothers killed their parents.
15. Hurricane Hugo hit the SE United States.
16. The San Francisco Earthquake caused the World Series to be postponed for 10 days.
17. Communist regimes fell all over the world.
18. My Blazers fired Mike Schuler, despite his good record, due to not getting along with players.  This was the start of a very successful career for Rick Adelman as the new head coach (though he didn't win either of his Finals appearances).
19. The awesome 3D polygon pioneer game HARD DRIVIN' was released, as was the great GOLDEN AXE, MIDNIGHT RESISTANCE and TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES in arcades.
20. The last good Indiana Jones movie INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE was released.
21. The awful BACK TO THE FUTURE II and LOOK WHO'S TALKING were released.
22. I remember going to see LICENSE TO KILL and thinking it was a very good Bond movie-- up until the fish float winked at the end.  God, that was stupid!
23. I thought FIELD OF DREAMS wasn't nearly as good as everybody else said.
24. Went to see-- and enjoyed-- THE LITTLE MERMAID and PARENTHOOD.   Just about died laughing at the "diarrhea song" parts in the latter film.
25. Saw BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE at the theater.  Very dumb, but enjoyable.  Napoleon cracked me up in it.

Whew!  That was a fun little trip back to 1989.
Anyone else got a year or decade they want to take a trip back to?

[ER]

25 Things I Remember About 1995

1.   OJ got away with murder.
2.   I finished tenth grade in the spring of 1995, and began eleventh that fall.
3.   Toy Story came out.
4.   Because my father worked in a federal building, the Oklahoma City bombing particularly terrified me....
5.   I got my driver's license, and a car!
6.   Star Trek Voyager debuted, but I didn't get into it immediately.
7.   Newt Gingrich kept acting like a fat little betch every time I turned on the news.
8.   I first read The Sandman series, and it re-wired my mind.
9.   Mellon Collie and the infinite Sadness released on October 24th, a year to the day after I nearly died, and became the soundtrack for my life that year.
10.   Pete Sampras won his third Wimbledon singles title.
11.   People at my school kept going around saying: "No soup for you!'" which I did not get because I didn't watch Seinfeld.
12.   Poor Christopher Reeve became paralyzed.
13.   My dad came home from DC and told me a hilarious story about Boris Yeltsin walking around town drunk and half-dressed.
14.   I twice broke up with the same guy by phone, too young and dumb to realize that wasn't nice.
15.   Windows 95 hit shelves.
16.   PS1 went on sale.
17.   All those infomercials for the George Foreman Grill!
18.   Jagged! Little!! Pill!!!
19.   For the first time in my life, I had too much to drink, thanks to my cousin basically tricking me.
20.   Ireland removed the ban on Playboy magazine being sold there.
21.   The Tokyo subway gas attack.
22.   I may have just possibly seen the devil.
23.   All the guys I knew seemed to be obsessed with a new show called Xena: Warrior Princess, and all the nerdy ones lost their mind over another new show called Sailor Moon. I don't know why.
24.   I drove my boyfriend to the hospital one night after he accidentally slashed his hand open. (That man had the most profound combination of great and horrible luck of anyone I have ever known...)
25.   Prime Minister Rabin was murdered; bloody are the peacemakers.

1995 was a huge year.

[RCMerchant]

1970
I bought my first issue of Famous Monsters Magazine . # 81

[Trevor]

1970
I bought my first issue of Famous Monsters Magazine . # 81

I bought a copy of that on my way home to Zimbabwe in (I think) 1982: it had a picture of Ronald Lacey melting on the cover.

[Rev. Powell]

1986

1. Had my first sexual experience with a real live girl.
2. Graduated high school when my Physics professor graciously gave me a D- instead of the F I deserved.
3. My high school girlfriend broke up with me.
4. Had my first experience with depression.
5. Smoked marijuana for the first time.
6. Heard my first Tom Waits song ("Hang on St. Christopher").
7. Tried LSD for the first time.
8. Heard a former teacher's husband and a man I had met, Dick Scobee, died in the Challenger explosion.
9. Saw "Blue Velvet" in the theater, having no idea what I was in for.
10. Nearly flunked out of my first semester of college.
11. Saw Rush and Arlo Guthrie perform live.
12. Heard original radio broadcasts of "the Church of the Subgenius Hour of Slack."
13. Requested a radio station play a song for the first and only time ("Sister Golden Hair.")
14. Skipped work to go to the beach.
15. Got sunburn so bad I was nauseous and formed blisters.
16. Was bitten by a brown recluse.
17. Went to Orlando alone with no one to meet me and no place to stay. Was picked up and driven around by a gay hairdresser who eventually tried to hit on me and was sorely disappointed.
18. Refused to go see "Top Gun."
19. Got to the finals in intramural bowling league.
20. Scored the winning points (free throws) in the only game our intramural basketball team won all season.
21. Got a subscription to "The National Lampoon."
22. Read "Thus Spake Zarathustra" instead of my assigned reading.
23. Was the only male in a group of students who went to see "Peggy Sue Got Married."
24. Got the college nickname "Hung."
25. Ate calamari for the first time, and liked it.

