Morning folks.  Today’s the first Monday of Daylight Savings Time, thanks to those fucking farmers.  Or something.  Whatever.  Hopefully you were able to get up on time and aren’t late for work, so you can spend the appropriate amount of time avoiding work by participating in this here draft.

The 1980’s were the formative decade in a young Horatio’s life.  They started when I was 11, they ended when I was 21, or close enough for this already strained point.  A lot happens in a youngster’s life during those years:  you get taller, your voice changes, hair starts appearing where there wasn’t hair before, and boners-at-awkard-times become an ever present challenge.

Basically you grow up.

Last off-season, and courtesy of RTD, we drafted bands’ discography’s from the 80’s.  This week we’re drafting movie from the 1980’s.  I did consider doing something similar to the band draft and taking an actor from the 80’s and then you’d get his or her output from that decade.  But then I’d take Eddie Murphy with the first pick, someone would take John Cusack with the second, and by the time Molly Ringwald went third we’d be out of movies.

So, your mission this week is to draft movies from the 80’s.  If it’s a movie that came out between 1/1/80 and 12/31/89, (don’t give me any shit about how the zero year is actually the last year of the preceding decade:  I promise you I do not care), it is eligible.  Bonus points if your pick is an excellent representation of what the 80’s was all about.

Which is the rise of Reaganism and subsequent, and very much directly related, decline of America.  But that’s another story.

Your commissioner for this week is the late and lamented John Hughes.  The director of such 80’s stalwarts, (and now remarkably problematic), films like ‘Sixteen Candles,’ ‘The Breakfast Club,’ ‘Weird Science,’ and (and I did not know this before right now), the criminally overlooked ‘Uncle Buck.’

A true honor to have his ghostly presence monitor our draft, and perhaps explain how Anthony Michael Hall having banged that girl at the end of Sixteen Candles when she was passed out isn’t rape.

It was a different time.

Also you’re probably largely on your own today.  Tomorrow is the 29th anniversary of Mrs. Horatio making a horrible, horrible decision, then somehow doubling down on it for the next three decades.  Depending on her work schedule we’ll likely be out and about enjoying this wonderful Smarch weather.

With the first pick I will take the movie that was on the other day that inspired this particular draft.

1983’s ‘Trading Places.’  Directed by John Landis, (a/k/a “That Other John Guy With All The 1980’s Movies”), and starring the aforementioned 1980’s powerhouse Eddie Murphy, with Dan Akroyd and an absolutely smoking Jamie Lee Curtis providing able support, Trading Places spends it’s running time skewering insider trading, wealth disparities, racist preconceptions, the war on drugs, and many other things that made the 1980’s the, well, the 1980’s.

Also it’s really funny and Jamie Lee shows her boobs.

The rest of you are on the clock.