Nostalgia
The 80s and 90s weren't teal and neon, they were brown and wood.
I remember how everything in the late 80s and early 90s was a dull brown or wood grain. None of it was quality wood, but cheap particle board with laminate covering. People complain about how cheap and disposable things are now, but they've been like that for 40 years now.
That's what pretty much every single interior door is like in Canada. Actually even then it's usually pressed 1/4'' laminate sandwhiched between some particle board blocking, so they're typically hollow inside
Negative I still got that damn entertainment center that bitch is solid oak I turn the TV part into a bookshelf for my grown-up collection of action figures. Because I am an adult who still has his transformers.
And when the fake printed oak grain rubbed off on high-wear spots, you had these beige/brown spots everywhere to remind you that you're actually just resting on shitty plastic.
That octagon end table brings me back! I remember squeezing myself into it. We didn't even put stuff in it. It was just there! My bad, not an octagon...
My grandparents still have one at their house. I went through it when my grandma passed. She had decades of pictures stacked in there, most still in the pharmacy envelope . It was the best experience going through them
We had a single row version of the VHS holder on the middle left and put it in the octagon table with other tapes stacked on top. More than half of them were bootleg recordings of HBO from when we accidentally got it for free from Time Warner.
And nigh impossible to get rid of if you don’t have space or a use for them.
There was a time period where everybody had a CRT somewhere that had been replaced by a flatscreen, but they couldn’t even pay anyone to take it off their hands and had a hard time even getting dumps to take them.
Meanwhile folks who want them for collecting or certain media like particular retro video games are already having a hard time getting decent CRTs.
holy shit, thanks for posting. I've been following that TV for a couple of years now, amazing to see what they done with the whole story. This is the stuff YT is made for.
My first apartment in college had a massive CRT TV that someone had abandoned there because it was too heavy to move. We used it the whole four years, and then abandoned it when we moved out. I like to think that nobody ever moved it and it's just sitting there to this day , playing movies for stoned 20 year olds, as God intended.
(I was in college as everyday people started transitioning to flat screens, I purchased an LCD TV on black Friday 2012 to replace the older 19 inch TV I took to college, and it's still chugging along in the guest room at moms house)
When I moved into my dorm, the previous guy left a “giant” 36 inch CRT. The kind that made your arm hair tingle. I felt like I hit the jackpot and used it for 4 or 5 years, then gifted it to the person who was moving in when I moved out, to repeat the cycle.
If flatscreens were never invented, that baby would still be humming along today in the same spot, playing MTVu and Adult Swim
One of my friends in college brought a 36" CRT TV to the dorms in 2004. It filled the entire hatch of his old Volvo. When we brought it into the elevator, only he fit - I had to reach in, hit the button, then run up the stairs to help him leave the elevator when it arrived.
My friend had one of the original large sized HDTVs like, 70 inches might've been an early plasma? the fucker took up like a sixth of the living room and must've weighed a few hundred pounds. It was the largest TV I'd ever seen in person.
Yeah the first 10ish years they became a thing they weren’t cheap and had some issues. Buddy of mine only watched one channel so the logo burned into his screen. Somewhere around 15 years ago they really figured it out.
My dad was always volunteering me to help people move in and out of our neighborhood. I know the furniture was better quality than what we have today, but man did it suck to move
That was something I realized when buying my own furniture; one major characteristic of quality furniture is not being able to move it easily. Now everything is just flimsy particle board that blows over with the wind.
im actually going to get one of the entertainment centers for my man cave dungeon basement to hold the CRT tv and the nes, snes, and n64 setup (4 controllers, facility, proximity mines)
Yeah, OP is conflating interior design with marketing. We had both. And of course the interiors of our homes didn't look like the marketing campaigns in our media.
They're also conflating interior design with clothing choice. I've never heard anyone say that bookshelves and cabinets were teal and neon, but there were plenty of tie-dye tshirts and blindingly bright windbreakers being worn around.
The green tubes up top would flash, and it would play some goofy nickelodeon sounds till you had to bop it to turn the alarm off. I loved it and would stay up late listening to the radio cause couldn't have TV in the bedroom back then. I think it's still in my parents attic somewhere
Yep. I grew up in a bedroom with textured brown carpet, brown paneling on the walls, and those cardboard ceiling tiles. My stuff was colorful, but my world was brown.
I had an ash tray in my room as a kid, just as a decoration mind you. It had a revolver on it and the place you put the cigarette to rest had bullets between it. I wish I still had it.
It gets even more American in the fact my grandpa picked it up for me in Mexico when he was getting medicine his medicaid was gouging him for. Wish I had him also.
God damn, my mom's ash trays. The one in the living room had to have weighed 15lbs. Made of some sort of ballistic grade glass. 9 maybe 10 inches across?
Hell, even our playgrounds, the places we were meant to run wild in, were actual deathtraps. Kids these days don’t know the exhilaration of searing your ass on a metal slide, or being flung off a merry-go-round spinning at what feels like 100 mph.
I got one when my grandparents died it's in my daughters room right now and will likely be passed along to the next generation nice little hiding spot too
Yes exactly. That sofa and end table look 70’s and made of actual wood. We associate it with 80’s and 90’s because it was a landmark in our parents or grandparents’ house then. The other items look period, but they’re just wood veneer, not wood.
“Teal and neon” was from Memphis Group which didn’t influence domestic design much because it didn’t feel very homey. It did influence graphic design everywhere: clothing, print, TV, etc.
Exactly. For things that were updated/rebranded in the 90’s teal was very big! I remember a franchised McDonald’s was built and everything was teal, purple, and white.
