1985 Time Capsule: Top News, Cost of Living, Billboard Hits, Top Movies, TV Show Premieres, Sports & More!

1985 Throwback: Images from left; Rocky & Drago, Ronald Reagan, Madonna, The Breakfast Club, Marty McFly
All Images via Everett Collection

The Cold War wound down, but the world wasn’t at peace

UNDATED: (FILE PHOTO) Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan speaks at a rally for Senator Durenberger February 8, 1982. Reagan turns 92 on February 6, 2003.

Michael Evans/The White House/Getty Images

1985 was a year of transition, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s second term as U.S. president and continuing with Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension to power in the USSR, which eventually resulted in the end of the Cold War and the dramatic fall of the failing communist country just six years later. It was also a year of political and international turmoil. The Iran-Contra affair, a scandal describing the discovery that senior officials of the Reagan administration secretly facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran during an arms embargo, was top news, as were several incidents of global terrorism: In June, a TWA flight from Athens to Rome was hijacked by Shiite Hezbollah terrorists, and in October, an Italian cruise ship was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists off the coast of Egypt, resulting in U.S. intervention.

From Ethiopia to Hollywood, there were disasters

DARLING LILI, Rock Hudson, 1970.

Everett Collection

Additionally, the year was plagued by a few major natural disasters. An earthquake in Mexico City killed 10,000, and a volcano erupted in Colombia, killing more than 23,000 nearby residents. Scientists also found a hole in the Ozone layer above Antarctica, a discovery that shocked the world.

Globally, we were also experiencing a health crisis in the form of a new infectious disease called AIDS, which Hollywood icon Rock Hudson died of later in the year, as well as a widespread famine in Ethiopia, which would end up killing over a million people and inspired a huge multi-venue benefit concert called Live Aid.

Coke changed the formula (and Sean Penn couldn’t stop getting in trouble)

1986 Madonna and Sean Penn.

Getty Images

On the lighter side of things, Coca-Cola introduced a new soda that instantly flopped with consumers, the first Blockbuster opened in Dallas, Texas, introducing the public to video rental technology, and Sean Penn, who was engaged to pop idol Madonna at the time, kept getting in trouble for beating people up; just in 1985 alone, he attacked two journalists trying to take photographs of him and his then-fiancée; a year later, he would get charged for battery two more times and even went to jail briefly. Luckily for everyone, he has since calmed down.

The Brat Pack, Back to the Future & Madonna took the world by storm

BACK TO THE FUTURE III, from left: Christopher Lloyd, Michael J. Fox, 1990.

©Universal/courtesy Everett Collection

On the Billboard charts, the biggest hits of the time were “Say You, Say Me” by Lionel Richie, “We Are the World,” the charity hit single written and performed by several pop idols for Africa, “Careless Whisper” by Wham! and “Like a Virgin” by Madonna. Hair metal was all the rage, and everything was huge: shirts, pants, earrings. Perhaps because it was kind of a dark time overall, what came out of Hollywood was often on the lighter side that year. Top films included now-classics Back to the Future, Beverly Hills Cop, Rocky IV and The Goonies. The Breakfast Club cemented John Hughes and several of its stars into Hollywood icon status, as did St. Elmo’s Fire with the “Brat Pack.” Some hugely successful and long-running series premiered during this time as well, such as Growing Pains, Moonlighting and The Golden Girls.

1985 Cost of Living

1985 Cost of Living graphic

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