1982-2005 was the peak of human civilization

1981 had, uh, some cool stuff I guess? We had the first space shuttle test flight, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the launch of MTV, and the first IBM PC.

But '82 was when everything really kicked into high gear: Conan the Barbarian, The Wrath of Khan, the first IBM PC "Clone" (a much more significant event than the IBM PC itself), The Secret of NIMH, the first shuttle operational flight, TRON, Knight Rider, First Blood, The Last Unicorn, Dark Crystal, and of course the first waves of He-Man and GI Joe toys.

This began a pop-culture golden age that plateaued in the '90s with Super Soakers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Goosebumps books, and the Disney Renaissance, and lasted until 2005 or 2006.

2005 was when all good things started coming to an end. Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios in Orlando closed on April 30th. The last episode of canon Star Trek aired on May 13th. The last canon, live-action Star Wars movie opened on May 19th. Spumco studios, which made Ren & Stimpy, closed on July 18th. Youtube launched on Dec 15th - while not a bad thing in and of itself, this would have horrible consequences for the file-sharing and AMV communities.

2006 brought HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, canonizing the 16:9 widescreen format, and I could go on a whole other rant about why widescreen was the biggest mistake in the history of screens. UPN and the WB merged into The CW in September. Facebook opened its doors to everyone on Sep 26th, dooming Myspace. Windows Vista launched on Nov 8th, and every version of Windows since then has doubled down on Vista's mistakes instead of fixing them.

I would give anything for just one more day in that time period.