A thread for Stranger Things, the "Goonies meets X-Files" new Netflix series (with SPOILERS!)

There was already some discussion on it on the general Netflix thread, but IMO it deserves a thread of it's own. And it's nicer for people who've watched the first season to discuss it here without needing to avoid spoilers.

IMO the whole 80s nostalgia felt kinda gratuitous at first, but of course as an 80s kid I also enjoyed, and I really thought all those signifiers helped people ease into the whole Goonies/E.T. vibe the makers were clearly aiming for... The whole idea that something mysterious and weird is lurking right behind the boring everyday life in a small town, but it doesn't go fully into David Lynch style cruel & adult suburban horror, I liked how the tone was always kept safe enough that actual kids around the same age as the kid protagonists could enjoy it.

Also, of course the whole commie paranoia aspect worked pretty nicely with the 80s setting, it had enough distance to real-world issues of today that it didn't feel like they were exploiting real fears to produce family entertainment, which might have been the case if the series was set in the present day, applying present day paranoias (like the fear of terrorism).

And of course the setting allowed them to avoid some plot problems that might've risen if it was set in a time period where cell phones and the internet are commonly available.

As for follow-up seasons, Johnny Fever posted this in the other thread:

Just watched an interview with the producers who say if Netflix grants Stranger Things additional seasons that it's not going to be an anthology series like American Horror Story or Fargo; they're going to base it around the same characters in the same approximate time—which, if you've made it all the way to episode 8, seems hard to believe. But I'm on board.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), 17. heinäkuuta 2016 10:53 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

IMO the follow-up is pretty easy to make with all the clues they set up in the final episode. Most importantly, it's heavily implied that Eleven didn't die but was transported to the upside down world. Her body isn't found, and Hopper is leaving Eggos (her favourite food) to the forest where we know the wall between the two world is pretty weak. And Hopper himself seems to be involved in some kind of X-Files work now, what with the men in black seemingly recruiting him at the end of the episode.

And then of course there's the baby monster Danny coughs out, which was the most obvious setup for the next season. And we still don't what happened to the upside down dimension... Since it has the same buildings as the "real" world, it seems it was once inhabited by humans, so what happened to them and why is it now infested with monsters? Seems like there's a lot of material still left to explore in a new season, I'm all for it.

Sorry, I meant to write Will, not Danny.

Am I the only one who felt casting Modine here was completely pointless? The three or four scenes where he got to actually do something could've been done by pretty much any second string TV actor, he never felt really threatening or anything.

Ryder was pretty good on the other hand, though her role was pretty one-note, it mostly went along the old "hysterical mother eventually finds the strength to face the monster" trope, a la Shelley Duvall in The Shining. Interested to see whether she gets to do more in a second season. The sheriff guy's "young John C. Reilly" impression and Eleven's intense innocence were the best bits of the show, acting-wise. Would totally watch a show revolving around those two only.

Frodo and the other three hobbits were all okay, but kinda interchangeable. The kid playing Sam was clearly the best, or at least he got the funniest snarky lines. Hope the second season elevates him beyond the comic relief role he mostly had in this one.

It's not like Modine is getting top billing jobs anymore, so his casting seemed appropriate. Also, they might be able to young him down a little bit if there are flashbacks in the future.

The only—ONLY—thing I found disappointing was the monster's design. Seems those featureless "venus fly trap" faces are so commonplace now. And while they do sufficiently creep me out, I guess I was expecting a better reveal.

I though all of the kids were amazing, even the teens. All the adults too. Nancy and Michael's dad was so exquisitely one-note and aloof.

Eleven's mother was the woman the chief and Winona went to go visit, yes? The story about the miscarriage seems like something that would have been used to cover up just literally stealing a baby.

Yeah, agree that the monster was disappointing and too "common horror creature" looking... They shouldn't have shown it properly at all, or it should've been truly faceless or something.

One interesting thing that was barely touched: it seemed like the Demogorgon wasn't really a "monster" per se, just an animal looking for something to eat? Even the creepy things done to Barb and others seemed to be just to provide food for its growing young. It felt like they could've gotten more out of the fact that Modine's character was the one real monster, but that wasn't really explored.

(xpost)

Eleven's mother was the woman the chief and Winona went to go visit, yes? The story about the miscarriage seems like something that would have been used to cover up just literally stealing a baby.

Yeah, that seemed to be case. At first I feared they were gonna reveal Eleven was the sheriff's girl who didn't die after all, but thankfully they didn't go there, that would've been too appropriate.

I was waiting for them to reveal that Will was really the biological son of the sheriff

Also, I felt kinda bad for Barb and her family. So much of the show revolved around Will and how sad her disappearance made everyone, but at least he was saved! Barb's mom was shown in exactly one scene, and we never saw if her family even found out what really happened to her. In most cases I thought Stranger Things managed to avoid the worst cliches of the '80s movies it was emulating, but here it felt that because Barb was so clearly the "attractive teen girl protagonist's not-so-attractive best sidekick", her fate could just be hand-waved with barely any mention.

(xpost)

I was waiting for them to reveal that Will was really the biological son of the sheriff

Wasn't it said that the sheriff had been in town for only 4 years?

And that he used to work in some bigger city before that? Probably lost that job because of the trauma of her daughter's death.

details

I think it was implied that he's only been back in town for four years.

As for Barb, I thought it was a pity she just ended up as story fodder in the end, but maybe her parents still believe she ran away?

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I seem to recall one of the deputies asking the sheriff whether it was like this in the big city, or something like that?

One thing that's been bugging me, and it's definitely not ruining the story for me in any way, is that if the gate to the Upside Down was only opened by Eleven recently, what was the creature feeding on before it could get topside?

(xpost)

Can't imagine the sheriff not telling her parents that she died, even if he wouldn't/couldn't tell all the details.

xp Yeah, I think he grew up in Hawkins, moved away to Indianapolis, and then moved back after his daughter died and his marriage dissolved.

One thing that's been bugging me, and it's definitely not ruining the story for me in any way, is that if the gate to the Upside Down was only opened by Eleven recently, what was the creature feeding on before it could get topside?

Well like I said above, since the upside down world had all the same buildings as the real world, the implication seems to have been that it was once a normal parallel world that was inhabited by people, possibly parallel versions of the people in the real world. But then something had happened and the creature(s) had infested the world and eaten everyone there.

xpost They seemed to be setting something up, with the sheriff asking if Will was gay in this weird way. And the other cops saying he used to sleep with Winona.

And presumably the backstory of the upside down world will be explored more in the next season? Especially if Eleven is now stuck there.

(xpost)

Yeah, I guess they could still reveal him to be Will's father. But that'd mean he was having an affair with her while he had a wife and daughter, not sure if they want to go there?

We're going to need a full character chronology to sort this out

Joyce and Hopper probably have some kind of ties back to high school, because he seemed to have some weird relationship with Lonnie (competition, disdain, something).

This was like the perfect blend of Spielberg and Stephen king

Was that a hatched egg hopper stopped to look at when they were in the upside-down?

I thought so. Nice Alien reference.

I wasn't sure, not after will choked out that baby slug

I imagine the snakey thing that Hopper pulled out of Will's throat hatched from the egg, then left a little creature thingy inside him to do...what? Who knows.

Eleven is the monster, guys

i.e. she created it

why was will still alive but barb was dead?

Will found hiding places

And was incubating the thing

i.e. she created it

Did she, though? Whenever she was in that black space with the wet floor, she could hone in on already living creatures (people to eavesdrop on), but there's no indication she could ever manifest something into being. She just brought it back out with her.

Xps yeah but the monster snatched him, right? So how did he get away?

And how did the monster get the scientist dude in the elevator at the beginning?

It came through a hole between the dimensions in the ceiling.

Yeah, it was a bit dodgy that the creature dragged both Barb and Will to the upside down dimension, but somehow Will managed to slip away from it while Barb didn't. But I guess Will is smaller and it was easier for him to hide? The creature didn't seem to have good eyesight, or possibly it was even blind? And Barb was bleeding while Will wasn't, so it couldn't track him by smell.

Since there were so many homages to the movie, I'm wondering whether season 2 will be the Aliens to season 1's Alien? The creature couldn't really have taken over a whole planet all by itself, and it was breeding anyway, so we should get multiple monsters next season... Though I'd be more happy if it was more about the mysteries of the upside down dimension in general, I'm not sure if the monster was successfully enough done that it could carry another season.

Yeah, the creature would have to have some amazing backstory for me to be happy with them focusing an entire second season on it.

