Culture
The Dream of the ’80s Is Alive in These Unhinged Chamber of Commerce Videos
How did urban boosters promote cities like Buffalo, Detroit and Kansas City during the 1980s? It took jingles, slogans, and a whole lot of montages.
No gimmick was too gimmicky. It was the 1980s, and chambers of commerce in cities around the country needed to convince people who’d spent the last decades fleeing crime and decay in America’s urban areas to come back downtown and party.
They made their cases, naturally, with the era’s most powerful medium: montage videos.