The Summer of 1984 was a great time to be a kid (I was 10). Along with The Last Starfighter there was also Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Karate Kid, Gremlins and Star Trek III... am I missing any others?
What are everyone's memories about that magical Summer movie season?
’Cause there’s thunder in your heart... Every move is like lightning!
Holy cow I had no idea all those movies came out around the same time. Truely a golden age of cinema. These are the movies that bring back a strong sense of nostalgia for me. I'm 28 now, so I was 5 back then. The first movie I ever saw in a movie theater was Ghostbusters in the summer of 84'. I'll never forget it either! It was at the historic Fox Theatre in Atlanta, complete with a "ghost" piano playing itself on the stage before the show. It was awesome. I guess everything is really a big deal when you're 5 years old! It was a good time to be a kid.
Thanks for the reminder! As I write this I'm listening to The Last Starfighter theme song... what a great score! I get choked up sometimes thinking about the good ole' days ;)
Peace
Great post. That's awesome.
’Cause there’s thunder in your heart... Every move is like lightning!
"The first movie I ever saw in a movie theater was Ghostbusters in the summer of 84'. I'll never forget it either! It was at the historic Fox Theatre in Atlanta, complete with a "ghost" piano playing itself on the stage before the show. It was awesome."
That's a great memory. It's a pity that distributors don't spend money on cool stuff like that any more. I remember seeing The Love Bug, back in the 60's, and on the roof over the entrance to the theater they had put a VW Bug, painted to look like Herbie.
Back in the 50's promoters had really kooky gimmicks, like buzzers in the seats and people in costumes to scare the patrons. The movie, Matinee, showed some of those gags. That's when going to the movies was an event.
"You're forgetting one thing- I just started using laser cats again!"
The last time in recent memory that I can recall any showmanship re: the opening of a movie was with one of the "Lord of the Rings" movies about a decade ago. I saw the first evening showing opening day and one of the managers came and stood down front and talked to the crowd for a bit and then introduced a couple of guys from some local "LOTR" fan club who came down in full costume and clumsily reenacted a fight scene between Aragorn and one of the Orcs.
’Cause there’s thunder in your heart... Every move is like lightning!
The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Star Wars, I was 4. Seriously cool memory having that epic of a movie being my first real movie memory. I was blown away to say the least. My parents said I didn't move the entire movie, I was glued to the screen. Being 4 I only remember bits and pieces but was immediately a Star Wars fan after.
shareAh, Secret Wars. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Super Powers figures came out right around the same time. 'Return of the Jedi' figures were on clearance @ Kay-Bee toys. 'G.I. Joe' was in all his glory. And I got $5.00 a week for my allowance. You just couldn't lose.
’Cause there’s thunder in your heart... Every move is like lightning!
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Right on, another 80's kid. Yep, words like Kay-Bee and Secret Wars are like our secret handshake .
’Cause there’s thunder in your heart... Every move is like lightning!
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The 80's were fanatastic,
Not olny did you have such claasic movies as The Terminator,Return of the Jedi, The Indy films,Starman,Labyrinth etc but it also spawned the best toy lines Transformers,Action Force (GI Joe here in the UK),Rocklords,M.a.sk, Star Wars and Thundercats!!!
Black Label Society SDMF'ER!!
'Terminator',
'2010, The Year We Make Contact',
'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension' (No matter where you go, there you are! Don't tug on that!)
'1984',
'Starman'.
There were others ('Dune' and 'The Natural') but those must be in the scifi list.
The 80's were fanatastic,
Wow, what a menu of excellent films, particularily of the fantasy/sci-fi kind, some of the all time best and they all came out in the same year!
I remember seeing most of those movies in the theatre so I must have been going to the movies a lot around then! Awesome thread and thanks for the memories, I would have been 10 years old at the time. Still remember playing Indiana Jones at some caves near my place that summer! Ah, good times...
ps. I think that The Thing came out that year too, didn't see it at the time but years later it would come to be my favourite horror movie, damn scary sci-fi stuff!
