"I watch it now and I realize how incredibly dated it is, but Molly Ringwald was the most chic, most fabulous teenager I'd ever seen," says Eliza W. Harrington '00 about "Sixteen Candles." "At that time being a teenager was just about as amazing as you could get."

The biggest movie of 1984 was "E.T.," the highest-grossing film of the 1980s and the fourth highest of all time. Many a senior at one time snuggled into bed along with a stuffed alien.

Jesse I. Needleman '00 remembers watching the cuddly extraterrestrial film over and over as a child.

"I had an illegal copy on videotape the year after it came out," he says.

Lanzot enjoyed the movie with more old-fashioned technology.

"I had E.T. records on vinyl," she says. "It was mostly instrumental music, but I would listen to my E.T. records all the time."

Early '80s music also left a mark. By the '90s, Michael Jackson was most famous as a punch line on "The Tonight Show," but back in 1983, "Thriller" was just plain cool.

"We did a gymnastics show to 'Thriller,'" Penelope A. Carter '00 says. "It was just us in black sweatpants, but we got to wear scary face paint and take turns jumping on the balance beam... We all felt very cutting-edge."