Popular Culture: 1980-1999

Popular Culture: 1980-1999 — page 3 — such as eBay Popular youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s In the 1980s and 1990s youths would spend their time listening to rap on their boom boxes or perhaps pop on their Sony Walkmans They might go to the local video arcade to play video games such as Donkey Kong or Pac-Man or later in the decade go to their friends houses to play Dungeons and Dragons or The Legend of Zelda on their home computer BMX biking skateboarding and inline skating were fun and fashionable Roller discos were at their peak in the 1980s but had virtually disappeared by the end of the 1990s Special effects and computer-generated images CGI of films impressed movie goers and 3-D films tried to make Jaws 3 even scarier The Rubik’s cube filled many a frustrated hour in the 1980s as people tried to figure out how to get all of the same color squares onto the same side of the cube

Popular Culture: 1980-1999 — page 4

Popular Culture: 1980-1999 — page 5 — Skateboarding was all the rage in the 1990s What was the world like in the 1980s and 1990s The 1980s was a time of strikes and job losses with factories and mines shutting down and an economic recession leading to high

Popular Culture: 1980-1999 — page 6 — unemployment But business was booming in finance with yuppies seeming to get rich quick That was until the stock markets collapsed on Black Monday October 19 1987 in the United States and Black Wednesday September 16 1992 in the United Kingdom 1 Politics Former film star Ronald Reagan became president of the United States in 1980 and governed until 1988 when Vice President George H W Bush won the election In the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher became the first female British prime minister in 1979 and governed until 1990 She earned the nickname Iron Lady from the Soviet press because of her strong anticommunist beliefs 2 Together with Reagan Thatcher ensured the Cold War continued The Cold War started between the Soviet Union and the United States following the end of World War II The war was fought mainly on political and economic fronts not on a battlefield The Cold War began to break down in the late 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union Gorbachev introduced reforms into the Soviet Union that eventually led to the collapse of the union in 1991 In 1993 Bill Clinton became president of the United States and oversaw the country’s longest peacetime economic expansion 3 In 1997 Tony Blair became the youngest prime minister of Britain since 1812 4

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