It’s any Saturday morning, 1980-something. 6:30 a.m. Luckily, it’s summertime. So it’s curious to your momma why you’re able to get up at such an ungodly hour every morning these days, yet she practically has to fire a cannon in your bedroom to get you up once school starts. But that’s inconsequential right now. What is consequential is hiking up your He-Man underwear, sneaking down the hallway, climbing up on the counter in your bare feet to grab the peanut butter Cap’n Crunch off the top of the fridge and making it in front of the TV before The Land of the Lost came on. After all, missing the first cartoon of the morning was like the weekly equivalent of missing the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. It just should not be missed.
The antenna (that’s right, an antenna) is just right for perfect reception and your Saturday is underway before the eye boogers have even been wiped from your eyes. And it’s Land of the Lost then Captain Kangaroo, Hong Kong Phooey, with generous segments of School House Rock sprinkled in. Then before you know it, you’re headlong into the latest episode of the Smurfs (Stupid Gargamel is at it again!). The Cap’n Crunch has melted to a soggy mess in your bowl but they’re still awesome when the Snorks take the screen.
By then, you think your momma is awake because something just kissed you on the top of your head. But you’re not quite sure until you hear and smell bacon strips and sausage links frying the kitchen. But you can’t lose focus. The Snorks aren’t done entertaining you yet. So you sink even further into the couch — your box of Alexander the Grapes candies you got from the ice cream man last night are resting against your elbow. You take a big gulp of that scrumptious peanut butter Cap’n Crunch milk, second only to Apple Jack milk in deliciousness, and wonder why Saturday morning cartoons ever had to an end. But they do. Soul Train is about to come on and time for your older brothers to take over the TV.
But it’s no matter because it’s still Saturday. You’ve still got the actual breakfast your mom has made, followed by the understanding that you and your siblings would be booted out of the house until the streetlights come on. Because you see back then, kids belonged outside. If you were inside on Saturday, you were on punishment or sick. It was peace time for your mom and adventure time for you. Time to grab a buddy, hop on your BMX or Huffy and go see what’s inside the giant cement pods out in the cotton fields just outside the projects. In doing so, you find a cool new makeshift clubhouse until they come do whatever it is they’re going to do with these huge cement structures.
After hanging out in there for a spell and dreaming the way only young boys from the projects can dream — like getting the newest pair of British Knights when they came out, layaway permitting — it’s back into the neighborhood to discover a freshly lain refrigerator box in Ms. Mamie’s driveway and a boombox cranking “Planet Rock” to the max. Shell-toed Adidas, suede Pumas and Kangol hats flying all around as project kids do headspins, windmills and the worm on the corrugated dance floor while those waiting their turn on the stage pop-lock and do the Wop to keep warmed up during the breakdancing throwdown.

After the dancing stops, or all the D-cell batteries in the ghetto blaster has been exhausted, the sun is setting and you just know that dreaded streetlight calling you home is about to buzz on. You’ve almost got the position of the sun down to a science, telling you how much time you have left, because wearing a watch cramped your style or you simply weren’t going to waste your hard-earned allowance on a watch unless it had the calculator on it. But you have just enough time to build a ramp with a couple of cinder blocks and an old piece of plywood. Since safety and good sense reigned supreme in those days, it was best to set up the ramp right in the middle of the street. If you were lucky, you get a few sweet bike jumps in before the plywood broke. If you weren’t lucky and the board broke as soon as you hit it and…well you’ve seen Napoleon Dynamite.
Buzzzz….
The street light is on! The mad dash to make it to your house before your momma came to the door and embarrassed you all over the projects. Luckily, you and your buddy, having dragged the cinder blocks and the plywood pieces onto the sidewalk and pedaling like the wind, make it inside. But your buddy isn’t as lucky as you are. His momma is already at her door and she’s pissed. A little stricter than your momma, you know your buddy’s momma hates having to get up from her chair and her sweet tea or miss a single second of Different Strokes to come looking for him. And as you hop off of your bike and onto your porch, almost like a slide into home plate with the throw coming toward you, you hear the fading rants of your buddy’s momma, “WHAT DID I TELL YOU!!!!….” You don’t feel sympathy for the whuppin’ your buddy’s probably gonna take tonight but relief that it wasn’t you on the business end of your own momma’s belt. Besides, you know he’d be cool. Back then, we knew nothing could ruin a Saturday. We also knew that a good time — complete with a few bonus minutes under the streetlight with your buddies trying to catch that frog we saw and strap him to a bottle rocket — was well worth an ass whuppin’.
