1982: The Greatest Geek Year Ever, Reaction

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28 thoughts on “1982: The Greatest Geek Year Ever, Reaction”

  6. Tron, Dark Crystal, Grease 2 (sue me I liked it), Poltergeist, ET, and Hasbro introduced the new GI Joe line that would end up laying a world of hurt on Star Wars. It was a great year. 1982 was also when Kenner finally released Luke Hoth after making me wait two years, and it's the only version of Luke they didn't include a lightsaber with even though he used it on the Wampa.

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  7. Oh my god!!! Every year of the 80's was a time!!! So many good movies to see!!! Saturdays were the best, movie then hang at the mall afterwards!!! Then go play!!!!🤘🤘🤘🤘

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  9. I didn't know this show existed. Looks like the VH1 "I Love the 80s" template, which I like, among others.
    Gotta admit seeing all those titles together is selling it as the best year pretty hard.
    It's almost been long enough that I have nostalgia for the 'I Love the 80s' show itself.

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  14. 82 has always been known for the year of Sci-Fi. The only other year that came close was 97. Me and my family saw all those movies except for Poltergeist. Some of those movies we saw twice.

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  15. What if I told you there was a year you could see movies directed by John Hughes, Tim Burton, James Cameron, Steven Speilberg (in collaboration with George Lucas), Spike Lee, Ron Howard, Richard Donner, Ivan Reitman, Rob Reiner, John G. Avildsen, Brian De Palma, Arthur Hiller, Joe Johnston, Peter Weir, and um…William Shatner…
    …and see movies starring actors the likes of John Candy, Steve Martin, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, MIchael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Patrick Swayze, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Robin Williams, and um…Weird Al Yankovic…

    …As well as see a brand new Roger Rabbit short cartoon in theaters?

    Wouldn't that be pretty amazing?
    How crazy would it be if I said it wasn't just over a year you could see all those movies but just over the Summer?

    It happened though!
    It was the legendary summer of 1989! Now I'm not ready to definitively say 1989 was the year, but it's a contender. I will say that Summer '89 was the most amazing movie Summer to have movies to go to! I'm not necessarily talking quality here but the quantity and sheer glut of films to look forward to.

    When I mention these movies, a lot of the franchise films, they are going to be at or near bottom entries for the franchise, but I ask you to take into account these movies not for the specific film but for how iconic the franchise was as a whole. It was still something to get excited about before seeing no matter how we felt after seeing it.

    Plus, a few franchises arguably had their best entries that summer! Then the stand alone films we got, so many of them became instant classics! Others became cult hits, some pretty big in intervening years, others modest but still loyal.

    These are the movies we got just for the 1989 Summer season (May – August):

    Tim Burton's Batman (Batman was so freaking HUGE that year!)

    Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
    Ghostbusters II
    Lethal Weapon 2
    License To Kill (James Bond XVI)
    Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
    The Karate Kid, Part III

    Honey, I Shrunk the Kids! (Which showed with the new Roger Rabbit cartoon short "Tummy Trouble")

    The Abyss
    Dead Poets Society
    Do The Right Thing
    Roadhouse
    Lock Up
    Great Balls of Fire
    Casualties Of War
    Hear No Evil, See No Evil
    When Harry Met Sally
    Uncle Buck
    Parenthood
    Weekend At Bernies
    UHF
    Turner & Hooch
    Little Monsters

    Millenium (One of those very obscure cult films, but if you like time travel movies that take their "time" telling the story, I recommend this movie!)

    The Return Of Swamp Thing
    Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
    A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

    That was just the summer!

    If we take into account the rest of the year there was also:
    Back to the Future, Part II
    The Little Mermaid (the animated one, the birth of the Disney Renaissance!)
    Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
    Major League
    The Burbs
    Three Fugitives (A seriously funny and underrated Martin Short/Nick Nolte film!)
    Cyborg
    Field Of Dreams
    My Left Foot
    Born on the 4th of July

    Harlem Nights (Eddie Murphy's gangster extravaganza flick, along with Murphy you get the legends Richard Pryor, Redd Fox, and Della Reese. Sadly it was panned by critics and considered the beginning of Eddie Murphy's fall from mega stardom. The saddest thing is while I dont think its great, I think it's a pretty good movie!)

    Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (Since the release of the first Police Academy movie in 1984, we got a sequel each and every year for the rest of the 80's. For movie critics it was torture. For average movie goers it was something to see and, more or less, we were entertained. As the 80's closed out, so did the tradition of getting a new Police Academy movie every year. This was the last one to be released except for a few years later when Mission To Moscow came out and even the most forgiving of Police Academy fans had to accept that movie was crap.)