[ER]

24. Got the college nickname "Hung."

RESPECT!! 

[RCMerchant]

1968

I remember hearing about the death of Martin Luther king on the car radio.

1976

I went to visit the Freedom Train in Kalamazoo.

1968

I saw PLANET OF THE APES in a theater.

1978

I hitch hiked to NY from Michigan, and saw my Ma for the first time since 1969.

[retrorussell]

Nice work, folks!  Love those trips down memory lane.

1990:
1. The NEO GEO arcade machine came out-- blew everything else out of the water at the time, and most cabinets had slots for games you could switch back and forth between.  I now have one in my living room!
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2. My Blazers lost in the Finals to Detroit.  5 game series and most games were close.  I hated Bill Laimbeer.  It looked like we sent game 4 to OT but after replay Danny Young's 3 was ruled too late.  Watched it from my friend's house down the street.
3. My first job, working for Pizza Hut.  Mostly I made the dough in the morning, but sometimes I worked late till close if we ran out of dough or needed extra cooks/box folders/dishwashers.  My pants would sometimes get wet with dishwater.
4. I think this was the year we moved to a couple miles away from our old house in Federal Way/Auburn, WA.  Very nice, big house!  I think my stepdad still lives there. 
5. I think I bought a Sega Genesis that year-- great game system!  Played plenty of Altered Beast and Revenge of Shinobi.  Sometimes I lost my cool with a game and punched at the wall.. I put up a poster over the hole.
6. Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
7. Tornadoes ripped through central US in March.
8. Northern Iran was devastated by an earthquake that claimed several tens of thousands of lives.
9. Martina Navratilova and Stefan Edberg win their Wimbledon Singles Championships.
10. My Buffalo Bills were getting really good, and on their way to their first Super Bowl.
11. Rosanne Barr's awful, insulting rendition of the Star Spangled Banner:
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12. The Gulf War began with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
13. Reporter Lisa Olsen was sexually harassed in the New England Patriots' locker room.
14. East and West Germany were united into a single Germany.
15. Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the Cold War.
16. Serial killer Andrei Chikatilo is caught.
17. Some celebrity deaths: Jim Henson, Alan Hale Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Ava Gardner, Greta Garbo, Rocky Graziano, Jill Ireland, Rex Harrison, Pearl Bailey, Leonard Bernstein, Roald Dahl.
18. Great arcade games SMASH TV, TROG, MAGICIAN LORD, MAGIC SWORD, COLUMNS, GOLDEN TEE GOLF, COMBATRIBES
19. Top films: GHOST, DANCES WITH WOLVES, PRETTY WOMAN, TOTAL RECALL, HOME ALONE, BACK TO THE FUTURE III, DIE HARD 2, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.
20. Some popular songs: Nothing Compares 2U, Hold On (Wilson Phillips), It Must Have Been Love, Unskinny Bop, Enjoy The Silence, All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You, Thunderstruck, etc.
21. MC Hammer pants and his song/ripoff U CAN'T TOUCH THIS (which stole the rhythm from Super Freak):

22. And this guy:

23. My brother was crazy about the YOUNG GUNS movies, including the sequel and its hit song.
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24. Mariah Carey takes the music world by storm with the #1 songs VISION OF LOVE and LOVE TAKES TIME.
25. Some bad films included KARATE KID PART III, PROBLEM CHILD, TROLL II, MADHOUSE, LOOSE CANNONS, HEART CONDITION, GHOST DAD, BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, NAVY SEALS, ROCKY V, and I was really not a fan of ADVENTURES OF FORD FAIRLANE.

