Oh the tv shows

Give him three q-tips and a tube of toothpaste and he will build you a nuclear reactor.

Always one of my favorites. Nothing like seeing these guys squawk their tires on dirt and jump over just about any obstacle just by hitting the gas.

The show that made headlines....Everyone wanted a talking car....I could have done without The Hoff myself...It was Kit that I wanted.

Probably one of my favorites. I loved seeing these guys turn stuff into weapons.

Movies

Ah yes, American Ninja...This film had all of the qualifications for an 80's movie....A lead actor that had 0 acting skills, hair band music and poorly choreographed martial arts....Not to mention the completely cheese-filled storyline.

Well who could forget Back to the Future....This was really one of the movies that portrayed the 80's as they were....Skateboards, rock music, and a super cool car.

One of my favorite movies from the time period (besides Star Wars of course). The Princess Bride was awesome...Plenty of humor to go around and Andre the Giant in a great role....I just read an article about this movie that talked about how bad off Andre was getting during the filming. They said that it took about twice as long to shoot his scenes because he was in such bad shape. Very sad.

Actually I prefer the reboot of the this movie as I have never been a fan of old Ralph Macchio. He is not the greatest actor in my book. Of course Pat Morita makes teh movie what it is. This movie did really define a lot from the 80's. The story of the weakling underdog rising to the top and beating the cool kids.

Electronic Entertainment

I can still remember when we got our Atari 2600. It came with the Pac-Man game, the game that would eventually bring this company down. We thought it was awesome. The favorites around our house were Frogger (my dad flipped this game), Defender, Spider Fighter, Pit Fall, and I had a Spider-Man game. We had a game called DragonFire. If you beat the last dragon you were supposed to take a picture of the screen and the score and you would get a free poster. The only problem is that it was next to impossible to get a shot of the screen with the cameras of the time. So we were left with a fuzzy picture and no poster.

This was the first computer at our house. Roughly the size of a large calculator and about the same amount of power. About the only thing I remember my Dad being able to do with this machine is programming a bowling game that was pretty pathetic. Of course it took weeks to program the game.

This was our second computer. It was pretty popular at the time. We had the tape drive for it and Dad used to get the Games magazines that had programs in the back that you could punch in and create a game. They had page after page of numeric codes that had to be punched in and when you got to the end you would get an error on line such and such. Then it was back to the program to find the mistake.

This one came after the Vic 20. My Uncle Jim owned a store that sold Commodores and their different programs so we got one for Christmas. I remember playing a few games on it but nothing all that great. It was hard to use and took a long time to boot up. But, I do remember being introduced to what I consider the early internet with the Commodore 64. If you had the modem and plugged in the phone line you could log on to bulletin boards. They were kind of like websites.

We will start with a few that we all had

Oh how many hours I spent trying to figure this thing out....I was able to get just one side but could never get more than one. The Rubix Cube still haunts many of us from the 80's. I finally gave up and took the stickers off and put them all back on in the right order.

This was one of my favorites when I was growing up. It was my obsession to find out what exactly was inside this darn thing. Inside mine was some kind of green slime....Of course my mother threw it away when she found out it had a hole in it.

Obviously being a child in the 1980's was no treat LOL. Here I thought the way that my parents dressed me and made me wear my hair was bad! There must have been a hairspray shortage after this picture was taken.