Things are going to get “totally awesome” at the Petersen Automotive Museum when the venue goes back in time to celebrate the radical era of vehicles from the ’80s and ’90s.

“We’ve never really done anything like this before. It’s an exhibit about an era, the last two decades of the 20th century, and those two decades were totally awesome for cars,” said Jonathan Eisen, curator of the new exhibit dubbed “Totally Awesome! Cars and Culture of the ’80s and ’90s”

Made up of dozens of concept cars, production models and vehicles from pop culture, plus a few nostalgic video games and even a fashion show, the exhibit opens Saturday and runs through April.

The cars on display exemplify the period when vehicles transitioned from being pretty technologically bare-bones to more sophisticated machines with computer-aided designs and significant gains in power, safety and efficiency.

“And the cars were really cool,” Eisen said. “At the beginning of the ’80s cars were still designed like they were in the ’60s and ’70s, and then as the decade moved on they became more and more futuristic,” he added.

Some of these milestone cars include a 1995 McLaren F1, a 1985 Lamborghini Countach 5000S and a 1987 Buick GNX, the first GNX ever built. The car is a super high-performance Buick Regal.

“So it looks a lot like a mid-’80s Buick Regal, a very normal car that a lot of grandparents drove. But Buick gave them a high performance turbocharged engine,” Eisen said.

Of course, since this exhibition deals with a period that continues to have an impact on pop culture, there will be purely fun elements as well.

So people can expect to see iconic cars like the 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 “Time Machine” used in “Back to the Future,” plus the 1998 Volkswagen Beetle featured in “Austin Powers” and a 1984 “Pac-Man Rod,” a hot rod built in the early ’80s that looks just like a Pac-Man.

“It was built right in the middle of Pac-Man fever. I don’t think most young people know about Pac-Man fever,” Eisen said.

Visitors should also be ready to show off their arcade skills because there are going to be old-school video game machines where people can play car-related games like Pole Position, Spy Hunter and Outrun.

And in a partnership with the Los Angeles Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, mannequins throughout the exhibit will be dressed up in totally awesome fashion from the 1980s and 1990s.