About Stranger Things

Binge-watched it, which was roughly 8 hours over the weekend. I liked it, but I didn't love it.

The show was supposed to date back to 1983 (hey, I was in middle school in 1983!), but they got the little details wrong. In 1983, most of us had push-button and cordless phones; rotary units were already on the way out. In 1983, many households had Walkmans, but what we saw instead were 70s style over the ear headphones. Maybe in Indiana middle-school kids were excited about CB radios, but the geeks in my school (I count myself a geek) were using TRS-80 computers to learn BASIC, by 1983.

That Ford Pinto? Mid-70s. Okay, maybe 1983 Indiana was really poor and so they mostly drove vehicles from the mid-70s. However, by 1983 the rage was cheap Japanese imports, particularly the Toyota Carolla and Nissan Sentra, yet not a single Japanese import? Hmm. To top things off, that VW Cabriolet didn't exist in 1983.

Even the music was a little off. For instance, they made the mistake of including The Bangles' rendition of Hazy Shade of Winter, which wasn't released until 1985 and it didn't gain steam until 1987's Less Than Zero movie. Even Corey Hart's Sunglasses at Night wasn't released until 1984. The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go has the right timing, but The Clash's big song in 1983 was Rock the Casbah. I get the subtext of the song they used, but Hall and Oates' Maneater was huge in 1983 and works just as well:

"Watch out boy
She'll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes)
She's a maneater"

You know who was really hot in 1983? Michael Jackson. In late 1982, Jackson released one of his best albums, Thriller. Can't think of a better song to feature on a show like Stranger Things.

So yeah, everything was just a little off. Maybe that's okay for most folks, but the other problem I had with the show was that more than half the characters were busy shouting all the time at each other, particularly Winona Ryder's character. It started to get tiresome for me, knowing that when she was in the shot we were surely going to be treated to another angry shout -- was there anyone who didn't get yelled at?

The saving grace in all of this were the visuals and the basic story. In the 80s, what movie / show didn't have teenagers as the heroines? This pretty much matched that formula, but with the creepy feel of the X-Files. In other words, a show that was meant to appeal to Gen-X. Winona Ryder -- can you get any more Gen-X than her?