re: Is the 80’s and 90’s the two best decades the best 20 years known to mankind..

They're the best decades if you want lots of murder, rape, and other violent crimes:





These discussions are always based in nostalgia. You can always guess the ages of people based on how they describe the 70s/80s/90s. However, media of the eras has not been erased and shows that the outlook was bleak and anxiety was high.

Outside of crime, I remember the 80s to an extent and it was filled with lots of economic anxiety and a fear that the Japanese were about to become our overlords. You can see this in various media of the time (Die Hard, Rising Sun, Black Rain, etc.).

The 90s were even more bleak. Gangsta rap and the East Coast-West Coast rap wars dominated the culture. Also, the crime was getting so bad in the 80s and 90s that you had real scary projections of just how bad the mid-late 90s were going to be. Robocop, Demolition Man, etc.

Outside of comedies (and to a large extent, fantasies) like John Hughes movies, projecting the time on screen was very bleak with lots of grit, grime, and anxiety. These were not the halcyon days that we remember as kids because (a) we were kids and (b) we were less developed and ignorant kids b/c of the lack of the internet. We were allowed to live in a fantasy and believe it while the world crumbled around us.