The Thing came out in '82
The 80's where an awesome decade for everything in entertainment! I still remember old commercials in between Saturday morning cartoons! by the way what's happened to Saturday morning cartoons? where they go? it's a shame kids today are forced to watch crap. THUNDER...THUNDER... THUNDERCATS
(sorry if I duplicate any that were already mentioned)
Nightmare on Elm Street
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Amadeus
Neverending Story
Beverly Hills Cop
Police Academy
Revenge of the Nerds
Star Trek 3
Conan the Destroyer
Purple Rain
Toxic Avenger
Firestarter
Friday the 13th; the final chapter
Pope of Greenwich Village
Godzilla 1985
Once Upon A Time in America
Gremlins
This Is Spinal Tap
Romancing The Stone
These didn't make a lot of money, but they do have a certain cult charm:
Repo Man:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087995/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
The Brother From Another Planet:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087004/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Night Of The Comet:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087799/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
"Which was yes....destroy Russia, or number two"
Forgot THE NEVERENDING STORY came out that same year also.
Most men see things as they are & ask why, I dream things that never were & say why not
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Ah, fellow children of the '80's.... We are the last "tough" generation.
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank Kool-aid made with real white sugar. And, we weren't overweight. WHY?
Because we were always outside, playing...that's why!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times,we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations or X-boxes. There was no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms.
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Eyema souper jeanyus!!!
Stoopid78 i loved reading your post, i couldn't agree more. Makes me feel grateful for growing up during those times. I think we are going to have a lot of overweight adults in the future that are todays young kids. You brought back memories of my youth of being outside so much and just enjoying getting the fresh air. Feel a bit sorry for the kids today as most of them will never experience that.
"It's a trap"
Hear, hear martyfunkhouser. That was spot on Stoopid78. If there was a Bible for the 70's/80's Generation, your post would be the book of Leviticus .
Excellent post. I loved it.
’Cause there’s thunder in your heart... Every move is like lightning!
Stoopid alot of what you said was right but something's u got wrong like no cable? we got our cable in 87[uk].my dad had a mobile fone in 86,no cd's??cd;s was one of the best known inventions of the mid 80's,also we did have computer consoles spectrum,atari,nintendo[nes]master system[85][sega]+megadrive[88] my cozin got a Amiga500 in 87 32 bit was amazing!and we did have some form of internet in late 80s but you couldnt speak to people around the world with it.Yea i used to always play out with my mates as a kid but also loved playing on my nes got it for my birthday in 86 and dam you amercians you got it in 85 lol
sharejust a few points, cable was around in the 80's, but it wasn't as rampant as the 90's, and did not have hundreds of channels.
yeah, some people had mobile phones in the 80's. some people had them in the 60's too. the point is they were not ubiquitous yet.
you are correct about game consoles, but they certainly were nothing like xbox/playstation. also, we did have VHS tapes for our VCR's, which brought about their own drama... i had almost every single transformers episode on tape, until it got eaten the last time.
no, the public did not really have internet in the 80's. we did have BBS's though, which were cool as hell, and had some awesome games on them (for the time) you could speak to people around the world, but only on systems which linked to others (this logically evolved more into the internet you now know)
america got the nes in 85, but i didn't get mine untill 87, so you were still ahead of me there... but i got my commodore's, atari, and trash80 in 81-84.
oh, and master system was sega, nes was just NES (nintendo entertainment system) master system was sega's rival product.
Thank you for the reminder, Stoopid78.
I am guessing that the "78" is not merely a sequence number. Neither is the "46" in mine.
Remember cars without seat belts?
Remember 45-rpm singles?
Remember TV before VHS? Before color? Before remote controls?