One more interesting thing that wasn't really discussed in the finale: the sheriff pretty much sold out Eleven to save Will, didn't he? He told the bad guys where El and the other kids were hiding, so what happened next was kinda his fault. At first I thought they'd reveal he was faking, that he told the bad guys some false location, but that didn't seem to be the case... Maybe that's why he's bringing food to El at the end (and possibly helping her hide from the men in black?), because he feels guilty about it?

feel like we were robbed of epic modine death. but maybe he didn't die...it was too quick. they should have had him talking up against a wall in the school and the monster comes out of the wall and chomps his head off. that's always a good way to do it.

Yeah, I didn't really understand that sudden shift in his character. I guess his primary concern was making Joyce's family whole again, all else be damned. I don't know if El is still alive, or if she is, that's she's even in "our" world, but him leaving the Eggo waffles out there makes me think he feels pretty guilty.

I've only seen like 2 and some change episodes of this but my early reaction: fuck this show. Have a lot of affection for the things it references, but (or because of that) this feels so pandering, witless, and soulless. Does it do anything interesting in the back half or does it continue emptily jerking off ppl who were kids in the 80s?

i'm an 80's kid who has shrugged and ignored over 5 million 80's revivals and i loved this!

Yeah, the same here. It doesn't really go above and beyond it's inspirations, but IMO it's a solid, intriguing mystery story with mostly good actors and some neat visuals, not just an empty pastiche. The 80s tropes are really just the cake dressing, I would've liked this story even with a present day setting. But if the first 2 episodes haven't convinced you, I can't imagine the rest of it will.

one break with 80s form-- the girl who has sex lives and the virgin dies

I was thinking that mustve been deliberate hey?

How do you know she was virgin? Just because she looked geeky?

like i said on the netflix thread, it reminded me of the faux-spielberg Super 8 and i loved that movie to death. it's not like you can't do the 80's right its just that so many people get it wrong or just go for surface visuals. this had the surface visuals but it also just had a good t.v. movie story.

gotta say the first scene with her friend at the lockers, man, they nailed the brainy redhead hairdo and outfit so perfectly. stunning really.

this was better than M&M too. i eagerly awaited this t.v. movie in 1982 after i read the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awTKqydci_c

plus, as far as nostalgia goes, i'll take Poltergeist and Stephen King short stories over stupid Ghostbusters any day.

one break with 80s form-- the girl who has sex lives and the virgin dies

― Blowout Coombes (President Keyes), Thursday, July 21, 2016 12:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This occurred to me too. I thought at least Steve was a goner.

I was convinced steve was related to Jean ralphio till I looked him up on IMDb

steve not dying was a total shocker! there were multiple instances inside and outside the house where you really thought he was done for. man, that hair of his...

Even though "child with special powers on the run from the authorities" is one of my least favorite genre tropes ever, this was good

I read somewhere that Steve didn't die because they liked the actor a lot and decided to give him more to do.

Similar thing happened with Aaron Paul on Breaking Bad IIRC

I thought Steve was pretty awesome.

btw, here's the band of the guys who did the show's instrumental score.

https://survive.bandcamp.com/

Good lord tuomas you asked some stupid questions itt

I thought this was great btw. For something so heavily referential it was surprisingly unpredictable ... Like they played with these tropes and cliches in a way that made them feel new and unexpected.

Also I don't think will choked out a "baby" creature, it was just goop that suggests he's become infected himself

My nitpicks were when you watch the pool scene he stops taking photos well before the monster shows up and when the phone gets electrified it obviously doesn't look blackened and burned at first until they do a close up later lol

i liked how the two friends who weren't Mike conveniently didn't have parents. even at the end after almost dying at the school they are just sitting by themselves in the hospital waiting room.

also trying to figure out the Barb timeline. she doesn't go to school for two whole days and then Nancy calls the police about her? it was kinda unclear. and Nancy kind of a bad friend in general. telling her mom that Barb is at the library? when there is already one kid missing? that's mean!

also i don't think he stopped taking pictures well before the monster showed up. he took one last picture and then looked down and when he looked up she was gone.

I thought the token black friend was a really good actor!

still weighing up whether to dive into E02

my 80s sensibilities were a little rattled by terms like 'shit' and 'douchebag'

douchebag a thing in the early 80's! "chill" was the one that got me. "let's go chill in my car". don't think that was a thing back then. the word chill existed but i don't remember people using it like that at all.

"chill out" existed back then. maybe not in Indiana though.

they could have gotten away with chill pill. if they needed a chill thing to say. that was a thing in 1983.

they could have even had The Big Chill playing at the movie house.

i'm not saying it didn't exist. pretty sure "shit" existed then too. just that you wouldn't hear it in spielberg film!

just "penis breath"

actually they said "shit" E.T. too

i've become such a fainting fanny!

How many episodes before this passes the Bechdel test? My missus is getting impatient.

Bechdel test is post-80s. It would be anachronistic.

the mom and daughter kinda talk to each other. and winona talks to a catatonic woman...

winona talks to L

Nobody's asked any stupid questions itt, you dick xps

also i don't think he stopped taking pictures well before the monster showed up. he took one last picture and then looked down and when he looked up she was gone.

― scott seward, Friday, July 22, 2016 10:17 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nah I rewatched it the time between was ridic, her blood drops in the water after he stops shooting. If that's what drew the monster then there's no way he got it in the photo

Nobody's asked any stupid questions itt, you dick xps

― just1n3, Friday, July 22, 2016 5:51 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Disagree, ilx's "suspension of disbelief is a lie" cru asks dumb things like "how come Will didn't get eaten but her friend did?" As if we need literally every step spelled out for this. These kids are torture on the game of thrones thread

That was me, not tuomas. Fuck off.

Well I'm going to ask some stupid questions

When 11 first made contact with the monster, what was it eating?
How did the upsides own go from black nothingness to a parallel universe?
Where was the portal?
What deal did hopper make with Modine? When they took him away at the hospital I assumed he was with them but there he was at the local cop shop Xmas party.
If the monster appeared every time there was blood, why didn't it show up whenever 11 got a nose bleed?

Not a question but I did like the parallel of the winter snow with the white floaty stuff in the upsidedown

Another question: why didn't Mike try to contact 11 on the walkie-talkie?

i wish they hadn't done the hopper getting into the car thing at the end. it bugged me. and mike should have been the one leaving waffles in the woods.

Netflix still hasn't officially confirmed a S2, but the producers and actors seem to believe it's a done deal. I imagine some of the questions left at the end will be addressed.

As for what new things might happen in S2, I wonder if The Upside Down will continue to play a role in the show's story or if they'll move on to some other freaky thing.

If 11 got her abilities from her mom taking acid while she was pregnant I'm thinking there are an army of 11s out there from the 60s and 70s.

and of course the obvious question - who were 001-010?

Most of sunny's questions are fine! I'm not saying questions are bad, just bad ones

This q though:

Another question: why didn't Mike try to contact 11 on the walkie-talkie?

― Quarter measures (sunny successor), Saturday, July 23, 2016 8:37 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Because she's the one who has to make the walkie talkie work as a receiver, she can't (as far as I know) just make herself appear on any walkie talkie

Also, the waffles suggest he knows she's around and might be intentionally hiding her

i wish they hadn't done the hopper getting into the car thing at the end. it bugged me. and mike should have been the one leaving waffles in the woods.

― scott seward, Saturday, July 23, 2016 10:29 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Idk it made sense of course the Feds want to question him

This scared me and I got a lump in my throat in the last episode, F-

i watched this whole thing in <2 days and i'm deeply ashamed because it's so sunny outside.

thought kid w/o teeth was a perfect mix of neal and bill from freaks and geeks. he stole every scene.

Ryder is doing that thing that every single character in the omen does, of being like "hey, maybe if I act completely bananas 100% of the time, everybody will believe me! IM TELLING YOU HES THE DEVIL AGOOGOOBABAHEEHEE" which is obv a valid part of the playbook they're using here but can still grate

he stole every scene.

I really liked how they cast a group of people who looked so exactly like they stepped out of a 1980s film, then subverted the expectations people my age had for those characters. You expect the slightly chubby kid without the teeth to be the fairly useless, wisecracking one, but no, he's a solid group leader with science skills. You expect both him and Lucas to just do whatever Mike tells them, but no, they've got minds of their own and Lucas goes off to investigate by himself. You expect Nancy to be useless, but no, she's calmly amazing and resourceful and resilient. And so on.

Yeah the casting was excellent.

One thing I'm left puzzled by - was there/is there only one monster? If so whats with all the eggs and incubated dead people? Is the idea that S2 will mean more come back or something?

