What Young Sheldon's Iain Armitage Finds So Strange About The Show's '80s Setting
Remember the '80s? Well, considering they were over 30 years ago, you might not. However, there's enough nostalgia for the '80s on television these days between shows like "The Goldbergs," "Stranger Things," and "Young Sheldon" that you probably have nostalgia for the decade, even if you didn't live through it.
Fans seem to be divided on whether or not '80s nostalgia is fun or just overplayed. On Reddit, the appropriately named u/80snostalgiaman asked, "Who else out there is a huge ['80s] nostalgia fanatic?" He said, "Here's a test: Watch some ['80s] commercials and see if you get warm and fuzzy inside." Meanwhile, in the r/unpopularopinion subreddit, u/StevesMcQueenIsHere posted, "The '80s nostalgia trend in movies and TV is f***ing annoying." The user goes on to suggest that the "unimaginative" trend only indulges a generation's desire to recapture their youth. Nonetheless, television shows set in the '80s are still a hit with many viewers.
So what is it about the '80s that makes it so unique? "Young Sheldon" star Iain Armitage talked about one detail he found particularly strange while shooting a television show set in a decade he wasn't alive to experience.
Armitage can't believe the shoulder pads
In a 2019 Access interview, Mario Lopez asked Armitage what he found to be the weirdest part about the '80s, to which the child actor responded, "Probably the fashion." He explained: "Miss Annie [Potts] will come on set in one of her Meemaw shirts, and then I'll put my arm around her, and I'll be like, 'Your shoulder feels weird.' And then she's like, 'All of it's padded.'" In the same interview, Annie Potts, who plays Connie "Meemaw" Tucker on "Young Sheldon," explained that the costumes reminded her of her clothes from her days on the '80s sitcom "Designing Women." "They brought me, yesterday, a belt that they showed to me, and I went, 'Oh my god, that's Dixie Carter's belt!'"
On Steve Harvey's short-lived talk show "Steve," the younger cast members were shown pictures of items from the '80s and tried to guess what they were. The children struggled to identify everything except the Cabbage Patch Doll, which they guessed pretty easily.
The shoulder pads might not be that foreign for too much longer. According to InStyle magazine, many fashion trends from the '80s are coming back in style, including the glam rock aesthetic, oversized blazers with shoulder pads, and bodysuits. The InStyle article mentioned nothing about big hair coming back, though, and that's something we should all be grateful for.