RINKER ON COLLECTIBLES — Column #1490

Copyright © Harry Rinker, LLC 2015

The 1980s Are Old

When asked “how do you know when you are old,” my stock answer is when a television series is set in your youth.  Age is relative. What is old to a young adult in his/her twenties may not seem old to a senior citizen in his/her sixties.  It is a matter of perspective.

Most television shows are set in contemporary or futuristic time.  Viewers watching the first run of “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave it to Beaver” identified with the setting.  The homes were identical to the one in which they lived, a neighbor, or the period ideal as pictured in contemporary magazines such as “Better Homes and Gardens” and “Woman’s Home Companion.

When “Happy Days” premiered on ABC on January 15, 1974, I was 33.  I was married with two young children.  I will refrain from commenting on whether these were happy days for me.  When “Happy Days” ended its initial run in September 1984, I was about to turn 44.  I was divorced and remarried.  Oh, happy days!

“Happy Days” traced the lives of its fictional cast members from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.  Numerous episodes rekindled simplified youthful memories.  I identified with the show because it provided a fictional (more real than most realized) romanticizing of the adolescence that I wish I had led as opposed to the one that I did.

The means by which collecting transitions from one decade to the next among young collectors is a topic that fascinates me.  The answers help determine what makes a decade’s collectibles hot, what cools collecting interest in a decade, how this question impacts collecting in the short, intermediate, and long term, and what role the media and other outside groups play in the process.  During my time tracking movement within the antiques and collectibles trade, I have watched interest in 1950s and 1960s collectibles rise and fade.  The 1970s is struggling to hold its position as “king of the hill.”  The 1980s is the challenger.  It will not be long before it succeeds.

[Author’s Aside #1:  In addition to tracking the settings of television shows, I also follow the songs currently played on Oldies radio and elevator music.  The days of Engelbert Humperdinck and Wayne Newton are gone.  Oldies radio and elevator music relies heavily on music from the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Courtney Michelle [Harrison] Love was born on July 9, 1964.  She is now 50.  Although still performing, her debut music dates from the 1980s and early 1990s.  Her present day audience consists primarily of adults from this time period.  To them, this seems like yesterday. ]

“Do the math” is one of my favorite responses to individuals trying to understand why something does or does not attract young collectors.  If you were 18 in 1980, you are 53 in 2015.  If you were 18 in 1990, you are now 43.  Fifty is old, especially to young adults in their late twenties and thirties.  Forty is iffy.  Growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I considered 45 old.  Today, the number is closer to 55 or 60.  Those who are 53 are rapidly approaching 55.

For those individuals who prefer to collect their youth, the key acquisition years are the late 30s through the early 60s.  The generation who were adolescents or young adults during the 1980s are in the middle of this collecting tradition.  The 1980s are the hot decade.  The evolution into collecting 1980s memorabilia is following the same pattern as previous decade collecting transitions.

Driving home from East Lansing to Kentwood, Michigan, following a day of instruction at the Institute for the Study of Antiques and Collectibles’ 2015 Antiques and Collectibles Summer Camp, I was listening to National Public Radio.  A commentator was talking about the new television series slated for fall 2015.  The commentator noted that several of the shows were set in the 1980s.  The alarm bells went off in my head.  If true, this is additional validation that the 1980s is a hot decade.  A hot decade is one that rekindles memories for the generation who were adolescents and young adults during that time and who now feel a desire to recapture these memories by buying collectibles from that decade.  Whether they actual owned or did not own an example is immaterial.

I identified five shows scheduled for fall 2015 debuts – “Fargo,” “The Goldbergs”, “Halt and Catch Fire,” “Red Oak”, and ”Show Me a Hero.”  “Fargo,” a dark comedy-crime series inspired by the 1966 film “Fargo,” returns for its second season.  In its first season, the show was set in January 2006.  The second season takes place in 1979 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Luverne, Minnesota.  Lou Solverson, a Vietnam veteran and state police office, investigates a gang and syndicated related crime as well as works with the detail responsible for protecting Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan when he visits Fargo.