Don't apply logic to the monster

It's like alien they can do whatever they want with it

It killed all the soldiers it caught within seconds but that one kid it caught got away

The gunk covering everything in the parallel dimension definitely suggested 80s monster cocoons so I

...wouldn't be surprised by an aliens direction in s2

Oh great, a pile of references to a movie franchise I havent seen :(

this whole series is a pile of references! it isn't that alien-y tho

Yeah I got a lot of em! Alien(s) is the one Ive never really seen (and hasnt refs to it been done to death?)

Still, dont mean to sound like I'm whining, I thought this show was really good.

I was going off tuomas's comment re s2 but the main thing you need to know is that aliens has more aliens than alien (sorry if spoiler)

Speaking of references...

http://www.vulture.com/2016/07/stranger-things-film-reference-glossary.html

I've never seen Altered States. Is it good?

Yes it is. Or at least the first 80% of it.

I figured the trainline walk to be a hat tip to Stand By Me.

The reference to The Conversation was so well done bc you really *were* worried he'd end up like gene hackman's character

Reference to alien in the moment when he knocks down the older brother before the boyfriend shows up w a baseball bat

I'm surprised they didnt mention those two instances

This also in parts reminded me of every young adult novel I read at age 8-11

The monster was the least interesting thing about this. I hope they move on to something else for S2.

Is the portal still open? It could be a Hellmouth kind of situation.

When 11 first made contact with the monster, what was it eating?
How did the upsides own go from black nothingness to a parallel universe?
Where was the portal?
What deal did hopper make with Modine? When they took him away at the hospital I assumed he was with them but there he was at the local cop shop Xmas party.
If the monster appeared every time there was blood, why didn't it show up whenever 11 got a nose bleed?

― Quarter measures (sunny successor), 23. heinäkuuta 2016 16:32

Here are some answers to these questions:

* I mentioned this upthread, but my theory is that the upside down world used to be inhabited by humans (since it has the same buildings as the "real" world), but the monsters appeared from somewhere and killed most/all of the humans on that world. That's why the buildings are covered by alien slime/cocoons.

* The black nothingness wasn't the upside world, it was merely a visual shorthand to show how Eleven perceived things when she was trying to contact someone with her ESP powers. We saw the same black nothingness when she was spying on the Russian agent(?), which happened before she even made contact with the upside down world.

* The main portal was a hole inside the Hawkins Laboratory, but it seemed that the monster was able to take advantage of the way Eleven had weakened the walls between dimensions and create smaller portals itself within a limited area near the main portal. That's why it was able to hunt in the woods and near Will's house. My silly fan theory (which will no doubt irritate D-40, so he should stop reading now) is that the monsters are some kind of interdimensional parasites which move from one world to another, devouring the life within them. Maybe the upside down world was once a normal Earth, until they discovered means of creating their own portal, thus inviting the monsters in?

* The deal with Dr. Brenner (Modine) was he allows Hopper and Joyce to go through the portal to save Will if Hopper tells them where Eleven is. It remains unclear why Brenner didn't just get them shot after Hopper had ratted on Eleven, but later on he does say that Hopper and Joyce probably won't get out of the upside down world alive, so it seems Brenner hoped he wouldn't have to go through the trouble of killing them and faking their deaths as suicides or something.

As to what deal Hopper made with the authorities that allows him to stay as the local sheriff, that's a hook for season 2... Though I guess too many people know about the Eleven and the monster now that the men in black could simply kill them all without drawing too much attention, so presumably Hopper was able to cut a favourable deal with them in exchange for his silence?

* The monster was only able to prey within a limited area, where the barrier between the upside down world and the "real" world was weakened. That's why Nancy and Jonathan knew where to hunt for it. Eleven never even went inside that area, she was too scared of going near Hawkins Laboratory once she'd escaped from there. So the monster never smelled her blood.

one thing that bothered me about this, if we're doing quibbling, was that the ryder's son never told her that he had heard the same report of a man with no face from nancy. she was going crazy and he could have made her feel more certain she was right, it seems a really important thing to do.

That was explained onscreen though. After he hears about the faceless man from Nancy, he comes home and is clearly about to tell his mom... But then he finds out his dad has come to "help" Joyce, and later on the dad tells him that he shouldn't feed his mom's craziness, so he keeps quiet until after Joyce has kicked the dad out.

I guess yeah, feel like the sense of time passing was a bit hard to gauge.

As to what deal Hopper made with the authorities that allows him to stay as the local sheriff, that's a hook for season 2...

He's the chief of police rather than the sheriff, which I assume is a proper fulltime job rather than an elected position, so it might be a lot harder to get rid of him.

I guess yeah, feel like the sense of time passing was a bit hard to gauge.

I had a bit of problem keeping up with this too, but towards the end of the season they say that Will has been missing only a week or something, so it seems most of the events take place within just a few days. That means Will's funeral was held very quickly after his "body" was discovered, but other than that I think it works in explaining why the characters don't have the time to meet each other and share their information.

yeah that line about "a week ago i was buying new clothes" or whaatever kind of drew attention to the trickiness of the timeline, there was another part where they said "yesterday" and it was something from like two episodes ago. i'm only really criticising this cos i think about this stuff a lot when plotting fiction.

i was p impressed with this show overall - it felt almost cynical in the way it so expertly tapped into nostalgia for et/goonies etc. but it still was pretty well done - i also have to admit finding the last episode and the relationship between the children really affecting. all the child actors were great, especially lucas.

i guess it owed a lot to let the right one in as well.

For something so heavily referential it was surprisingly unpredictable ... Like they played with these tropes and cliches in a way that made them feel new and unexpected.

Cabin in the Woods:Slasher/Horror Movies::Stranger Things:80s/Spielberg/King/Cronenberg

actually they said "shit" E.T. too

And "douchebag!"

haha i am the worst.

For something so heavily referential it was surprisingly unpredictable ... Like they played with these tropes and cliches in a way that made them feel new and unexpected.

Cabin in the Woods:Slasher/Horror Movies::Stranger Things:80s/Spielberg/King/Cronenberg

i don't think this is accurate at all. this was so, so much more slavish referential pandering than it was subversive, meta, or re-inventive.

for 'slavish referential pandering' i was extremely invested in the characters, their stories & ideas, i don't think for the average kid watching this (and at some level this does feel like a kid's movie) they're spending all day pointing at the references to films that came out two decades before they were born

i mean show not movie obv

The Duffers always viewed it as a movie, so you're not wrong.

it feels like a very long movie

star wars is such slavish referential pandering...haven't these people read Dune or seen The Hidden Fortress

i realize this is more densely referential than star wars but i think it's very purposefully done, it's not like a game of 'spot the reference'... like i said w/ the example of the conversation, if you recognize the reference it adds weight to your fear that the chief might be losing it before he figures out what's going on

https://vimeo.com/175929311

Side-by-side supercut of Stranger Things scenes and similar scenes from 70s/80s films. Incredibly well done.

I guess yeah, feel like the sense of time passing was a bit hard to gauge.

I had no trouble with this at all? Only a few days passed in total afaict. This was made pretty clear when Nancy refers to "what you did yesterday" to Wills brother re the camera thing.

And thinking about the rapid funeral, perhaps that was in an attempt to cover up the fake body.

OK in ep 2 i am warming to the friendship vibe with the kids and 11. (am i weird for wondering how everyone knows she's a girl right away? i totally thought boy and still sort of do.)

does jonathan drive a Ford LTD? i partially grew up in one. bench seats and lap belts. the period details like that, the clothes and haircuts and furniture feel completely legit. if a little bit overdeterminedly drab.

i love how wanker love interest's parent-free party is totally LAME.

ok holy shit the wall

nance is a dickhead to barb. DICKHEAD.

less-than-zero bangles version of hazy shade of winter surely a bit too late for the period they're evoking

we got a big t.v. today at the mall with much better picture than our old t.v. and this show now looks 100% different. very weird. it looks much more like an 80s shot on video t.v. show. maybe our old t.v. was just really bad. its way brighter now. (it does have that pan & scan feel that i have noticed on big t.v.s during action scenes. don't know what that's about.)

(my kids are enjoying this by the way...)

haha, i thought that when i heard hazy shade of winter too. but i let it go.

the "pan and scan" vibe is a setting that you can turn off. frame interpolation is the technical term for it i think? but different TV mfrs call it different things in the settings? you should probably turn it off

ah okay.

less-than-zero bangles version of hazy shade of winter surely a bit too late for the period they're evoking

I almost let that pull me out of it, but then I let it go.

