DENVER • Big-haired rockers play on a TV. “The Facts of Life” sitcom plays on another. Galaga awaits on another. Come on a Saturday morning, and it’ll be cartoons on the screens.
Those color-changing T-shirts — Hypercolor, they were called — wait to be worn again. They are for sale on one rack. The shelves are packed, hardly an inch available in this 900-square-foot shop on South Broadway.
Hulk Hogan’s early Fu Manchu mustache can be found here beside his World Wrestling Federation foes. He-Man is fighting Skeletor. The “Star Wars” gang is here, of course. As are the Cabbage Patch Kids, the Ghostbusters, the Gremlins and ladies of “Jem and the Holograms.”
Care Bears? California Raisins? Check and check, along with Robo Cop and the first Autobots.
“Dancing in the Dark” plays on. Colorful lights swirl on the walls painted in such a way that recalls your childhood bedroom. The smell is familiar.
“Like bubble gum. We do that on purpose,” Dede Thompson says behind the counter. “That’s all part of the experience to make it like a little time machine here in Denver.”
Welcome to Fifty-Two 80s. “A totally awesome shop,” it calls itself — a shop filled with your wildest ’80s dreams. (Nightmares, too, considering the decade’s horror stars like Freddy and Jason, or the fashion you’d rather forget.)
The customer remarks are common:
“Oh, my gosh!”
“No way!”
“I used to have this!”
Fifty-Two 80s is a vintage, pop culture emporium of toys, clothes, memorabilia and still-working electronics, like boomboxes and Walkman and Atari. Atlas Obscura calls it “a tightly-packed womb of nostalgia.”
Thompson owns the business with her longtime friend and fiance, Tony Vecchio. They count more than 6,000 items in the small space today, not including the 303 types of nonsports trading cards.
There are cards better known (Garbage Pail Kids) and lesser known.
“Here’s a bizarre one: Terrorist Attack from 1987,” Vecchio says, holding up a pack before moving to another. “Not to be outdone by the 1992 AIDS awareness cards.”
Yes, the merchandise spills into the ’90s — steadily more so, to account for a local clientele steadily more from those years. But Fifty-Two 80s mostly celebrates the namesake decade, the decade Vecchio and Thompson knew as kids.
“The decade of decadence,” Vecchio has heard it described. A decade of Madonna, Van Halen, David Bowie and Michael Jackson, their posters plastering these walls.
A decade of innocence, children from back then might think of it. That’s how Vecchio thinks of it. He grew up in a small, west Texas town.
“Music, bicycles, drinking from the water hose,” Vecchio says. “Everyone knew everyone. We all went to the dance together, we all hung out at the town square together, rode down the drag together.”
Nostalgia was powerful, he knew. And he knew it to be ignited by things and brands — all of that consumerism behind “the decade of decadence.”
That was his thinking in 2013 as he was cooking for a Denver catering company. He called his friend, who was in the mortgage business and raising kids of her own. Yes, Vecchio and Thompson were all grown up by then, time flying by.
But what if they could return to the old days? Vecchio wondered.
“’Dede, I think I want to open an ’80s store,’” Thompson recalls him saying. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
She went with it. And so went their hunt for inventory.
They started scouring the internet for collectibles. They’d get box after box in the mail, opening them up like it was Christmas all over again. It would be that way, Vecchio knew, for his customers — once carefree kids like himself now navigating the complexities of life, bearing whatever burdens the years added.
Vecchio knew: “If you can find that one thing you got on your seventh birthday or seventh Christmas that you held so near and dear to you, and it was the most amazing thing to you, it’s still gonna be the most amazing thing to you.”
The curating approach has changed over the store’s 11 years. Vecchio and Thompson still scour the internet, namely Facebook Marketplace. Now, rather than receiving packages in the mail, they go directly to the product, sifting through basements, attics, garage sales and conventions. Other times people come to them to sell.
“That’s part of the fun,” Thompson says. “Finding that treasure.”
She particularly treasures Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony dolls. Those are dolls she might’ve kept as a kid. Vecchio never had much.
“Usually just those rack toys, what you’d find at the grocery store for 75 cents or whatever,” he says. “Maybe a water gun here and there.”
Now he’s getting stuff beyond his childhood imagination.
Take, for example, a robot car made to fit child drivers in 1986. “I was telling (Thompson), ‘If I was a kid and had that thing, that would’ve been the end-all, be-all,’” he says.
He sold it, just as he has sold several rare finds from over the years. It’s always a strange emotion: a businessman’s gain and a boy’s loss.
Vecchio has witnessed other emotions in the shop.
“It’s unbelievable the stories we hear,” he says.
One was from a woman who came out of the bathroom, crying over the reading material she found there. It was an old TV Guide. She remembered sitting on her father’s lap on Sunday nights, circling their favorite programs for the week.
“She told me that specific TV Guide was the last TV Guide that her and her dad looked at together before he passed,” Vecchio says.
There was another woman crying at the sight of a Muppets View-Master. She said she visited the characters in those reels at the worst times of her abusive childhood, finding some joy from Kermit, Fozzie and Miss Piggy.
Another woman came to the register with a Teddy Ruxpin bear, a Pound Puppy and a Rainbow Brite doll. She remembered keeping them on her bed once.
“She said she hadn’t seen those three items since she ran away from home. She had to grow up, she was never a kid again,” Vecchio says. “She said, ‘Thank you for letting me be a kid again.’”