The third season of the “The Goldbergs,” produced by Adam F. Golderg, premieres on September 23, 2015.  The show is set in the early 1980s.  The premise involves Adam, a period geek, using a video camera to document his family.  The family consists of Adam’s mother and father, a sister Erica, an older brother Barry, and a grandfather named “Pops.”  The show is a comedy, meaning there is little normal about the Goldbergs.

[Author’s Aside #2:  I have not viewed an episode of “The Goldbergs.”  For me, “The Goldbergs” always will be the black and white television show that first aired on NBC in 1949.  The television show was an adaptation from radio, as were many early television shows.  “The Goldbergs” (“Rise of the Goldbergs”), a cross between a comedy and drama, followed the lives of a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York,   Eventually, the Goldbergs moved from their tenement to the suburbs.  The radio show, developed by Gertrude Berg, ran from 1929 to 1946.  The television version ended in 1956.]

The second season of “Halt and Catch Fire” ran during the summer of 2015.  The show is set in Dallas in 1983.  Three individuals – an engineer, a prodigy, and a visionary – see the potential flaws in IBM’s personal computer and the opportunity to develop a competitor to the IBM PC.  AMC is currently assessing whether there will be a third season of the show.

“Red Oaks,” a comedy, is an Amazon product.  In 1985, a young college student between his sophomore and junior years works as a tennis instructor for the summer at the exclusive “Red Oaks” country club located in suburban New Jersey.  Reviewing the initial press and internet releases, “Red Oaks” does not classify as family entertainment.

“Show Me a Hero” is based on Lisa Belken’s 1999 book of the same name.  The miniseries focused on a white middle-class neighborhood’s resistance to a federally-mandated public housing development in Yonkers, New York.  The storyline extends from 1987 to 1994.

Reruns of 1950s through 1960s black and white television programming on Nickelodeon, AMC’s “Mad Men,” and similar period television program revivals have not been successful in stimulating younger collectors’ interest in period memorabilia.  Members from the generations watching these shows who were not alive during the initial broadcast do not feel a kinship with the licensed products of these shows.  They did not own and/or play with it.   It is the archaic quaintness of shows such as “I Dream of Jeannie” and “The Brady Bunch” that attracts younger views.

The current shows set in the 1980s are different.  Like “Happy Days,” they will help define the period in which they are set.  First, they encourage younger viewers to think of the 1980s as the distant past and provide a nostalgic look back for the forty- and fiftysomething generations.   Second, the settings of these shows will clarify what should be considered iconic objects from the 1980s.  The decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s are well defined by collectors.  Although it will take another three to five years before the 1980s are clearly defined from a collecting perspective, these shows are a start.

Finally, the 1980s is a meaningless period to anyone born after 1984.  They have no memories of it.  Those born between 1980 and 1983 have only juvenile memories.  The 1980s and what is to be collected from it, will be defined by those who were teenagers and young adults during the decade.

Applying “Rinker’s 30 Year Rule – for the first thirty years of any object’s life all its value is speculative,” the memorabilia from the first half of the 1980s no longer fits this criteria.  Its secondary market is stable.  The memorabilia from the second half will follows in a few years.

Most individuals reading this column will be in denial.  For them, the 1980s is not that long ago.  It is.  In the collecting world, the 1980s are the new 1950s and 1960s.

Harry L. Rinker welcomes questions from readers about collectibles, those mass-produced items from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Selected letters will be answered in this column.  Harry cannot provide personal answers.  Photos and other material submitted cannot be returned.  Send your questions to: Rinker on Collectibles, 5955 Mill Point Court SE, Kentwood, MI  49512.  You also can e-mail your questions to harrylrinker@aol.com. Only e-mails containing a full name and mailing address will be considered.

You can listen and participate in WHATCHA GOT?, Harry’s antiques and collectibles radio call-in show, on Sunday mornings between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM Eastern Time.  If you cannot find it on a station in your area, WHATCHA GOT? streams live on the Internet at www.gcnlive.com.