the list of 9 for july 16, 2008:
NINE REASONS WHY 1987 WAS THE WORST YEAR FOR AMERICAN CULTURE
I probably should have put this list up in 2007, to serve as some sort of twentieth anniversary,but frankly I hadn't written it yet. Anyway, while any given year will have its share of good andbad movies, songs and other cultural touchstones, I grimly recall a year in which almosteverything was really, really bad. Worthless, unmemorable, cynically made... just bad. Andthat year was 1987. Behold:
- MOVIES: Apart from cult favorites like RoboCop, FullMetal Jacket, The Princess Bride and The Untouchables, 1987 was filled with insipidhits that insulted even the lowest common denominator audiences: Three Men and a Baby wasthe box office champ, followed by embarrassments such as Mannequin, Beverly Hills Cop II, Harryand the Hendersons, The Secret of My Success and Dirty Dancing. And Cher was the year'smost popular actor.
- TELEVISION: Along with many terrible sitcoms at their peakof popularity (Growing Pains, Webster, Who's the Boss, Mr. Belvedere - must I go on?),once-respectable shows like Moonlighting, Miami Vice, Magnum P.I., Cagney & Lacey, FamilyTies and St. Elsewhere had jumped the shark and were limping to a close. The onlynotable series to debut in 1987 were on the brand new Fox network (Married with Children, 21Jump Street, Tracey Ullman... not exactly cherished today). True, Star Trek: The NextGeneration first aired this year, but even Trekkies agree that its 87-88 season sucked.
- MUSIC: There remains respectability associated with theyear's top seller, U2's The Joshua Tree (though I'm sick of it; are you?), along with twodivisive but still classic albums (George Michael's Faith and Guns 'n' Roses' Appetitefor Destruction, neither of which became big until 1988), but 1987 was a bleak year for pop,one in which Tiffany, Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, a defanged Pink Floyd, MichaelJackson's Bad and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack were all top sellers.
- LITERATURE: Bill Cosby and his sweater had the #1nonfiction bestseller, Fatherhood, which is as unessential as you would imagine. At the topof the fiction charts: Stephen King, as usual (with The Tommyknockers - not quite up therewith The Stand), along with Reaganite warmonger Tom Clancy and his first two novels. Thiswas also the year that Shirley MacLaine sold a lot of books about her past lives. And DanielleSteele was big. The only classic novel from 1987 was Toni Morrison's Beloved, withTom Wolfe's overrated The Bonfire of the Vanities a distant second.
- NEWS AND POLITICS: Nothing good happened this year. As forthe bad: Oliver North took the fifth in the Iran-Contra hearings, Reagan escaped all blame bysaying "I do not recall," we had to endure Robert Bork's doomed nomination to the Supreme Court,Gary Hart dropped out of the presidental race after being caught cheating on his wife (1987 willgo down as the year of the frizzy-haired, scandal-associated bimbo: remember the trifecta of FawnHall, Donna Rice and Jessica Hahn - televangelist Jim Bakker's "indiscretion"?), and the stockmarket took its biggest dive in history on "Black Monday."
- ANIMATION: Awful, pre-Cartoon Network offerings includedALF (the cartoon), G.I. Joe, He-Man, Jem, Transformers and Thundercats. I know thatsome of you currently aged 25 to 35 will have some nostalgia for these programs. But they werebadly written, artlessly designed and very, very poorly animated. And with Disney in the dumps andshort-lived competitor Don Bluth between films, there was nothing at the theaters. It would be twomore years before The Little Mermaid would make animated features popular again, and twomore before Ren & Stimpy changed the face of TV cartoons.
- TOYS: I might as well just copy and paste what I wrote for"animation," only I can't forget the repulsive Garbage Pail Kids. Otherwise, along with the above,you've got your Care Bears, your Garfield tie-ins, your My Little Pony... all total junk.
- VIDEO GAMES: The golden age of the arcade was over.Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders... all relics of the past. And none of the post-Atarihome video game systems had come out yet. 1987 did see the debuts for Street Fighter, DoubleDragon and The Legend of Zelda - big developments for the industry, I suppose, butmeaningless to me.
- FASHION: Where do I start? Mullets on men? Big shaggymanes on women? Acid-washed jeans on everybody? None of these has been revived even as other,slightly less regrettable 1980s fashions have come back in vogue. Good riddance.
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