C: With the recent release of Transformers 2 and GI:JOE – The Rise of Cobra (is that the sweetest name for anything ever, or what?) I’ve been subjected to endless crying about how nothing good has come out of the 80s, and that I need to grow up. I agree with this completely. PSYCH! The 80s were a beautiful time, where entertainment for entertainment’s sake was allowed to flourish. Josh and I argue often over this, because his parents banned him from participating in the 80s.

J: I’m beginning to sympathise with them. If I’d been around to witness the horror foisted upon the children of the 80s by a broken pop culture, I would have told me that all the toys my friends were playing with were demonic and would land me in hell too. The 80s were indefensible.

C: Ahh, broken pop culture. The 80s was the time that pretentious wankery forgot. Back then, you could enjoy something without having to worry about its relevance to blah blah blah. Back then it was okay to look up at a soldier who beat down baddies (with guns, not extreme sports or some shit), all in the name of being a good guy. Back then it was okay to sing a song about how great it is to drink and fuck without some socially repressed underdog trying to pin some homosexual subtext to you. And looking back, you can laugh at it, and yourself, without feeling ashamed that you once genuinely loved it.

J: The fact that people didn’t pick you up on it (so to speak) doesn’t mean that homosexual subtext didn’t exist; rather, it flourished in movies like Top Gun. Sure, it’s a great movie, but it is entirely about manly love, and it simply can’t be any other way. My problem with the 80s is that it somehow allowed us to pretend that pretentiousness didn’t exist. It gifted us things like GI Joe, that happy cartoon about American hegemony free of any redeeming subtext. War was peace, not to mention awesome. The good guy (mostly embodied in he who would become the Governator) always won. The 80s weren’t about a lack of pretention; they were the definition of pretention. The 80s lied to us, man.

C: Yeah, looking at it from today’s perspective. The argument seems to centre on entertainment, which should have been mentioned earlier, but for a brief period we got actual entertainment - to be more specific, greater escapism. No-one’s going to sit and pretend that “the good guy always wins” is true in real life. It’s not about real life. For one half-decade or so, you could actually go to the cinema and watch the good guy always win, and completely forget about whatever shithouse corner of the world was on the news. Not that it should be forgotten about, but you need to be able to take a break. These days especially, there’s this inability to get away from our six O’clock summary of why the world sucks. No wonder people can’t take a step back and be excellent to each other anymore.

J: Is that 80s-esque homosexual innuendo?

C: Sure, but it’s your own fault if your diet of social commentary and genre deconstruction left you unable to get over it and have a laugh.

J: But that was a joke! See, you’re taking it all too seriously. You’re putting 80s culture up on this hallowed pedestal where it just doesn’t deserve to be. The whole point of the 80s is so we can now define ourselves in opposition to it, and laugh ourselves stupid at it. “Oh, man, we were stupid back then. We’re not like that now. Hahahaha. Oh, what fools we were.”

C: Pfft. We could play at that all night. What I said was a joke at the expense of your ridiculous persecution complex of a community that excludes you! Ha. Of course it’s up on a pedestal; the 80s was a culture of worship. I’m going back to the escapism point, which you haven’t addressed and I’d guess is the moot of this argument. Fun for the sake of fun before we go back to the real world, which seems sorely lacking lately. As for your defining ourselves in opposition argument, that doesn’t fit well with the assertion that nothing good came from it, but the irony in your quotes is again half the fun in looking back at it.

J: You may not have wanted me to have the last word but I’m the editor so: We still have escapism now, only the graphics are better.

T: Yeah, those 80s. So controversial. When the lights are on in your house, you can’t see outside but people can see in. Please don’t touch my soft machine.

D: In the 80s I went from 0 – 8, which is sort of like 80s backwards. Wait, I don’t need to be here. Bye Josh!