CCA 72 Popular Culture in the 80

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CCA 72 Popular Culture in the 80sDate
Day

• Cultural Fact A sad day in our history was
  January 28, 1986, when space shuttle Challenger
  exploded 74 seconds after liftoff at Cape
  Canaveral, Florida killing all seven astronauts,
  including school teacher Christa McAuliffe.
• This day in History
• Class work
• Homework

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AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE IN THE EIGHTIES

• The 1980s became the Me! Me! Me! generation of
  status seekers.   During the 1980s, hostile
  takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and mega-mergers
  spawned a new breed of billionaire.  Donald
  Trump, Leona Helmsley, and Ivan Boesky icons of a
  the meteoric rise and fall of the rich and
  famous.  If you've got it, flaunt it and You can
  have it all! were watchwords.

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Reaganomics and the American Class Structure
"The economic distance between rich and poor,
between well paid and poorly paid, is higher
today than at any time in the lifetimes of all
but our most senior citizens, the veterans of the
Great Depression." Televisual Celebration of
Wealth in 1980s America Dynasty, Dallas,
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous The Rise of
the "Yuppie"
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Whats a Yuppie ?

• Informal for (y)oung (U)rban (P)rofessional, or
  Yup. turned into yuppie in the 1980's. A term
  used to describe someone who is young, possibly
  just out of college, and who has a high-paying
  job and an affluent lifestyle. Can now be used to
  describe any rich person who is not modest about
  their financial status. Yuppiedom (yuppie-dum)is
  a term used to describe an involvement in being a
  yuppie.
• Yuppie-I'm going to go drive my ferrari to the
  seafood place for a 500 lobster.

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Binge buying and credit became a way of life and
'Shop Til you Drop' was the watchword.  Labels
were everything, even (or especially) for our
children.  Tom Wolfe dubbed the baby-boomers as
the 'splurge generation.'  Video games, aerobics,
minivans, camcorders, and talk shows became part
of our lives.   The decade began with
double-digit inflation,
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Promotional Photograph for Dynasty
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Screen Source Presents 20 Most Popular TV Shows
in the Eighties Background information on Dallas
(1978-1991)
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Greed is Good

• the film has come to be seen as the archetypal
  portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas's
  character memorably declaring that "greed, for
  lack of a better word, is good". It has also
  proven influential in inspiring people to work on
  Wall Street

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Blue-Collar Workers' Declining Standard of
Living Problems of the Inner City 1. influx of
immigrants and ethnic polarization 2. inner-city
unemployment and crime 3. skyrocketing
incarceration rates for African-American and
Latino men
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Not everyone got rich

• Reagan declared a war on drugs, Kermit didn't
  find it easy to be green, hospital costs rose, we
  lost many, many of our finest talents to AIDS
  which before the decade ended spread to black and
  Hispanic women, and  unemployment rose.

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Families changed drastically during these years. 
The 80s continued the trends of the 60s and 70s -
more divorces, more unmarried's living together,
more single parent families.  The two-earner
family was even more common than in previous
decades, more women earned college and advanced
degrees, married, and had fewer children.
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