[ER]

Memories of 1999

1.   Y2K scared billions, while I cheerfully maintained faith that capitalistic greed would put things right.
2.   The Euro became legal tender in eleven EU nations.
3.   I turned twenty-one in the last week of the year/decade/century/millennium.
4.   Ricky Martin's energetic but irritating Livin' La Vita Loca was heard EVERYWHERE.
5.   The debut episode of The Sopranos serial-cussed its way onto HBO, while SpongeBob SquarePants began its inexplicable 23-years and counting run on Nickelodeon.
6.   Somewhere the 6,000,000,000th resident of Earth slid out an unsuspecting birth canal.
7.   My friends and I went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and we loved it, darnit, we loved it!
8.   Two screwed-up teens thought it'd be cool to undertake spree-murder at Colorado's Columbine High School.
9.   Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor and later poster person for burning pants, won his first Tour de France. (Hey, I made a rhyme!)
10.   Impeached President Clinton was acquitted in his Senate trial.
11.   On the last day of 1999. Vladimir Putin took over Russia. Sigh.
12.   Napster went online, and I admit, I used the heck out of it. Sorrrrry, music industry. (Well, maybe a little bit.)
13.   That September my cousin named her baby son Tyler, after a character from Fight Club. Fun fact: as a teenager Tyler would have sex with more men in an average week than I have in my lifetime, and that's spotting me twenty years.
14.   Scotland got its first Parliament in 300 years; I won't mention Northern Ireland's parliamentary debacle that began that same year.
15.   The Sixth Sense had a great tagline. "I see dead people..." Seriously great.
16.   My university roommate converted to Catholicism and asked me to sponsor her, so I made my first confession in years, and the poor priest likely needed therapy after hearing everything I told him.
17.   The eternal, unkillable, now surely undead, Family Guy debuted on FOX.
18.   Much of Oklahoma City went aloft in a tornado with record-breaking 309 MPH winds.
19.   Did a huge road trip that summer with my visiting college friends; showed them Jerry Springer's house down from my aunt's, and a cop told us we were trespassing. I told him, "None of us even like the guy." The cop said, "Then think how embarrassing it'll be to get arrested over him. Get moving." Ha....
20.   An early internet rumor had us wondering if Wendy the Snapple Lady was truly doing girl-on-girl porn.
21.   My roommate's brother and I climbed Mount Katahdin and that morning saw the sunrise before possibly anyone else in the US.
22.   Talk of the Kennedy Curse was revived when JFK Jr. took an ill-fated flight with his wife and her sister.
23.   The Blair Witch Project....was what it was. Personally I liked it.
24.   SNL did a big 25th anniversary broadcast, and someone forced me to stay and watch it by hiding my car keys. Yep, forced me to stay by hiding my car keys. Wasn't that like non-sexual date rape or something?  #MeToo, where were you when I needed you?
25.   On December 27th, I saw someone I love for the last time, and his final words haunt me.

[RCMerchant]

1970.

Vietnam and the Manson trial was all over the news- which for my Dad was Walter Cronkite.

1977

Saw STAR WARS at the Strand. I was not impressed.

[ER]

retrorussell, you do know this is like giving a pyromaniac matches, don't you?



Memories of 1997

1.   The Heavens Gate crowd committed mass suicide, in part because of the approach of Hale-Bopp comet.
2.   I saw Smashing Pumpkins in concert but felt cheated because I had to go home after the show---school night---when others I was with stayed out and ran into Billy Corgan and  D'arcy Wretzky at a club!
3.   IBM's Deep Blue beat Chess Grand Master Gary Kasparov....take that, fleshy beings!
4.   The notoriously divisive The English Patient won nine Oscars.
5.   In a great year for TV, Buffy the Vampire Slayer made staking the undead cool; we first went down to South Park; and Hank Hill let us know he sold propane and propane accessories.
6.   Weeks before graduating from high school, I ditched the famed eastern university into which I'd been accepted. My lawyer aunt didn't speak to me for a year, and my academic advisor sat on his office floor and cried about the impending fallout on his job.
7.   Amid the rainiest June in local history, I got engaged.
8.   With a psychologist I did a bunch of past life hypnotic regressions and one session of future life progression. The former were fun, the latter was horrifying.
9.   It was a sad year, with the losses of Jeff Buckley, Chris Farley, Jimmy Stewart, John Denver, and of course Princess Diana and Mother Theresa, who passed within days of one another.
10.   The United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China.
11.   I "ran away" and spent most of the summer homeless and sleeping in my car, but eventually hiked the Hundred-Mile Wilderness on the A.T. and got into college, so happy ending there.
12.   Bill Clinton began his second term on MLK Day.
13.   Most folks agreed Dolly, the famous sheep, looked just like her mother.
14.   Uber-narcissist Andrew Cunanan ventilated his head in Miami.
15.   The first Harry Potter novel The Philosopher's Stone, saw release.
16.   Mike Tyson bobbed Evander Holyfield's ear.
17.   An astute jury found OJ Simpson civilly liable for wrongful deaths.
18.   Steve Jobs returned to Apple.
19.   I minored in PE, just me and a buncha blue state lesbians who kept inviting me to play dodgeball.
20.   The intrusive employer I began working for at age seventeen told me I had amoral tendencies, handled physical pain well, emotional pain poorly, and was prone to be polyandrous. I disagreed til life made me wiser.
21.   Chumbawamba repeatedly vowed that if they got knocked down, they'd get up again, that nothing was gonna keep them down.
22.   Brad Pitt sued Playgirl for unauthorized pictures of his pee-pee.
23.   Eddie Murphy gave a transsexual prostitute a ride home from the Sunset Strip. What a nice guy!
24.   British nanny Louise Woodward went on trial for allegedly shaking a baby to death.
25.   I rang New Year's Eve with my grandpa and his friends, and it was sweet.

