Exoplanet hunters ignored or ridiculed in the 1980s or 1990s? I recently came across this youtube video, in which a few people are singing about the history of exoplanet discovery.

It suggests that, in the 1990s, exoplanet hunters were largely ignored or ridiculed. Is there any truth to this?
Everyone expected exoplanets to exist - there was no reason to suppose that the conditions that existed when the sun formed were unique, and we knew that multiple star systems were common. Newton wrote "And if the fixed stars are the centres of similar systems, they will all be constructed according to a similar design"

Observations in the 80s were not ignored, they just lacked sufficient evidence. I.e, they were considered and properly rejected. Better observations have since confirmed some of the planets that were "discovered" in the 80s, but denied others. Scientific scepticism means that you don't accept something without evidence.

We knew that finding planets would be hard. The technology of sensitive ccd devices that could be used for constant monitoring of multiple stars didn't exist in a form that could be put on a space telescope, and there were other priorities for space science: solar system exploration. 

Knowing that planets would be impossible to observe with contempory technology meant that "planet hunting" wasn't a thing. The first planet to be detected was around a pulsar, as the detection depends on changes in the timing of the pulsar, not on measurements of variations in light intensity during a transit, or doppler shift as the star is wobbled.