50 Fun Facts About 1985

Which 1985 comedy became the year's top-grossing film after Eric Stoltz was replaced as its lead weeks into filming?

Back to the Future had already shot for several weeks with Stoltz before Michael J. Fox took over as Marty McFly, a switch that added about $4 million to the budget.

Which British star played both Live Aid concerts in July 1985, crossing the Atlantic on Concorde between sets?

Phil Collins sang at Wembley, then flew to Philadelphia, where he also drummed for Eric Clapton and the surviving members of Led Zeppelin.

Which reformulated soft drink launched in April 1985 drew such a backlash that the old recipe returned in 79 days?

New Coke was born after blind taste tests favoured the sweeter taste of Pepsi, but angry drinkers forced the old formula back onto shelves as Coca-Cola Classic.

Which ocean liner's wreck did a French-American team led by Robert Ballard find in the North Atlantic in September 1985?

Titanic was found with Argo, a towed camera sled the US Navy had sponsored, and the search was only possible after Ballard had first surveyed two lost nuclear submarines.

Which Shigeru Miyamoto game, released by Nintendo in Japan in September 1985, has sold more than 58 million copies?

Super Mario Bros. sold 1.2 million copies in Japan in its first month alone, and it is credited with helping to revive the video game industry after the 1983 crash.

Which Soviet politician became Communist Party general secretary in March 1985 after the death of Konstantin Chernenko?

Mikhail Gorbachev followed the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov and Chernenko, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika loosened controls on speech and the economy.

Which NBC sitcom that premiered in September 1985 saw all four of its lead actresses win Emmy Awards?

The Golden Girls follows four older women sharing a house in Miami, and the show itself twice won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series.

Which singer co-wrote We Are the World with Michael Jackson before its all-star recording session in January 1985?

Lionel Richie and Jackson completed the lyrics and melody the night before recording began, and Quincy Jones produced the single to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Which newspaper comic strip did Bill Watterson launch in November 1985 and refuse to license for any merchandise?

Calvin and Hobbes began in just 35 newspapers and peaked at more than 2,000, yet no official toys or cartoons were made during its ten-year run.

Which wrestling event debuted at Madison Square Garden in March 1985 with Hulk Hogan and Mr. T in the main event?

WrestleMania's first card featured Muhammad Ali as a guest referee, Liberace as timekeeper and baseball manager Billy Martin as ring announcer.

Which 1985 John Hughes film follows five high school students through an all-day Saturday detention?

The Breakfast Club was shot at a closed high school in Des Plaines, Illinois, where the crew built its library set inside the gymnasium because the real one was too small.

Which 1985 adventure film, from a Steven Spielberg story, sends a group of Oregon kids after a pirate's lost treasure?

The Goonies follow an old map to the fortune of One-Eyed Willy while trying to save their homes in Astoria from foreclosure.

Which 1985 drama starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture?

Out of Africa is loosely based on the memoir of Danish author Karen Blixen, who published it under the pen name Isak Dinesen.

Which 1985 Steven Spielberg drama starring Whoopi Goldberg earned eleven Oscar nominations yet won none?

The Color Purple, adapted from Alice Walker's novel, also gave Oprah Winfrey her film debut and a supporting actress nomination.

Which actor made his American film debut as Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV in 1985?

Dolph Lundgren and Sylvester Stallone threw real punches in their fight scenes, and the blows put Stallone in intensive care.

Which actor made his seventh and final appearance as James Bond in the 1985 film A View to a Kill?

Roger Moore faced Christopher Walken's villain Max Zorin, and the Duran Duran title song became the first Bond theme to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

Which Miloš Forman film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, at the Academy Awards ceremony held in March 1985?

Amadeus shared the most nominations of the night, eleven, with A Passage to India, and F. Murray Abraham took Best Actor as the envious composer Salieri.

Which ABC adventure series that debuted in 1985 starred Richard Dean Anderson as a secret agent who avoids guns?

MacGyver fixes problems with a Swiss Army knife, duct tape and science, and his name entered Oxford Dictionaries in 2015 as a verb for making an improvised repair.

Which BBC soap opera set in the fictional London borough of Walford first aired in February 1985?

EastEnders drew some 17 million viewers to its first episode, and its stories revolve around the residents of Albert Square.

Which actor shot to fame in 1985 as detective David Addison opposite Cybill Shepherd in the series Moonlighting?

Bruce Willis played a partner in the Blue Moon Detective Agency, and the show's blend of mystery, comedy and romance made it an early example of the dramedy.

Which singer wrote and produced Everything She Wants, the song at number one in America on May 25, 1985?

George Michael's duo Wham! scored a third straight American chart-topper with it, in the same spring they became the first Western pop group to visit China.

Which singer's self-titled debut album of February 1985 was the first debut to produce three US number-one singles?

Whitney Houston entered the album chart at a lowly number 166 and took until 1986 to reach the top, where the record stayed for fourteen weeks.

Which British band's 1985 album Brothers in Arms was the first to sell a million copies on compact disc?

Dire Straits made it as a fully digital recording aimed at the new CD market, and it went on to sell more than 30 million copies worldwide.

Which country is home to a-ha, whose sketch-animated Take On Me video helped the song top the US chart in 1985?

Norway's a-ha waited six months for the video's hand-traced rotoscope animation, which went on to win six prizes at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards.

Which singer launched her first concert tour in 1985, with the Beastie Boys as her opening act?

Madonna named it The Virgin Tour, and it promoted her first two studio albums, her 1983 debut and 1984's Like a Virgin.