Setting - 1983
Song - 1987

the only time the references put me off was how overtly alien-y some bits of the final ep were. at the same time, when i saw "telekinetic girl in a hospital gown with a tattoo of a number" my first thought was "akira," which is a reference i've seen few people making and also makes me think a.) the show's refs might be more compounded/layered/complex than simple "here's a shot that evokes (x)" or b.) some of this stuff is so deeply embedded in the pop culture of the past 40 years that you could easily say one aspect comes from x, y, or z and they all seem like plausible inspirations.

i agree with whoever said modine's death shoulda been...not necessarily more grisly but more impactful. but yeah this was great. the platonic 80s/90s stephen king tv miniseries finally done with an actual budget, good acting, and decent-to-great effects.

i love how wanker love interest's parent-free party is totally LAME.

Ha, well, I liked that scene because it invoked exactly what asshole boys did at that age in my experience. There was no party, they just say there is to get 2 girls to come over and try and screw one or both of them (often with pleas to raid yer parents booze stash on the way over also). It, and Barb, resonated heavily for me.

Barb even looked a bit like my HS best friend, only I was the nerdy skinny one and she was the glasses/80s hair one but she was the bitch.

less-than-zero bangles version of hazy shade of winter surely a bit too late for the period they're evoking

Well the last episode features a tune from Moby's Everything is Wrong (1995), so I guess they're not being too strict about the music being period accurate when it's non-diegetic.

i agree with whoever said modine's death shoulda been...not necessarily more grisly but more impactful.

The way I interpreted is that they left it intentionally ambiguous whether he even died, in case they want to bring the character back next season (and Modine is interested in returning). But I agree that his death was suprisingly lame, though he was kind of a lame villain to begin with, he never felt as threatening as they probably intended. Definitely one of the weakest parts of the series, alongside with the monster's CGI face.

at the same time, when i saw "telekinetic girl in a hospital gown with a tattoo of a number" my first thought was "akira," which is a reference i've seen few people making and also makes me think a.) the show's refs might be more compounded/layered/complex than simple "here's a shot that evokes (x)" or b.) some of this stuff is so deeply embedded in the pop culture of the past 40 years that you could easily say one aspect comes from x, y, or z and they all seem like plausible inspirations.

Somehow I hadn't made this connection in my mind, but you're totally right! IIRC there's even a scene in Akira where one of the ESP kids shouts and makes a car that's coming towards him/her fly in the air?

The "80s home video" vibe in the visuals was evident in the title sequence, where they made the red colour in the letter warble a bit and added some visual noise (those small white dots flickerring on the screen), as if you were watching this from an old tube television. I don't think they did that outside the titles though, everything else looked clean and HD.

"the red colour in the letters"

Someone please remind me of the name 11's mom called her

there is something odd about this mountain of 80s signifiers filmed in pin-sharp HD and using modern shaky-cam technique

Jane iirc? xp

there is something odd about this mountain of 80s signifiers filmed in pin-sharp HD and using modern shaky-cam technique

So you think all movies set in the 1920s should be black & white and silent?

excuse me?

1) i like odd things
2) it's not just set in the 80s, it's an homage to specific films from the 80s, which is reflected in color palette, shot composition, casting, genre, theme, etc. so in the respect yes, for me the shaky cam and hi-defness are odd, novel, a weird spin on things. (you could even see this as a mirror of the plot in that we get to see the "underside" or hidden aspects of those older movies). just as a specific homage to, say, the early films of jean renoir would be, yes, odd if it were filmed in color with shaky HD camera work.

in fact, and i think you'll like this analogy Tuomas, if you could go back in time to air this on HBO over 10 sundays in 1985 it would have the same sort of effect that johnny b. goode had on that high school dance in back to the future. just similar enough to what people knew to hook them in, but a qualitative jump in style and technique

I get that, but what would be the alternative? Film it in crappy-looking and/or stiff '80s television techniques? Some people are already criticizing the series for having so many shout-outs to its inspirations, if the visual style was total homage too, it'd be hard to treat it as anything else than a pastiche. I like the series just as it is: paying homage to inspirations, but also doing stuff (not just the visuals, but the more graphic horror too) that never would've made it to TV in the actual 1980s.

i like it too Tuomas

It's not actually paying homage to '80s television though. All its influences are cinematic

A couple of non-80s things the show reminded me of:

Like the (crappy) tv version of Under the Dome there were interconnected stories centering on a group of kids, a group of teens, and various adults (including cops)

Freaks and Geeks-- this is pretty obvious. 80s setting. 3 D&D playing boys. An older sister trying to change. Lots of gruesome deaths.

Lots of gruesome deaths.

Did I miss an episode of F&G?

the school shooting one. Or was that my fan-fic?

I feel like there is a bit of a Twin Peaks feel too (down to some of the cinematography).

twin peaks was way more colorful imo. this whole things is very, very taupe.

i do really like how genuinely crappy a lot of it feels, the high school, the rich asshole's clothes. their hair is probably a LITTLE too nice but only just. the 80s was still the 70s in many ways and this show gets that.

Agree this is very muted overall, but a lot of taupe in TP small town bits.

yeah you're right. i've still only finished three eps! am loving the evolution of the crazy mom's lightbulb technique. very E.T., the trail of colored lights like the trail of M&Ms.

however i thought the way the kids turned on 11 once their buddy turned up dead in the reservoir felt a little like a waypoint required by the script rather than how these kids would actually react. if they'd seen a kid actually use telekinesis in real life they would treat him/her like a god for the rest of their lives tbh.

am waiting for jonathan's carrie moment now, obv.

"Film it in crappy-looking and/or stiff '80s television techniques?"

watching it with that weird smoothing/soap-opera-effect function on the big t.v. we got made it look exactly like this. it kinda freaked me out. but was kinda cool. it looked exactly like an episode of my old favorite friday the 13th t.v. show starring canadian songbird robey. it made it look strangely 3D as well. it was like the upsidedown version of the show. if you have a big t.v. with that feature you should try it. it made it look more canadian in general.

Only works on a 120hz tv and above. Fortunately, I don't have that option.

Yeah that shit is only good for sports.

it looks so fucked up.

god i loved this damn show

lol "how on earth can this girl pass undetected in school with that crewcut??" uh cause she totally looks like and dresses like a boy??

was sorta hoping 11 would, instead of halting troy and making him wet himself at the school assembly, snap his head clean off his body and then be like "what? was that wrong?"

ask for the negatives nance, jesus

ah good, they're developing new prints

multidimensional meat wall so disturbing

i hope 11 doesn't stay in this dumb drag for too long

Not reading this thread yet because am only on episode 3 but wanted to pop my head in and say I really like this, will be joining you soon kthxbye

One of us!

<3 barbs

https://i.redd.it/qqvl7j5zonax.jpg

amen

feel like if she'd had even fewer than 10 minutes the adulation might be even greater

We really enjoyed this; Em was a bit dubious after the first episode ("this is SO targeted for us to enjoy it that I'm not sure I can") but the characterisation and plot and design are so well done that she soon got over that, whereas I was suckered in within about five seconds.

Dustin as best character, with the best lines. "Don't keep this curiosity door locked" or whatever he said to the science teacher on the phone was just amazing. Liked all the cast, though - I think the only characters we didn't like were Steve's 'friends' and even he didn't like them by the end.

Appreciated the way it loomed towards and then pulled away from all the tropes you'd expect - the virgin dies, the 'fat' kid is actually the smartest one, the girl doesn't ditch the jock and take-up with the outcast, etc etc - just enough to make it feel fresh.

Really hope they get to make a second season, and that it doesn't just revolve around a monster.

Doug Wheeler era Swamp Thing logo
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/e/ea/Swamp_Thing_Vol_2_88.jpg

just wanted to get that font out there

Glad y'all saw Akira here - and was baffled when it was missing from "influence lists" like the Vulture one.

Add to the bangles and moby quibbles, the New Order track used "Elegia" was on Low Life in 1985 - but that would be being really precious about the times. On that, would a US "alternative" kid have heard of the Smiths in 1983?

Now That's What I Call Music 2 has a Smiths song on it, and that came out in the second half of 1983, so a clued-in teenager who listens to college radio could very well have, I think.

would've maybe appreciated it more if the weird poor kid in nowhere Indiana listened to something that someone in that situation would likely listen to. eyes nearly rolled outta my skull when they had him talking about Joy Division and Television.

More likely a Devo fan

Did US college radio play UK Now series stuff?

but that's kind of indicative of the audience-stroking bs in this show that annoys me

xp to self

i definitely heard "this charming man" on the radio in 1983, but 1984 was ground zero for smiths love between me and my friends. first album. hatful. would be very doubtful that someone in indiana would be putting them on mixtapes based on one or two singles. that didn't even come out in the u.s. i don't think.

