Is it the neon and pastel? The nerdiness? The "split-screen" like look of it? The bulkiness and uselessness?

i think it's tied in with the development of computers in a way i can't quite describe. it's like the perfect merging of the board game with the abstract matrix of the computer. but once computers themselves got more accessible you really didn't need the rubiks cube anymore.

on a less cutesy level, it was a huge fad but it became almost immediately clear if you had a gift for it or not. i could only get two sides. there was this calculus head in my school who could solve it in like two minutes maybe a month after it came out. and that's the way it went, you either nailed it right away because that's the way you thought, or you tinkered with it for a while and then went, bah, screw this damn thing.

great question though. if you werern't around you coldn't know how HUGE the cube was. it made the hula hoop look lame.

Why is the Rubix Cube so Eighties?

Because it was then it was invented, developed, marketed and sold in the shops.

Good question.