[indianasmith]

I don't have anything like ER's gift of near-total recall, but here is what I remember from my senior year, 1982:

1.  I pulled the grandest practical joke of my long career on a co-worker at the Dairy Queen where I was employed, and she didn't speak to me for six weeks.  It was TOTALLY worth it!
2.  I made what may be the most awkward marriage proposal in history to my childhood sweetheart, and to my eternal wonder, she accepted.  Remind me to tell you the story sometime.
3.  The marriage of Lady Diana Spencer to Prince Charles yielded a new heir to the throne.
4.  I went stag to our High School prom with several other friends after our school decided that only enrolled students in our district would be allowed to attend.
5.  I went on a 3-day campout with two of my classmates on a local lake the week before graduation and got the worst sunburn of my life!
6.  I graduated high school with my back still glowing infrared, wearing the lightest cotton T-shirt I owned under my cap and gown.
7.  When my fiancée hugged me after I received my diploma, I screamed in pain.  It wasn't the reaction she expected.
8.  We crammed 9 people into my two-door, 1977 Dodge Aspen and drove 60 miles to Six Flags Over Texas to celebrate graduation.
9.  After the six fastest weeks of my entire life sped by, I reported to Navy Boot Camp on July 15, 1982.
10.  I heard more profanity during the next eight weeks than I had in my entire previous life, growing up as a preacher's son.
11.  After graduating from basic training, I was assigned to Radioman "A" school in San Diego, California.
12.  At Thanksgiving, I came home on four days' leave and was met at the parents by a dozen of my friends and my fiancée.
13.  We showed up at my parents' home around 1 AM, and my best friend and his girlfriend knocked on the door and asked if my Dad could please give them some emergency counseling.  As Dad sat down in his usual recliner to find out what on earth was happening with them, I snuck in the door behind them and gave him and Mom the surprise of their lives!
14.  I returned to San Diego, finished "A" school, and was ordered to report to IMCO (International Morse Code Operator) School in January.  But, having used up all my leave, I could not go home for Christmas.
15.  I spent most of New Year's Eve moping around the barracks, called Mom and Dad and my fiancée, and wished that I had more leave time on the books.

That was my 1982.

[Allhallowsday]

1976
I saw MURDER BY DEATH with my sister-in-law in a theater that summer.  I saw a bit of it last night on TCM. 
It was the Bicentennial.  Most towns had weeks of fireworks displays, parades and picnics.  I remember the tall ships in NY Harbor. 
That fall I started at the High School as a Sophomore.  JIMMY CARTER was elected President.  After NIXON and FORD, he was a ray of hope.

[retrorussell]

1980:
1. My mom got divorced from my dad.  I still lived with her at the house for that year and visited my dad and stepmom in NE Portland on weekends (they got married this year).
2. FRIDAY THE 13TH was such a big deal!  I remember not understanding that the poster had a silhouette of a person with a bloody knife-- I thought it was just weird-shaped woods or something.  I was a dumb kid, what can I say.  The image of the bloody knife haunted my dreams.