Yeah "On the radio in the US" was definitely not the same thing as "On the radio in Indiana."

we had this too in 1984: https://www.discogs.com/Various-Debut-LP-Magazine-Issue-06/release/847817

How far is fictional Hawkins, IN from Indiana U.? They have a pretty good radio station.

you could get the this charming man u.k. 12-inch in 1984 too here. hand in glove 7-inch and this charming man single the only 1983 releases. and definitely never put out here. 1984 was an avalanche of stuff. all those singles.

they were just one year off, basically. by 1984 a savvy indiana kid could definitely get into the smiths.

Season 2 will have to deal with this time traveling Smiths fan

1983 definitely the year that younger people started in with new order here via PC&L and blue monday. tons of college airplay. the earlier stuff was harder to find and probably only bought by older hepcats who knew joy division or who knew what factory records was. i remember having a hard time finding the first album and ceremony 12-inch in new york city in 1983/1984. they had come and gone already.

(i mention new order cuz in 1983 new order love would lead to joy division love. who were still definitely a mysterious cult band in 1983 in the states. not some quincy jones ewok on the beach joint.)

"your son michael is in danger. i can help him. but only if you trust me. do you trust me?"

BASED ON WHAT YOU OLEAGINOUS SILVER FUCK

i mean let's see, you've just turned my house upside down and told me nothing. yep that's enough for me!

i like how winona's dressing like she's in the matrix now

They modeled her hair on Meryl Streep in Silkwood

i'm not saying anything new i realise but the girl who plays 11 should win emmy for best actress. performance of the goddamn year

lol at dustin's pre-google research methods when he wants to know how ro build a sensory deprivation tank

ready to watch this again. i can't get the themesong out of my head

I read a couple days ago they're releasing the score.

this show was so good i dont want a second season

I would have been happy for there not to have been a second season but the multiple points of intrigue and uncertainty raised by the ending piqued my interest too much.

i.e. what will happen to will? how will he be affected by his time in the upside down world. what's hopper up to with those dudes exactly. and does hopper know that eleven is alive? or is he, driven by his guilt of selling her out, leaving the eggos out in the forest in the vague hope that she's out there somewhere and might find them?

i must know!

another huge influence: Silent Hill

also the flower-faced monster getting doused in flames was pure Thing

xp i wouldn't be mad if they made a second season.

hey the synth band that did the soundtrack nailed the vibe so, so hard. they also scored "the guest," and more ppl should watch that movie if they dig 80s retro pastiche/homage. also, it has a RAD soundtrack beyond the original score.

slight quibble: monster looked shite

they didn't reeeeally have an idea for the alien actually but it's OK, it was enough that it was gonna gitcha

i've been watching the resident evil movies again (i like them!) and i always liked their plant zombies.

http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/resident-evil-afterlife-movie-image-22.jpg

and the skinless devil dogs of course.

man as soon as Mike started in with "you'll have all the Eggos you ever want!" I knew 11 was a certified goner

The sudden rehabilitation of Steve was really touching I thought. And I liked his swagger with the nail-bat.

emmy for steve please

EMMYS FOR EVERYONE

http://www.silenthillmemories.net/sh1/screens/pics/sh1_screen_09.jpg

hey but like

what about the funeral, and will's "body"

and the pathologist from "state" who presumably submitted an autopsy report?

and dr brenner?

and the trashed school?

how did the town process any of this information??

Love all the ineffectual and/or evil dads in this show. Especially Nancy and Mike's dad. Cracked me up every time he was on screen.

Sorry if this was already discussed but why did the chief put food, including eggos, in the box in the woods at the end? Is he sending food to El on the dark side somehow?

Is he sending food to El on the dark side somehow?

Tune into S2 to find out!

Things I totally loved about this show:

1) The kids, particularly Eleven and Dustin, and the teens.

2) The score and soundtrack in general.

3) That it avoids a bunch of obvious stuff (Sheriff and Winona fall in love, dorky kid gets girl, etc).

4) Any scene with the science teacher.

5) That despite being close to six hours long it still felt pretty tightly put together.

Things I didn't love:

1) Looks like there will be a sequel.

2) Hopper's "strategy" makes absolutely no sense (although I guess Modine was like who cares go into the stupid hole just save me some time).

3) As Tracer Hand notes the whole ending is a little "la la la" considering the level of mayhem...

Overall though this was probably the best Netflix series.

Neat article on the typography of the title card:

https://blog.nelsoncash.com/the-typography-of-stranger-things-e35771f40d31#.79trnn9z2

Feel silly I missed the obvious King homage, I was thinking of Carpenter instead, probably more due to the score.

My only very minor quibble, re the post above, is the skip one month and how reset everyone seemed. It feels like there should have been more fallout from what happened.

well it was Christmas. They were probably trying to put on a brave face

So, who does 11 remind me (you) of?

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/stranger-things-finale-duffer-brothers-interview-season-2-1201816664/

Matt: We talked about “Silent Hill,” the video games were an inspiration, and “Alien” was an inspiration, in terms of the look.

:D

font also quite reminiscent of this: http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1306028600l/190958.jpg

:-) Has someone recently added that to the References in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITC_Benguiat

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Smiths_-_Strangeways_here_we_come.jpg

Did anyone else laugh when the monster was on the floor literally burning to death and then eyebrow kid suddenly comes in WITH A FIRE EXTINGUISHER like "oh here let me get that for you buddy, all better? great"

i was sorta like, wait why are you putting him out

I assumed they didnt want the whole house to burn to the ground?

I made the same assumption

lol ok that makes sense. still he was a little on the rare side i thought

oh yeah it's definitely still funny I was correct to laugh

I'd have left it on a little longer but I am probably guilty of being over-cautious with unstoppable interdimensional monsters

Are we assuming the monster is male btw? The characters called it a "man w no face" at one point iirc but that's a pretty terrible description all round so we can prob discount it as poor eyewitnessing

I kind of think of unstoppable interdimensional monsters as being gender neutral.

So, who does 11 remind me (you) of?

Charlie/Firestarter
Ripley from Alien III for the look
Tetsuo from Akira

Young ScarJo?
https://goo.gl/images/MB0cnG

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/ff/20/6f/ff206f00e534054b952001a9ee1d8163.jpg

okay so i know 11 is hardcore leggo my eggo but surely modine fed her something else during the 12 years she was in the govt facility.

by the way the supermarket scene was badass

Probably soylent protein gruel 7d/w in the facility

11 is gonna grow up to be the lead singer of the band Savages.

"okay so i know 11 is hardcore leggo my eggo but surely modine fed her something else during the 12 years she was in the govt facility."

see i don't think she got anything like that living in the lab and that's why she wanted the junk food all the time.

Yeah

Soybean paste fortified with lsd

vs whatever the fuck an eggo is

how did the town process any of this information??

idk, it reminded me of how at the end of Buffy episodes all the townsfolk just go on about their lives like it's not at all weird that the world almost ends every couple weeks.

11 is Imperator Furiosa, surely?

font also quite reminiscent of this: http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1306028600l/190958.jpg

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, July 30, 2016 12:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's the most bored looking kid fantasy hero that I've ever seen! Dude is like, "I'd rather be hitting the bong and listening to Return to Forever".

i thought this was really lovely

contextually it did help that all the other big-ticket neflix shows (OITNB, JJ) have left me totally cold. i liked how clear and focused this was.

i didn't mind the shaggy ending either; showing the loose ends is what an episodic show ought to do.

so, Hop is a fed now?

got a stupid question: so, were there two monsters? or did the one that was shot, beaten and burned, and crawled bloodily back to the library, quickly recover and head to the school to feast on the feds? also why didn't it feast on the feds instead of going after the kids? (ok that one is a stupid question to which i know the stupid answer.)

i think it DID feast on the Feds. right? the brraaap of the guns fell silent. and then it was still hungry. for a late night bite of raw child.

no idea about how many monsters there were.

totally loved the dream-like physical frustration of grabbing the stones from the backpack, passing them to lucas, lucas firing, the shots not working, grabbing another stone, passing it to lucas...

One monster, I believe: not wounded badly enough (normal-world injuries seem slight to it, see all the machine-guns emptied into it) though it totally looked a bit singed. And I don't think it went after the kids so much as it went after Eleven — he chased her right through the gate in the first place, after all. That last one a bit of rationalisation of the obvious reason, tho

i really think my favorite part was the entering of the tree. because it was such an amazing illustration of something you should never ever do in a million years. it was 200% wrong.