Which country singer co-founded Farm Aid in 1985 with Neil Young and John Mellencamp after a remark at Live Aid?

Willie Nelson helped stage the first show in Champaign, Illinois, before 80,000 people, acting on an idea Bob Dylan had floated from the stage that July.

Which Parents Music Resource Center co-founder pushed record labels in 1985 to put warning labels on explicit albums?

Tipper Gore's campaign led to a Senate hearing where Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver testified, and then to the Parental Advisory sticker.

Which show opened at the Barbican in October 1985 to poor reviews and became the West End's longest-running musical?

Les Misérables, adapted from Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, sold out its first three-month engagement despite the critics and has played in London continuously since.

Which actor, then 29, did People magazine name its first Sexiest Man Alive in February 1985?

Mel Gibson inspired the title itself, which began as an exclamation in a staff discussion about a planned story on him and was turned into a cover line.

Which part of the atmosphere did British scientists report in May 1985 was thinning dramatically over Antarctica?

The ozone layer findings shocked researchers because the loss was far larger than predicted, and by 1987 the Montreal Protocol was adopted to end production of CFCs.

Which puzzle game, released in the USSR in 1985, did Alexey Pajitnov name partly after his favourite sport, tennis?

Tetris joins tennis to tetra, meaning four, since every falling piece is built from four connected blocks, and Pajitnov wrote it in his spare time at an Academy of Sciences computing centre.

Which fictional thief gave her name to a 1985 Broderbund geography game sold with a copy of The World Almanac?

Carmen Sandiego is the final culprit, and players rise through the ACME Detective Agency by questioning witnesses and chasing her V.I.L.E. crooks around the world.

Which Microsoft product, first released in November 1985, ran as a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS?

Windows 1.0 did not let its program panes overlap, so everything open on screen was tiled side by side instead.

Which Massachusetts computer maker registered the internet's first .com domain name on March 15, 1985?

Symbolics was an MIT spinoff that built Lisp machines, and its pioneering web address outlived the original firm before being sold to a domain investor in 2009.

Which Canadian author published The Handmaid's Tale, set in the Republic of Gilead, in 1985?

Margaret Atwood began the manuscript in West Berlin in the spring of 1984 and finished it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while teaching at the university there.

Which 1985 Larry McMurtry novel about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

Lonesome Dove began as a screenplay McMurtry wrote with director Peter Bogdanovich, with John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda in mind for the leads.

Which 1985 Orson Scott Card novel about a child trained to fight aliens won both the Hugo and Nebula awards?

Ender's Game grew out of a short story of the same name that Card had published in Analog magazine back in 1977.

Which 1985 novel by Gabriel García Márquez follows Florentino Ariza's decades-long wait for Fermina Daza?

Love in the Time of Cholera has Florentino vow to stay faithful after Fermina marries another man, yet he drifts through hundreds of affairs while he waits.

Under which pen name, exposed by a Washington bookstore clerk in 1985, had Stephen King published the novel Thinner?

Richard Bachman was named on the spot after the band Bachman–Turner Overdrive, and Thinner sold ten times as many copies once the secret was out.

Which English novelist wrote a 1978 book titled 1985 as a tribute to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Anthony Burgess split the book in two: essays and mock interviews about Orwell's novel, then a novella in which the power of trade unions has kept on expanding.

Which everyday item's price in the United States went from 20 cents to 22 cents on February 17, 1985?

A first-class stamp had cost 20 cents since November 1981, and the new 22-cent letter rate lasted just over three years before climbing to 25 cents in April 1988.

What was the US federal minimum hourly wage throughout 1985, a rate frozen from January 1981 until April 1990?

$3.35 an hour held for more than nine years, which at the time was the longest freeze the federal minimum wage had ever seen.

What did a 30-second commercial cost during Super Bowl XIX, played at Stanford Stadium in January 1985?

$525,000 bought half a minute of a game whose coin toss was performed by President Ronald Reagan, by satellite from the White House.

Which country's secret agents sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in July 1985?

France sent its agents to stop the ship sailing to protest a planned nuclear test at Moruroa, and photographer Fernando Pereira drowned as it went down.

Which capital was devastated on 19 September 1985 by a magnitude 8.0 earthquake centred more than 350 km away?

Mexico City suffered so badly at that distance because it sits on an ancient lake bed, whose soft, water-laden clay moves easily when shaken.

Which highway, nicknamed the Mother Road, was officially removed from the US Highway System in June 1985?

Route 66 had carried drivers from Chicago to Los Angeles since 1926, but Interstates replaced most of it, a bypassing of small towns retold in Pixar's film Cars.

Which NFL team's 15–1 season in 1985 included just one defeat, to the Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football?

Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka's side won its first twelve games, and it is often set against the unbeaten 1972 Dolphins in arguments over the greatest NFL team.

Which Cincinnati Reds player-manager broke Ty Cobb's all-time hits record with a single on September 11, 1985?

Pete Rose's 4,192nd hit came off San Diego pitcher Eric Show, and the hometown crowd at Riverfront Stadium gave him a standing ovation that lasted for minutes.

Which unseeded 17-year-old won the Wimbledon men's singles title in July 1985 while ranked only 20th in the world?

Boris Becker beat Kevin Curren in four sets to become the first German champion and, at 17 years and 7 months, the youngest man ever to win the title.

Which eighth-seeded team shot 78.6 percent to upset Patrick Ewing's Georgetown in the 1985 NCAA basketball final?

Villanova won 66–64 for its first national title, missing only six of its 28 shots in a performance remembered as The Perfect Game.