BdayFacts.com › Year guides › 1986

Born in 1986? Here's the world you arrived into

In 1986, "That's What Friends Are For" topped the charts, Top Gun packed theaters, a stamp cost 22¢, the average home went for about $92,000.

What things cost in 1986

A $0.93 gallon of gas in 1986 has the buying power of roughly $2.65 in 2024 dollars. A 22¢ stamp is around 63¢ today, and a $3.71 movie ticket is about $10.60.

The biggest moments of 1986

• The Statue of Liberty celebrated her 100th birthday with a spectacular Fourth of July celebration in New York Harbor.
• The Oprah Winfrey Show went national and quickly became daytime TV's biggest hit.
• Millions of people joined hands coast to coast for the Hands Across America charity event.

• The nation grieved together in January when the space shuttle Challenger was lost with its seven crew members, including teacher Christa McAuliffe.
• In December, the experimental aircraft Voyager flew around the world nonstop without refueling — nine days aloft on a single tank.
• A fourth TV network, Fox, signed on in October 1986, daring to challenge the big three.

Toys, TV & trends of 1986

• Lazer Tag and Photon gear turned backyards into futuristic battle arenas.
• Nintendo's NES went nationwide, and kids swapped gross-out Garbage Pail Kids trading cards at school.
• Top Gun sent sales of aviator sunglasses soaring, and the first American Girl dolls debuted.

• In Japan, Nintendo released a golden-cartridge adventure called The Legend of Zelda in February 1986 — American kids would meet Link the next year.
• Pee-wee's Playhouse premiered on Saturday mornings, and everybody screamed real loud when the secret word was spoken.
• The California Raisins first shimmied across TV screens in 1986, singing "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" in claymation.

The music scene

"That's What Friends Are For" wasn't just the year's biggest hit — Dionne Warwick, Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder recorded it as a charity single that raised millions for AIDS research. Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" crashed rap into the pop top five for the first time, Peter Gabriel's stop-motion "Sledgehammer" video became the most-played clip in MTV history, and Paul Simon released the landmark Graceland album.

At the movies

Top Gun didn't just top the 1986 box office — the Navy set up recruiting tables outside theaters to catch moviegoers walking out on a high. Oliver Stone's Platoon won the Best Picture Oscar. And in February, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics division and named it Pixar, while An American Tail's little mouse Fievel proved non-Disney animation could be a smash.

Cartoons kids loved

• The Real Ghostbusters
• My Little Pony 'n Friends
• SilverHawks

The Real Ghostbusters showed how fast Hollywood had learned to spin a blockbuster into a Saturday-morning franchise, barely two years after the film. 1986 was such a boom year for kids' animation that toy-line cartoons even hit movie theaters — Transformers: The Movie featured Orson Welles in his final role, voicing the planet-eating Unicron.

The world in 1986

• World population: about 4.9 billion
• U.S. President: Ronald Reagan
• Halley's Comet made its once-every-76-years visit past Earth.

• The Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986 spread fallout across Europe and changed the conversation about nuclear power worldwide.
• Reagan and Gorbachev's dramatic Reykjavik Summit in October came startlingly close to a deal eliminating nuclear weapons — and paved the way for the treaty that followed.
• Diego Maradona carried Argentina to the 1986 World Cup title, scoring both the infamous "Hand of God" goal and the dazzling "Goal of the Century" in a single match.

1986 birthday questions

Want it on paper? The same 1986 front page prints as a greeting card, poster or framed keepsake.

Anyone born in 1986 turns 40 this year — see 40th birthday gift ideas.

More years like 1986

Jump a generation: 1946 · 1956 · 1961 · 1966 · 1976 · 1996 · 2006 · 2011 · 2016