Rivals the first scene from The Stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRdPNlLG4s

hi

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/stranger-things-survive-talk-their-creepy-nostalgic-score-w431789

i liked hearing from those guys! that score really is dope

these kids today with their cassettes and vhs tapes

It was only a matter of time before someone did this, but the Randy Newman song is an inspired choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0K0VpPjMjQ

Ended up quite unintentionally binge-watching most of this, after kinda halfheartedly working through the first few episodes... at first it felt like it was coasting too much on the E.T. and Stephen King trappings (juiced up with Akira/Evangelion stuff), like it knew that the (awesome) set-dressing and costumes and stuff would be enough to hook 80s kids like myself. In particular - and I don't watch a lot of contemporary TV so maybe this is common - it felt really jumpy in the editing, like no scenes could build up tension, characters would respond to something someone else said before you'd really absorbed it yourself, just no air in the scenes. Even extends to the opening credits, where they barely let one title fade out before the next one pops up.

But either that got better or I just got used to it because once the plot really got going I was hooked. I do think it could have been an episode or two shorter - especially in the first half there felt like a lot of padding, like how many scenes do we need to re-establish that Winona Ryder is doing this stuff with the lights and freaking out, or that the kids are frustratedly trying to communicate with El? But ehhhh, setting that aside, it was a nice little supernatural tale in a milieu I was happy to see on screen. I mean, we had a Volkswagen Rabbit, feels right seeing one in a movie. Pandering maybe but in a way it's amazing this hasn't come along before - American Graffiti came out barely a decade after the period it was trying to lovingly reconstruct.

Ate up every scene Harbour was in (though it was kinda weird how in one episode he just suddenly switches to punching people out left and right, after all the slow, I've-got-a-nagging-feeling detective work). Wish Ryder had been given more room at the start to go through some non-hysterical notes so we can see how she gets to the point she stays at for like five shrieking episodes. The kid actors were all great (though Toothless was clearly coached into doing way too much of a loud Chunk part - liked him better when he was doing anything else). Wish they'd dialed down some of the D&D/X-Men stuff, even just for the sake of variety in the script, but also for the sake of better or more convincing nostalgia - like they could had some lamer or more forgotten interests ("I got these binoculars by selling GRIT!"), and D&D is so on the nose re: E.T.

I do agree there's some plot-hole stuff where people who should be communicating things they've discovered just never get around to it. Eventually there's too much going on and you accept that there's no time but there's definitely a mid-season stretch where it started to get distracting though I can't now remember what the examples were that nagged at me. It did seem awfully convenient that the bad guys don't seem to have actually bothered bugging the Byers house (and that our cast just accept that it's "safe" for no really good reason). Particularly in the last couple episodes, while Jonathan and Nancy are going back and forth to that house, it's like, really? No goons were set to watch the place in case they come back there with El in tow?

Re: speculation stuff - my interpretation was that Modine (aka Gendou Ikari) initially were using El to spy on the Soviets or read minds or whatever, a natural extension of their MKULTRA remit from the 60s. The black emptiness is either a visualization of her sensory-deprived mind-state as suggested above, or some kind of no-place in between dimensions. At some point they/she become aware of the existence of the upside-down world and the monster, and have her psychically try to make contact. Somehow, this triggers the opening of the gate - maybe the monster, or maybe El, have the power to make that tear between dimensions. I haven't gone back to check this, but what I told myself was that the room they used for El's immersion tank is the room that became the overgrown, sealed-off gate zone where they're doing their experiments now - like there's some sequence we didn't see of total mayhem after she makes contact, and they have to quickly seal off this whole part of the building, which is gradually being overtaken by, basically, invasive upside-down species. So El blames herself for the monster being able to get into our world, but she didn't really create it, and the whole thing is a case where the government's mandate has expanded crazily beyond their original project but they're so deep into cover-up territory that they just keep pressing ahead.

Tracer OTM about the late 70s look/feel of that early 80s period, perhaps most dramatically in children's hairstyles. It just pours out of my family photographs but most "80s retro" stuff misses that entirely. Would be interested to read interviews with the design team or whatever - I kept imagining them perusing Sears catalogs and stuff and going, OK, for the working class house, they'd still have accumulated stuff going back to the wedding, but the rich kid house will be '82, '83. Agreed with those saying the music cues didn't quite nail this sweet spot though - the Smiths move in particular. Would have felt more real to have something like, I dunno.... in the kinda King-esque bestseller A Boy's Life by Robert McCammon (1991), set in a small Alabama town in the early 1960s, the most exciting, renegade, spellbinding music for our early-teenage protagonist is "I Get Around." I buy that. It doesn't have to be the coolest most underground music for an 11-year old to be hypnotized by it and want to rewind the tape and play it again. (I would have bought Murmur though.)

OTM, the music was a little hip. No "I Love A Rainy Night"? No country music ffs!

I got the feeling that Modine and his goons were operating outside the letter of the law and couldn't just start tailing everyone willy nilly for fear of drawing attention to themselves. Kind of a don't ask don't tell operation.

i loved hearing Trooper's "Raise A Little Hell" briefly. probably my favorite song in 1979.

I'm pretty sure that it's El's powers that open up the rift between the "real world" and "upside down" as it appears to be her reaction (terror) to the monster which causes it.

"Should I Stay or Should I Go" did chart and was reasonably successful by a big name band by 82-83 who was touted by Rolling Stone, et al, so that wasn't exactly coolest or most underground.

yeah, whoever did the costuming got it so right. and they didn't go overboard. they could have just been looking at one of my high school yearbooks.

i remember watching The Ice Storm and thinking that they went a little overboard with the nostalgia. like 4 layers of brown on a person. it's probably really tempting to go nuts.

but Barb, man, i KNEW Barb. you know?

only on episode 5

been having fun naming all the 80s music and artefacts in the show

it also opened up a discussion about 4th dimension stuff with the gf last night which was fun

I've seen a few people suggest that the monster is one of the previous experiments (1-10) gone wrong

just a little too early for this picture to be in nancy's locker. very big with the girls in my hometown.

http://www.globalarray.net/user/cardboardstars/soloflexbodyyy2208072011.jpg

so i wanted to wait til i finished watching the entire series to bring this up (only on ep5) but

i vaguely remember reading online about a conspiracy theory that involved the us gov't/cia/fbi (don't remember which) interrogating an alien, named patient something-or-other (some numbers i believe), who was confined to a particular cell. the theory is really about the experiments they did on it

anyway i don't see enough of these types of shows/movies or read about aliens enough so i'm assuming this is just a reference to a popular conspiracy theory/incident in real life

Oh god I remember that Soloflex ad.

I always felt bad he couldn't get his shirt off completely.

Is that Scott Brown?

ab phallus.

Just finished. Loved it absolutely. Yes, it was insanely reference-heavy, but it didn't feel like fanwank to me. I cared about pretty much all of the characters and found the mystery compelling -> a much greater feat than pure homage could pull off.

there's some sequence we didn't see of total mayhem after she makes contact

We see onscreen, as she's screaming with fright at the monster in the black space, that her psychic terror opens up the cracks between the worlds.

I do agree there's some plot-hole stuff where people who should be communicating things they've discovered just never get around to it.

Also, stuff like this is never a plot hole! This is how people behave! Yes, you're shouting at the screen going "tell them tell them, pool your resources", but *that* would be the TV/movie convenient option, not the real-world option.

Do agree that the use of bugs/surveillance definitely seemed a bit hit-and-miss in a way that even kind of incompetent bureaucrats would have managed to get more right.

Do agree that the use of bugs/surveillance definitely seemed a bit hit-and-miss

This was one of the only superfluous plot devices imo. If it served any purpose at all, it was not enough to waste time on.

the only real inconsistency i spotted was in episode 8, when one of the feds tells hopper and joyce that the atmosphere is poisonous so they have to wear those hazmat suits. i'm assuming he meant the entrance to the upside down is poisonous, because others (including hopper) had already been inside the upside down without any protection, but it's not clear only outside the entrance is poisonous, and if this were true, it sounds a bit too silly

but i really dig this show

I don't know, I didn't really read that as inconsistent. Lots of things are noxious or poisonous or dangerous in some way, that doesn't mean that everyone who is exposed will die or even get majorly sick. People survived the nuclear bomb. People survived Chernobyl. People survived working with asbestos. People survive gas leaks all the time. That doesn't mean those things weren't/aren't incredibly hazardous, it just means that you don't *necessarily* get sick, and that minor exposure might not even do you any noticeable harm. A government facility that has easy access to hazmats would definitely use them, though.

Also, see Will - he definitely became ill after prolonged exposure. Obviously you could attribute it to fear, hunger, exhaustion, etc, but he looked actually ill from being in that world for so long.