Inside, it’s time for the Saturday bath parade at my house. My momma demanded we wash all the filth of the day off our bodies before thinking of doing anything else. That included all the grease beneath my oldest brothers fingers from working on bikes all day. All the dirt my older brother collected on his hands and face from rooting through the fields for new rocks for his rock polishing kit. And all the grit my baby sister got caught between the grooves of her jellies. Being the third of four children in a house where the hot water was scarce, you had one of two options. Wait your turn and get an ice cold bath or share with your little sister and enjoy a lukewarm bath with a toddler who, on one tragic evening, couldn’t tell the difference between a poop she made in the tub and a stick of Mary Jane caramel candy. (I’ll let you draw your own conclusion on that one).
Bathing is done. And you’ve slipped, or rather peeled, out of your He-Man undies in to your A-Teams. All that’s left of Saturday is dinner and a little time on the Nintendo or racing cars with your big brother on his toy race track until you get tired or on your momma’s nerves, whichever came first.
Growing up in the eighties was a real treasure. Colors were never more vivid. Food never tasted better. And I still can’t decide if it had more to do with the era or the fact that I was in my youth that made it all so nostalgic and almost cinematic.
Sadly though, we grow older. The peanut butter Cap’n Crunch on the fridge are replaced with Raisin Bran or Cheerios or whatever the hell high fiber cereal your doctor recommends, that’s if your body can still handle lactose. Saturday morning cartoons are replaced with web surfing for anything remotely entertaining. And going outside to play simply isn’t done.
If you’re lucky like I am, a happily married graphic designer, art photographer and illustrator, all too rapidly approaching forty, you look back on your childhood as a source of inspiration. We 80’s kids were so lucky, whether we knew it or not.. We had He-Man and the A-Team and, oh my god NINTENDO to shape and color our worlds. We witnessed Back to the Future, The Goonies and the McD.L.T.. Yo! MTV Raps every Friday night and The Fat Boys. Beat Street and Krush Groove. Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. The Karate Kid and the PogoBal. The Cosby Show and Roseanne. Prince and Michael Jackson. Tell me you wouldn’t do it all again if you could. To paraphrase Mr. T, I truly do pity the fool that missed out on all that.
Another way I’m luckily is to find myself at a point in my life creatively where I need to explore. Call it a mid-life creative crisis or whatever, but I need to get that “just got a new packet of Garbage Pail Kids cards” feeling back again. So I just started drawing. Roaming with my pencil and on my computer with no real goal in sight. My heart and art inherently brought me back to the 80’s. Images of B-boy stances and Rubik’s cube came flooding back. And a new series was born.
“Childhood” will be an ongoing series of illustrations. I will expel my sweet memories of yesteryear into an exploration, or visual diarrhea if you will, in a variety of illustrative styles. No one will look like another in this series, except by pure coincidence. I’m bringing back the radical ol’ days, one colorful illustration at a time. So, hop in the DeLorean with me because I’m setting the dial to 1980-something and punching it to 88 miles an hour. What I hope will come out of the series will be fun, first and foremost. Every designer and illustrator needs to “get it all out” from time to time. So rarely do you get to do exactly what you want to do professionally. Personal projects like my “Childhood” series are the Baby Ruth bars that feed the metaphorical Sloth chained in the basement that is the creative subconscious. And he grows stronger and more desperate with each professional compromise or outright denial we must endure to make our money.
Researching this series will be fun but I intend to rely largely on my memory and perceptions to finish the illustrations. So, I hope those who take an interest in the series or are hardcore 80’s fans won’t judge me too harshly for being inaccurate about some details from the 80’s. Take a chill pill, it’s just the way mind processed it, which is part of the fun of this. It’ll be like taking an 80’s quiz in Highlights magazine, then flipping it upside down for the answers to see how I did.
So all that’s left to do for now is introduce you to the first installment in the series entitled “Project Breakin’,” a combination of simplistic line drawings against a digital rendering of my childhood neighborhood in the North Carolina projects. This is Ms. Mamie’s driveway on Saturday. Music blasting and breakdancing ’til the break of streetlights. The series will be simplistic and honest, like stepping inside my own heart to witness the rhythm of the beat. After all, Gloria Estefan sang it best, the rhythm is gonna get you. I hope the “Childhood” series gets everyone that grew up and appreciates the raddest, freshest, most totally tubular era in our history. So excuse me, I gotta get back in time.

My name is Troy Cooper. I’m a graphic designer, art photographer and illustrator living in Norfolk, VA. My websites are www.midnightsalad.com and www.troycooperartphotography.com