On March 31, 2016, CNN will premiere its new documentary miniseries The Eighties, a seven-part look back at a decade that began in the despair surrounding the murder of former Beatle John Lennon and ended with the dawn of renewed hope with the demolition of the Berlin Wall. AIDS, Reaganomics, Glasnost, the first woman in space, New Wave, New Coke, the Royal Wedding, Pac-Man, the Challenger Disaster, the discovery of the Titanic, the War on Drugs, the World Wide Web... for a decade misremembered as a victory of style over substance, the Eighties were marked end-to-end and year by year with world-changing events, discoveries, and innovations that reshaped the contours of modern history. To commemorate CNN's launch of this latest achievement from executive producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and Emmy® award-winning producer Mark Herzog, Turner Classic Movies will present an evening of programming devoted to one of the decade's more notable sidebars: "80s Gender Benders." However Eighties cinema seemed to be dominated by the alpha dog excesses of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris, other films explored our natural curiosity with how the other sex lives. In Blake Edwards' Victor Victoria (1982), Julie Andrews plays a starving soprano pitched to the Paris public as a male drag performer; in Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982), Dustin Hoffman plays an out-of-work actor who wins a role on a soap opera by concealing his gender under a wig and padded bra. Both Andrews and Hoffman won Academy Awards for their hilarious and not infrequently thought-provoking performances, which set the tone and the pace for a host of likeminded gender-bending and body-swap comedies to follow.

by Richard Harland Smith