(Also I'm p sure Silent Hill atmosphere was poisonous and most of them didn't die through the atmospheric conditions... plenty of other things to git ya)

fair points

The non-communications...after some more reflection I think there were two that really bugged me. #1 is Jonathan hearing about the no-face guy through Nancy, which he immediately connects to his mother's story. That happens in the fourth episode but he never talks to Joyce about it until they're at the police station together in the seventh. IIRC we're meant to accept that Jonathan doesn't bring this up because his mother's very upset and so on, and the only time they're together in that stretch is for Will's funeral, but you'd think he'd have said SOMETHING given that their last conversation was the big public argument about her being crazy.

#2: Hopper discovers the fake Will body, then heads immediately over to break into the evil laboratory even though he now has reason to believe they're involved in a massive conspiracy, and (I assume) has figured out this conspiracy probably killed the diner guy to cover their tracks. Fine if he wants to risk his life, but shouldn't he let Joyce know that she's not crazy and that the body is fake? Or pass around notes or something to let people know of this flagrant, tangible evidence of a huge criminal conspiracy? Because if they do kill him, the truth dies with him. It all comes right at the end, but that was one that really did bug me at the time - everybody is just leaving Winona Ryder freaking the fuck out when they've all got proof that she's not nuts! I know, it's a pacing thing, and it is satisfying when we finally, through an unlikely chain of events, have all the heroes together and on the same page.

Also a bit odd: the show seems to strongly suggest that Eleven is the daughter of the MKULTRA victim Hopper and Joyce visit (rather than that kid being say, Three or Seven) - seems kind of strange that neither of them say anything to El about this, during the long evening preparing the makeshift sensory deprivation tank. I get that there was a lot going on, and nobody knew how it was all going to end, and that finding out her mother was a catatonic wreck might be upsetting, but it feels like something one of these characters would do.

Obvious angle for the next season: everybody's looking for El (good guys and bad guys) while Hopper is trying to mop up other loose ends -- - better known as One through Ten. MKULTRA goes far enough back that its children could be whatever age - could totally see a Sylar-from-Heroes-esque deranged killer wandering around, say. Not sure this would be a great way to show but it is a dangler that totally invites some new stories.

#1 was dealt with upthread, but it wasn't just because his mum was upset, it was because his dad was there, which changed the situation completely, both psychologically and practically. It wasn't so much that his dad was persuasive about not making it worse for Joyce, but that he was physically present at any opportunity Jonathan had.

#2 I do agree with. It seems foolish, even in the heat of the moment, to go straight to the Big Bad Conspiracy people rather than to go to your potential ally. But I guess he's a very tropey "grizzled loner with tragic backstory" kind of guy, so it's not world-jolting to me. (Actually what was world-jolting was in the first episode where it was revealed his daughter was dead, I actually let out a groan b/c it's just too obvious a backstory. I think they did manage to pull it off without it being too horrifically cornball, though.)

#3 - not sure. Bear in mind that Eleven doesn't even really have a concept of having a mother. It sounded like she was taken pretty much right from the womb. It might be a bit much to throw that into the mix as well as sending her off to a parallel universe.

Btw, did anybody else assume that the numbers referred to clones rather than just test subjects? There's nothing really there to indicate it but that was my first thought, in fact I didn't even really entertain the idea that there would be non-identical test subjects until after halfway through.

my interpretation was that Modine (aka Gendou Ikari) initially were using El to spy on the Soviets or read minds or whatever,

No interpretation about it, I thought that was pretty clearly telegraphed?

Yeah, that was shown on screen. They didn't actually say "oh, and now it is time to spy on Soviets", but they did make her find a guy who was talking Russian and then she broadcast it to them.

Also I was sure that El was going to be Hopper's daughter for a while, glad that turned out not to be the case.

Yeah at that point I just thought "oh of course, she's being developed as a spy tool, should have realised that".

Oh yeah totally - the part that was not explicit was the exact sequence of how their scheme developed. I was speculating that, specifically, it began as spying and expanded dramatically into the Upside-Down and the monster only after they discovered those things through their use of El. Then there's another serious uptick when the contact opens up the gate, and they have to redesign the facility and the program around containing and exploring this other dimension. As opposed to, like, their ultimate goal was always the exploration of other dimensions but they worked their way up to it gradually or something, y'know?

(I was also addressing speculation like Number None's suggestion that El created the monster, sunny successor's confusion as to the location of the portal, the discussion over what the black nothingness was,)

The thing about the Jonathan/Joyce thing is, okay, he doesn't want to talk about it while Lonnie's around, fine, but.... how about you wait til Lonnie leaves, and then tell her? Or leave a note or something, since you're going off to face possible death hunting the monster with Nancy? I get that he's a teenager and might make poor decisions but he's spent days with his mother on the "you need to STOP THIS!" tip, you'd think it'd be a really important thing to him that she's right.

I guess I basically accept the genre-trope answer to Hopper not communicating with anybody. He seemed interested in bouncing ideas off the other cops earlier, though, even just to talk himself through the cockamamie theory forming in his head. Maybe it only bugged me because, again, we've seen SO MUCH of Joyce freaking out on her own, nobody believes her, etc., that it seems cruel to her. I related to her character and it was galling that no one was telling her anything for a couple episodes there. I guess that does raise the tension - oh man, if Hopper bites it, everything he's found out will be lost! But to me the minuses outweighed the pluses.

Finished watching this over two evenings, really loved it. From what I'd read about it I thought the genre/era details might be distracting but they weren't at all. I like that they've left just enough loose ends for a sequel to follow on.

Something Tuomas said upthread:

* The black nothingness wasn't the upside world, it was merely a visual shorthand to show how Eleven perceived things when she was trying to contact someone with her ESP powers. We saw the same black nothingness when she was spying on the Russian agent(?), which happened before she even made contact with the upside down world.

Reminded me that when Eleven was trying to explain the upside down world to the others she used the all-black underside of the D&D board, so that makes sense.

First episode watched yesterday. Blimey, I really enjoyed this.

i like the video of the two kids singing along to the theme song. can't figure out how to link to it directly:

https://www.facebook.com/StrangerThingsTV/

love the fan art too.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13912632_1095694733839689_529391156152322734_n.jpg?oh=121bc051789a39f6b20922790ac1a2bb&oe=582090F6

Loved this.

http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2016/07/27/487602000/kids-on-bikes-the-sci-fi-nostalgia-of-stranger-things-paper-girls-super-8?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

Some interesting bits in this, on the "Kids On Bikes" genre. Some threads could be delved into much further, but it's a prompt of some kind.

Sometimes the dialogue would be so on the nose as to be cringey, which happened a handful of times in Ep 6.

Enjoys much of it otherwise.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh loved this omg

xp yeah I thought that, like the woman in the station saying to Nancy after Jonathan punched the cop "only love can make someone be so passionate. Or stupid."

No country music ffs!

dolly parton's in there somewhere

xp yeah I thought that, like the woman in the station saying to Nancy after Jonathan punched the cop "only love can make someone be so passionate. Or stupid."

Yeah that was particularly irritating too bc it was so rong. Like no you dopey office person insulting someone's whole family would do the job just fine.

I did like that they made the boyfriend less of an outright bully, his reaction to Jonathan's amateur photography is reasonable given his limited understanding of the recent events (even if his handling of the situation is totally alpha-male). even gets upset about how his friends treated his "ex" afterwards despite seeming to be on board with it at the time.

also thankful that there are high school scenes where people with letter jackets don't make obligatory appearances every ten seconds in the hallways (though they also didn't have much opportunity to do so)

iana child psychologist but I wonder if Johnny Five Eleven will speak in full sentences in s2 because she is obv fluent in English and I'm not sure it made much sense that she didn't speak in full sentences once she started talking

She's been a human lab rat her whole life. What reason could she have to trust people she's never met?

sure, that is a reason not to speak at all at the beginning

once she obviously fully trusts her new friends it is a bit weird that she doesnt use sentences

This is ok (havent finished yet), not sure there's much more here than v thorough pastiche tbh.

wrong

Loved the performances in this, especially the toothless kid and Winona

Loved Steve's redemption/epiphany, which happened all of a sudden like the Grinch

I cried when Will got rescued. I wonder if tge ad&d insurance company demanded payback.

as far as boy on bike genre films, i think the overall emotional tone had lots of elements of flight of the navigator.

Yes!

Weirdly i wanted to watch that after finishing this series

God this gave me all the goddamn feels

I like how it partly ended up being about how mediocre parents can still be good parents, or are deep down, or when it counts or something idk quite how to articulate it

So good. SO good.