3. Queen's THE GAME was a great album.  We had ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST on 45.  We loved listening to weird B-sides and DON'T TRY SUICIDE cracked us up.
4. Also, Queen gained acclaim for their score for FLASH GORDON.  I saw it at the Westgate Theater in Beaverton, OR (now defunct) near Christmas and loved it.  Nowadays.. I love it less due to the terrible acting of Flash and Dale.  Still goofy fun.
5. ORDINARY PEOPLE would go on to win several Oscars.
6. THE ROSE was a big hit for Bette Midler.   Great song, awful person.
7. Didn't get to see XANADU when it was out and it got destroyed by critics-- later on, I found out they were absolutely right.  But Olivia Newton-John was ROWR hot and the ELO soundtrack was terrific.  Loved the title song and ALL OVER THE WORLD.  Her song MAGIC always made me think of the ventriloquist horror film from 2 years prior. 
8. FAME, TAKE YOUR TIME (DO IT RIGHT) and UPSIDE DOWN were great entries in the final days of disco.
9. Operation Eagle Claw was a failed attempt to rescue hostages in Iran-- 2 US military choppers collided.
10. The US boycotted the Olympic games in Moscow due to Russia invading Afghanistan the previous year.  Russia would boycott the 1984 games in L.A.
11. John Lennon is shot to death outside his New York apartment.  A saddened Howard Cosell, who had the former Beatle on Monday Night Football as a guest years prior, broke the news during a broadcast of a New England/Miami game.
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12. Mr. Lennon's last album during his life: DOUBLE FANTASY, with massive hit (JUST LIKE) STARTING OVER, and radio staple WOMAN, as well as plenty other good songs.  Never cared much for Yoko.
13. Got kind of grossed out in the theater when Han Solo guts a dead creature to put Luke inside and keep him warm in EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.
14. Movies that didn't put gays in a particularly positive light: CRUISING and WINDOWS.
15. Some weird movies I'd see in the papers that people kind of forgot: THE GONG SHOW MOVIE, TIMES SQUARE, THE FINAL COUNTDOWN, SIMON, FATSO, O HEAVELY DOG, THE LAST FLIGHT OF NOAH'S ARK, SATURN 3, SOMEWHERE IN TIME, THE CHILDREN, and WITHOUT WARNING.
16. Good comedies: AIRPLANE!, CADDYSHACK, MY BODYGUARD, THE BLUES BROTHERS, USED CARS, STIR CRAZY, 9 TO 5.  Also the Showtime staple ANIMALYMPICS.
17. DeNiro catapults into stardom with the vulgar RAGING BULL.
18. Slasher films  start to come out of the woodwork to cash in on FRIDAY THE 13TH's success: PROM NIGHT, HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE, TERROR TRAIN, and MANIAC.
19. Good horror films: DRESSED TO KILL and THE FOG.  Wasn't as crazy about THE SHINING as some.
20. Whew, that was a lot of movies-- how about some tv show debuts?  MAGNUM P.I., BOSOM BUDDIES, TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT, 3-2-1 CONTACT, FRIDAYS, IT'S A LIVING, MYSTERY, SOLID GOLD, THAT'S INCREDIBLE, cartoons RICHIE RICH, THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN, the awful Filmation TOM AND JERRY COMEDY SHOW, FONZ AND THE HAPPY DAYS GANG, DRAK PACK, and game shows PLAY THE PERCENTAGES, BLOCKBUSTERS, FACE THE MUSIC, CHAIN REACTION and BULLSEYE.
21. Started going to a "special" school (ugh) because I was (mis) diagnosed with Asperger's.  Only for about a year thankfully.
22. Mt. St. Helens blew her top!  Ash was strewn for miles and miles.  We saw it on cars in the streets.  There was a movie released the following year starring Art Carney called ST. HELENS!, in which he played a man named Harry Truman (!) who owned a lodge near the mountain; he refused to leave and was killed in the eruption.
23. I remember when I'd visit my dad/stepmom's house if we did enough chores we'd all get to go to the awesome entertainment center MALIBU GRAN PRIX and play video games, foosball and pinball and drive the Road Runner cars on the track.  Fun place, unfortunately defunct.
24. PAC-MAN is born from a missing slice of pizza.  Yep, designer Toru Iwatani saw an open mouth in that image and created the seminal "eat the dots" maze game for Namco.  I first saw it at my dad's bowling alley when he bowled league nights at Kellogg Bowl in Milwaukee.  I loved going there and getting soda and candy from the machines, and playing the arcade games there.  GALAXIAN (released the previous year in Japan) also got a lot of play from me there.  Sweet Tarts and Boston Baked Beans were my favorite candies to get from the nickel/dime candy machines there.
25. One-legged Canadian marathon runner Terry Fox begins his Marathon Of Hope, but dies of cancer the following year before he can complete it.

[RCMerchant]

1969

My Ma went to Woodstock. Us kids watched Chiller in Marlboro, NY.

http://youtu.be/9bcIGSaPnqc