I remember when Cleopatra went to the Temple of Ra to lead a few cheers.share
Did anyone mention The Ice Pirates? Great 1984 sci-fi spoof.
shareno dont think they did i rember though!blubber what did you think of my previous post to that user they wasnt making sense on 2nd half of it
shareDespite a tumultous childhood of neverending moves, I'll always love my demented father for the movies he brought home. Being an exec at an electronics firm, he knew how to copy virtually any copyrighted flick and loved to bring home every and any weird 80s flick from Re-Animator to Evil Dead. He taught me to love cinema, despite what it produced. Though I hate him now, I'll always love him for introduing me to the best of movies despite my age (I was watching R rated flicks at age 5). He granted me entrance into the world of Aliens, Return of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, and worse. For all our differences, we shared a love for horrific cinema.
http://tiny.cc/Proxies_of_Fate Our fate will be decided...
I have a soft spot for the mid-80s, because for a tiny window there were a bunch of blockbuster movies that were (a) big and bold and colourful AND (b) well-written, well-acted, with good characterisation. By the 1990s these two things seemed to become mutually incompatible - e.g. Independence Day, Lost in Space, Godzilla and so forth, which had lots of tiny people caught amidst enormous special effects - although thankfully things have improved a bit over the last decade.
I mean, Ghostbusters had some great lines ("they expect results", "mass hysteria!" etc) AND tonnes of special effects and action. Same with Gremlins. The critics back then tended to dismiss Raiders and Gremlins and the Star Wars films as mindless thrill rides, but they were dead wrong, so perhaps they are wrong today; but I can't see people caring much about the modern Transformers films in twenty years. There's a generation of actors growing up whose only experience of working on a film is of standing in front of a green backdrop, reacting to a set assistant holding a stick with a balloon on the end of it.
It's sort of heartbreaking to look through the box office charts for the decade. 1984 has a fantastic top ten - you forgot Splash, with Daryl Hannah's bum - but by 1986 there's Top Gun, which had a great soundtrack but wasn't in the same league and felt empty, and The Golden Child, which was awful, and Ruthless People(?) and something called Back to School. Star Trek IV hasn't aged well. But then again 1986 also had Aliens and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and further down the list The Fly, Pretty in Pink, Hannah and Her Sisters - a blockbuster! - and The Delta Force, which is awful but awesome at the same time. I notice that Hannah and Her Sisters grossed twice as much as Flight of the Navigator, which surprised me.
You know, 1989 has four sequels in the top ten, three of them with II (or 2) in the title. Did Star Trek V really make only $2m less than The Abyss? It did. 1989 is where the modern world seemed to take over.
I was 8 in 1984. My parents would of never let me see films like "Gremlins" or "Ghostbusters". However, I remember wanting to see "The Karate Kid" SOOO BAD!! Well, it ended up that friends of my parents wanted to see, but I had become so sick that couldn't go!!! Gosh, I was so sad...I had to wait until its VHS release.
I honestly don't remember "The Last Star Fighter" at all back then. Of course, since I've seen it...I've always thought it was average, kind of corny, but if I was a kid and saw I would of probably liked it. he film i most remember later as a 1984 film was "Sixteen Candles" but, again...a movie i don't remember back in 84.
I LOVED this movie when it came out - I saw it for the first time as a 15 year old kid in 1985. There was just something cool about the fantasy idea that while you may not have fit in here on earth, that you could be a hero in another galaxy where things were better.
For YEARS I claimed this was my favorite movie of all time.
There's something to be said for leaving memories alone and leaving these older movies as memories too. Don't get me wrong - I still really enjoy this movie, but when I watched it after buying it on DVD, I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't as good as I had remembered it, and it falls short enough that my son didn't even think it was that great.
It is what it is I suppose.
"My name is Gladiator"
I love nostalgia flicks. Just watched and it reminded me of how pumped I was as a kid thinking I could ace some video game, then go off and own an alien armada lol.
Amy: I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Actually, the 80's in general was a great time for movies.
Hollywood kinda sucks now.
§ Humans! You're not worth the flesh you're printed on! §
The best part of the summer of 1984 is that's when my daughter was born. And her mother and I took her to Last Starfighter, Ghostbusters,Temple of Doom, Star Trek III, Cloak and Dagger, Terminator etc. She was a very good baby and slept through all of those fun movies.
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