Houndsight is 20/20

Looking back on the 80s, as Vizsla's occasionally like to do, one thing becomes shockingly clear in retrospect.

There was a good solid year where that Cyndi Lauper/Madonna thing could have gone either way. 

They were interchangeable pop girls with chunky jewelery and crazy hair and you were just as likely to hear Lucky Star on the radio as you were to hear Time After Time.  Ultimately history came down on the side of Madonna sometime around the time when she happened to notice that 'yes, That David Bowie seems to still being doing well, how's he pulling that off?'

She wisely chose to follow the 'Change up your image every few years' thing, skipping right over the 'Do a lot of cocaine and store your urine in jars in the basement' part (at least as far as we know.) 

And so, True Blue came out, and Cyndi Lauper was relegated to history.

Eventually of course, sometime around the early Guy Ritchie years, History happened to notice where all this had taken Madonna, shuffled his feet awkwardly, and went to see if he still had Cyndi's number.

So, long story short... let's check back in on this one in about 10 years and see where we are.


Other notable cases of 'Could have gone either way'-

Jason Bateman/Kirk Cameron

There was a point when they were more or less the same.  Sure, NOW we know that one of them is awesome and the other is a gigantic douchebag trying to punish anyone who doesn't follow his religious mythology.  But at the time...

Arnold Schwarzenegger/Sylvester Stallone

Around the time of T2 and Stop or My Mom Will Shoot this seemed firmly decided.  Time, The Expendables, and hanging out with Jason Statham have since shown Sly to have a nicely self-deprecating sense of humility, so maybe we were wrong on this one

Gary Coleman/Emmanuel Lewis

Well, for some reason people still remember Gary Coleman's name, so I'm going to call this a win by default.

Blu-Ray/HDDVD

Yeah, you'd already forgotten they even existed, hadn't you.