Since I was born in 1979, I was thrust into the very beginning of that colorful and chaotic decade known as the 1980s. Those formative years provide vivid memories of family trips and gatherings; transatlantic TWA flights, elaborate kingdoms of Playmobil; summers that seemed to last as long as the Ordovician Epoch; music that still represents some of the best I’ve heard; elementary school; computer screens of green monochrome, to be followed by 16-color palette panels; computer games –North and South, The Oregon Trail, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?- that seem more entertaining in retrospect than the hyper-realistic games of today.

It was also a time of frightening world events, such as the final battles of the Cold War, the famine in Ethiopia, and the AIDS pandemic. For me, it was also the era for all of the personal challenges and fears that come with growing out of one’s protective cocoon and emerging as a gangly youth of the 1990s. As we crawl across the 2010s, which do not seem to have their own distinctive flavor yet, previous decades gain a rosy tinge of nostalgia, strangeness, and fantasy.

That brings us to this collection’s premise. What if the animal kingdom had its own Egregious Eighties? In this parallel universe, animals of various types and stripes experience their own fluorescent-flavored decade that mirrors human life during the 1980s.

We see hooves and claws on the trading floor of a New York stock exchange; capuchin monkeys in leggings; rabbits invading Grenada; lions with outrageous haircuts; a koala wrestling with a Rubik's Cube; Ursidae separated by a Bear-lin Wall; a Soviet rhino locked in an athletic struggle against an American one.

Animals of the 80s is a celebration not only of the various species with which we share this planet, but also of that confident and distant decade of greed and growth. Enjoy the show.