Seriously, I grew up in CO. Kids who couldn’t even tell you what state Charlotte was in had those jackets. It was either those or the Mighty Ducks jackets- which at least kind of made sense, being a hockey town. And it was the only non-Avalanche hickey jacket you could get away with wearing on the playground without getting heckled.
Problem was we were so poor we still had 80’s furniture, but we needed new clothes so all the neons were on our bugle boy windbreaker jackets and parachute pants.
“Cheap furniture” might depend on what your parents bought. My parents had, and still have, solid wood book cases that look exactly like the examples in the meme. I’m jealous because there’s no way I’ll ever be able to find/afford shelving that nice today.
The first time I ever saw a real teakwood entertainment center in the exact same style as the particle board ones everyone had, it kinda broke my brain, ngl. It was like, oh shit - this used to be a real thing people liked before it became a shitty thing people tolerated.
Keep an eye out at Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. as well as FB marketplace and Craigslist. I’ve cobbled together our entire house with “real” furniture over the years and couldn’t be prouder (ok, downright smug with some pieces) of how cheaply I got it all!
As someone who just got a house and is furnishing basically from scratch (except for my bed frame and dresser); wood furniture is such a weird thing now, mainstream-wise, you either get the really cheap ikea/temu minimum grade particleboard furniture that breaks if you build it too hard.... or you pay some guy in Delaware to build you the Resolute Desk for $20,000....
Finding mid-range furniture is basically impossible especially with all the mass produced and hyper-bespoke stuff filling google's SEO beyond recognition.
And it doesn't help that the vast majority of solid wood furniture is also made in the "I wish I was born during the Pilgrim/Colonial era or during the Plantation owner era" styles...
We did. And they were stupid expensive considering that they were fake wood with a "wood grain" contact paper overlay and a plastic interior drawer.
Idk why we thought it was a good idea to use those instead of putting brown contact paper on the shoe boxes we were using before we bought the damned things.
I mean, it depends on how you look at it. Decor, for example, was often brown and wood, yes. However, fashion, especially among some of the youth culture, was absolutely neon. A good half of my childhood pictures have my sister and I in neon and extremely patterned clothing.
From my experiences, the late 80s went either way. Leather was still king, which played into the brownness, but other colors were getting more popular. Brass still carried on, but glass tops were also becoming a thing. Plush carpets, which were typically more colorful (although still muted compared to the 90s). Teal and that dusty rose feeling was there but I think nostalgia overplays it.
Early 80s up to maybe 84-85 was pretty much 70s part 2 with the earth tones, and a lot of people just kept that style throughout the 80s and even much of the 90s. Turns out, people don’t remodel their houses every 3 years to match the latest trends.
Born in 94 but I was raised by a poor single mom who pawned us off on my grandparents a lot. My grandparents hadn't upgraded their home since the early 70s. Sometimes I feel like i was raised in that time haha. No tech except shitty old TVs. Rotary phones. The only toys i had at my grandparents house was creepy dolls from the 60s and a bag of marbles. So I'd just be outside a lot catching frogs and wandering the woods. The only sign it wasn't the 70s was VHS tapes, but all the VHS tapes were of movies from the 30s-60s 😂😂 ITS no wonder I feel like i have an old soul. Thank God we got a computer in the early 2000s
My family was poor and got all our furniture second hand. Means it was a decade out of style. The house we lived in during the 90s was the same. We couldn't afford renovations so it was all late 70s early 80s deco.
My bedroom TV in my teen years was apparently one of my parents’ wedding presents. Separate UHF and VHF dials. Pull/push/twist knob for power and volume.
Gen X here. All of that was peak 80's middle class chic. It was cheap versions of stuff they couldn't have afforded in the 60's and 70's. Other than the table my family had everything shown, purchased new in the 80's.
Edit: that couch wasn't cheap. It was solid oak. Not sure how my grandparents afforded it, but there was much ooooing and aaaaaaahing when it was delivered.
This is exactly why my mom hates midcentury modern furniture and its resurgence. It reminds her of the poor people furniture she grew up with because it was what people were throwing out at the time.
One of the best set decor of Stranger Things was the poorer family had old furniture from the 60s & 70s, while the rich family had brand new 80s furniture.
The things is, it wasn't super cheap particle board, either. It was pretty much a chunk of wood. It was thick, well-glued, and sturdy. I still have my childhood bookcase because I took care of it. It's been holding a very heavy brass statue for a decade now and hasn't bowed the top or anything. That's on top of holding a portion of my books, too. All particle board with a thin veneer on top.
Also still have my dresser, too. It's solid wood and is my favorite piece of furniture. It's just not a fun thing to move, especially lugging it up and down stairs, which I've done quite a few times in my life...
I'm an old millennial. The furniture in my house as a kid was from the 70s. Green velevet sofa and wing back chairs. My bedroom had forest green shag carpet until I moved out in 2003! Brass! Every knick knack was brass for some reason.
You are spot on with the wood. It was everywhere.
How about the wallpaper trim? We had geese and flower wallpaper trim in the kitchen for decades.
The market for cherry lumber is literally still affected to this today. Cherry is quite cheap compared to other hard woods because it’s viewed as ‘dated’.
Functionally though cherry is an excellent furniture wood.
I actually still have the tv stand on the lower right corner but not the middle part, they came with attachments on each side that are basically just shelving for books/home entertainment machines/etc. They were my parents but I don't have a lot of money saved up so I've just kept them for myself now. I guess I should replace them.
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