    K-9 (Now of course Tom Hanks can act circles around Jim Belushi, but when it comes to cop and dog partner movies, K-9 in my opinion is so far superior to Turner & Hooch!)

    Deep Star Six
    Leviathan
    (1989 was the year for under the sea adventure/action/horror. Deep Star Six and Leviathan, comsidered inferior films, came out earlier in the year, then later we got The Abyss and The Little Mermaid.)

    Lean On Me
    Glory
    Driving Miss Daisy
    (3 freaking Morgan Freeman movies in 1 year! If that's all I had for 1989 it would still need to be considered as a great year!)

    In October we got Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. So weak sauce as it was, still the BIG 3 in 80's slasher pics all represented that year!

    The Wizard (Nintendo was about to release one of it's biggest games ever, Super Mario Bros. 3, and decided to celebrate it by making a movie that was a 90 minute Nintendo commercial. I'm convinced it happened like this…
    Someone in the board room said "It can't just all be a commercial for 90 minutes, doesn't it have to be somewhat a movie?"
    Then another executive who had just rented the Sylvester Stallone movie "Over the Top" and had the VHS tape in front of him just pointed to it and said: "Just copy this for the framework of the movie part…"
    And the movie ended up being freaking awesome!)

    Tango and Cash (released at the end of December, the last big budget action movie of the decade, and it closes out the decade as one of the 80's-est action movies ever!)

    I mean, what a year! We had The Little Mermaid, an Indiana Jones movie, Michael Keaton as Batman… how could a year like that miss?
    …
    Wait…never mind!

    Almost finished here, I promise! Just want to add a little more, because we also had some very geek-out worthy television going on too!

    Star Trek: The Next Generation entered its third season in Fall 1989, it had been struggling the first two seasons and revamped itself for Season 3 and that is considered one of the show's best seasons and when TNG came into its own and became the legendary series it is.

    We had a live action Superboy TV series running in syndication, produced by Ilya Salkind, one of the producers of the first 3 Superman movies. The Superboy series, for being so restricted by its budget still, eventually, started putting out some great episodes.

    The cartoon series Ducktales was popular at the time and added a new character that year, Gizmo Duck. Premiering him on a network television special in a 2 hour movie (which became 5 episodes of the regular series) on NBC on Easter Sunday.

    Following the Ducktales movie NBC aired another made-for-TV-movie that turned out to be the pilot episode of a new series… Quantum Leap! The series debuted in 1989 and has since taken its place as one of the best time travel shows ever!

    We also got reacquainted with some old friends:
    The TV movie Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman aired that year.

    Also airing: The Trial of the Incredible Hulk which introduced us to a new character, Matt Murdock, also known as Daredevil. It was the first live-action appearance of Daredevil!

    In video games… Both the Sega Genesis and the original Nintendo Gameboy was released in 1989!

    I apologize for the crazy long comment. 1989 was just an amazing year and lately I've kind of been really into investigating just how good/significant it was and I now take any chance I can to talk about it.

    Best Regards!

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  18. To be honest, my favorite year has to be 1987. By then I was more knowledgeable about the world because, in '82, I sometimes couldn't fall asleep because I was worried about nuclear war, and so I begged my mom to let me have a book about Soviet military power. That explained quite a bit and that stymied my fears (I'm a big military dork.) Although 1982 was a decent year for me because I did learn more about Star Wars, since my best friend had all the books, art of Star Wars, the sketchbooks, etc. But in some ways deep down I'll never accept that Star Wars was over with an '83! At least for me until 1992.

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  24. The greatest 'geek' year is like the greatest era for music; it's whenever you personally were growing up, roughly around adolescence. It's not a huge stretch (Armstrong) of the mind to (action) figure this out. 😆👍

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  25. Actually, Junkman, without your ragging and insights, I would probably reject it as a show cuz it looks corporate and Gen Z friendly. 82 was alright. We got Poltergeist and we were aware of the event which would occur Next Summer, we just didn't realize that Jabba Palace Leia would blend our love of the Force with 13 year old hormones for quite a magical nerd enhancement 😂PS, Junkman turn your damn mic up when you do hot off the cuff commentary! Imagine legendary Metallica producer Bob Rock screaming at you from an isolated control booth each time your lips get to a distance greater than 6 inches from that little black Light Saber called the mic! PPS My aunt Nancy had an awesome job at Texas Instruments at this time, so care to guess which lucky kid got a real life Muthaf*ckin' Speak N Spell?!!! …Do you give up?! It was totally me!!!

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