Kevin Bacon has a message for anyone born after 1985: You have no idea how hard life was in the '80s, and it's time for you to show some respect for that decade's culture and technology.
In a new video for Mashable, the "Footloose" star aims a PSA-style plea at millennials on behalf of '80s awareness.
The 55-year-old actor says that in his day, if he was too shy to ask a girl out, he went to the white pages ("Google it," he snaps) and called her house. And "when she turns down your invitation to Sbarro, you can't just swipe away the hurt."
Bacon also schools current-events-minded millennials who are tweeting about Russia nowadays that a little thing called the Cold War was a much bigger deal in the '80s. "They had nukes pointed at us for 20 years. You couldn't even skateboard to a Blockbuster without getting nuked."
Fed up with a perceived lack of attention, Bacon walks out from in front of the camera, only to lob one last gripe at a line of people staring at their smart phones outside. "You people will never know the comfort of parachute pants."
In Austin, Texas, for the 2014 SXSW Music, Film, Interactive Festival, Bacon also took part in a discussion entitled "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: A Social Phenomenon Turns 20." Turns out the actor wasn't always a big fan of the game, which aims to connect him to any celebrity in six steps or less.
“It was so annoying,” Bacon said in an interview with BuzzFeed. “I thought it was a joke at my expense. I thought somebody was trying to pick the biggest loser they could find and joke about the fact I could be connected to Laurence Olivier in two steps. When you fight so hard and put your sweat and blood into trying to have your work speak for itself, I found it belittling."
Bacon eventually embraced the phenomenon, Buzzfeed writes, as he assumed it would, in his own words, “go the way of pogo sticks and pet rocks. ... But it never went away, and now it’s been 20 years."