When We Were Young - An 80s And 90s Pop Culture Podcast

The 1980s may not have been quite as bleak as 1984 predicted, but the Reagan era did see plenty of doom and gloom in entertainment, from Mad Max and Blade Runner to The Terminator and RoboCop. In When We Were Young’s latest episodes, Reel Gents podcast host Travis Dukelow joins us to dissect a cornucopia of dystopias unleashed in the 80s. In Part One, we cover Terry Gilliam’s legendary BRAZIL (1985), which takes several cues from Orwell’s 1984 and adds a healthy dollop of dryly absurd British humor. Jonathan Pryce stars as meek cog-in-the-machine Sam Lowry, whose heroic fantasies offer the only hope of escape from a dreary, duct-ravaged world — at least, until Robert De Niro shows up as the world’s most swashbuckling repairman. If your vision of the future involves Christmastime, lobotomies, plastic surgery gone awry, and terrorism, this is the dystopia for you! If you prefer a more scathing satire of consumerism and media, however, look no further than John Carpenter’s camp classic THEY LIVE (1987), di