Liked this a lot but it did feel like the weight of the obvious references (ET, Alien - at one point where Hopper and Winona are in the upside down she shouts something far too close to "get away from her you bitch" for comfort) was too much for me at times. Did love that the end titles were just randomly scattered through the show - the final ep has them after about 10 minutes and I think ep 5 has them about 5 minutes before the end.

Because you know I love nitpicking, how credible is it for the science teacher to have The Thing on VHS in late '83 or alternatively that it was on broadcast TV that soon after release?

One mystery I haven't seen discussed anywhere is Hopper finding his daughter's stuffed tiger in the upside down. It's implied in one of the flashbacks that she's seeing something that isn't there, could that be an early attempt at breaking through? Also could her leukaemia just have been exposure to the toxic environment of the upside down?

When the boys were looking for Eleven after she'd run off and shouting for her I couldn't get this out of my head, which spoiled the tone a bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

haha yeah i was thinking about that lift scene too aldo!

There are some very obvious, very big references to certain films all through this show. It has me wondering if it's a pastiche, a period drama or something else.

This sort of thing happens a lot more in music than on the screen - taking a confluence of ideas and tropes, mashing them together and updating them/putting a new spin on them, like say Haim or whoever you wish to pick. Stranger Things is like a DJ set of remixes of all your favourite teen horror films. I spend a lot of the time thinking 'that's ripped from Donnie Darko' or just wanting to shout 'GO INTO THE LIGHT CAROL-ANNE!'.
As such, you can't expect credibility to get in the way of a good storyline in Stranger Things. Would a smalltown cop really be able to bash his way into a high-security FBI unit like he did?
What I do like is how we get to see the development ofWinona's mum character. Source-material characters are ephemeral to plotlines. They're either overbearing sceptics or simply not there at all - 'Honey, I'm going out, don't eat anything!'

*source material parental characters is what I meant there.

My personal theory is that 11 somehow manifested the monster/s herself through her sheer terror of the sens-dep experiment.

Or maybe it was just that the monsters were always there but she softened the wall between the worlds <- obv more likely but i like my theory better :)

I think she was so afraid of what she had done that she didnt want to face them down & accept that she could control or stop them.

I really loved that moment with 11 & Winona when 11's in the sens-dep & she's rigid with terror & winona's telling her "don't be afraid, don't be afraid, I'm here" it was v powerful

Stranger Things is like a DJ set of remixes of all your favourite teen horror films. I spend a lot of the time thinking 'that's ripped from Donnie Darko' or just wanting to shout 'GO INTO THE LIGHT CAROL-ANNE!'.

this seems about right - even there though it's a pretty narrow subset of (mostly) 80s films. All of the direct rips/refs do take me out of a bit, I find myself thinking more about the construction of the show overall rather than getting drawn into the story.

Yeah, I know what you mean. When they first showed the foresty underworld and the dead deer, I just knew they'd show the monster feeding off it just like a specific scene in Harry Potter. At the same time, there's enough source material to be referenced (and it's not just 80s horror - there are lots of kids films and sci-fis and stuff in there, and as I say, Harry Potter and Donnie Darko aren't 80s films).

Donnie Darko is a pastiche of 80s films

^^^

honestly the only non-80s stuff I've really noticed has seem to come from that Voice of the Beehive remake I forget the name of

(altho fair pt about the deer-feeding, I hadn't caught that)

All of the direct rips/refs do take me out of a bit, I find myself thinking more about the construction of the show overall rather than getting drawn into the story.

― Οὖτις, Monday, August 8, 2016 12:22 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Remember when directors would reference like Truffaut or Kurasowa or whatever and Stranger Things is all like the Alien scene that was parodied in The Critic and the Commando scene that was parodied in UHF, and critics are falling all over themselves to praise what is, in a lot of ways, a stylized Family Guy episode

My new show JURASSIC GUMP is gonna clean up once I finish my Netflix pilot

I never identify with "takes me out of it" criticisms tho, doesn't really resonate with how I experience things xps

ok lol @ JURASSIC GUMP

you know what else keeps popping into my head while watching this is Beyond the Black Rainbow. Which was much more specific and abstract and strange than this (also had a really stupid ending) but did kind of a similar v specific late 70s/early-80s sf horror pastiche. Better soundtrack too.

oh man JURASSIC GUMP. the nineties revival is in full swing elsewhere so that's only a matter of time really.

and agreed with Veg about that Winona scene - - - a moment of comparative subtlety for the show, too, like it lets you think about the upbringing El's had to this point, and the power of a parental figure that actually is concerned for her well-being, and the comfort Winona has been dying to give to Will, and so on.

Looks like somebody itt doesn't understand the difference between parody and pastiche.

critics are falling all over themselves to praise what is, in a lot of ways, a stylized Family Guy episode

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, August 8, 2016 11:41 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah

i watched this with pals who are not really wide cultural consumers (or at least not in the way so many ilxors are) and when i made the now standard, boring, observation that it looked like 80s movies, they were all 'ohhhhhhhhh yeah i see that.' all the specific call-outs seem like easter eggs for media nerds like those itt, who spend all day thinking about movies and music etc. i think most ppl can grok that it's a pastiche, but i don't think they're having the jarring experience you're having, whiney -- it just scans as narrative, not as a series of references or gestures to other, specific movies

Yeah, I know what you mean. When they first showed the foresty underworld and the dead deer, I just knew they'd show the monster feeding off it just like a specific scene in Harry Potter. At the same time, there's enough source material to be referenced (and it's not just 80s horror - there are lots of kids films and sci-fis and stuff in there, and as I say, Harry Potter and Donnie Darko aren't 80s films).

― TARANTINO! (dog latin), Monday, August 8, 2016 12:32 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What in particular did they use from Donnie Darko? It's been years since I've seen that film.

Commando scene that was parodied in UHF

But surely that was Rambo: First Blood part II?

https://media3.giphy.com/media/LnftOVI9nd2zm/giphy.gif

It's what's being "referenced" that seems to be the sticking point xxp

Isn't the commando ref the "getting tooled up" scene? That was parodied in loaded weapon 1, idk about uhf as I haven't seen it

hahaha thanks wins

has anyone mentioned the blatant pilfering of Under the Skin in the psychic spying scenes yet

critics are falling all over themselves to praise what is, in a lot of ways, a stylized Family Guy episode

lol that is a low-ass blow, dude

for the most part I thought it was entertaining and engaging and rose above the pastiche elements, which were all pretty obvious

very good kid actors

I'm just trying to say these "easter eggs" like the thing dripping goo on Hopp's face or the Commando scene or whatever are like actually huge, iconic cultural signposts to the point where they've been parodied to death.

hahaha thanks wins

listen if there's one thing I know

xxp I mean, look, I like the show a lot too! but we really have to own up to the fact that there is some CORNY, LAZY shit in there

Under the Skin in the psychic spying scenes

this was the first thing I thought of tbh altho it just made me wonder if there was some 80s ur-text I was forgetting

xp

uh breakin out the CORNY isn't that deej's thing

uh oh

I meant to say

I'm just trying to say these "easter eggs" like the thing dripping goo on Hopp's face or the Commando scene or whatever are like actually huge, iconic cultural signposts to the point where they've been parodied to death.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, August 8, 2016 12:04 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

only to a relatively small-ish cohort of viewers, though! i really dont think most viewers are catching these in any sort of conscious way.

I really enjoyed Beyond the Black Rainbow but I feel like it was more of a stylistic exercise where Stranger Things is a thematic one.

A filmmaker on twitter was mentioning how BTBR didn't have very wide interest, but from a shot composition/directorial standpoint he's seen its influence

i guess i can get with 'lazy' and 'corny' in that the dramatic beats/tropes are familiar, and encouraged some ppl i was watching with to, like, yell at the screen because they knew what was coming --- but to me that just highlights how effectively they pulled it off. someone getting drawn in to it despite the familiarity is a success. only the nerds/movie heads are like "omg this is JUST LIKE that part in..."

How low have we seriously lowered the fucking bar if "People who have seen E.T. and Aliens" count as "movieheads." This is like calling Kanye super clever for putting the "trope" of Michael Jackson samples in "Good Life"

Fan service has completely cannibalized everyone's ability to think rationally about film.

There's like huge chunks of this that are just biting E.T., which is one thing if it's like Spielberg or Leone biting from Japanese movies a tiny cross-section of Film Forum mouthbreathers have seen vs. wholesale jacking from a move that made $750 million in 1982 dollars

^^^

i mean i think a lot of ppl over a certain age would see the similarities if ~pointed out~, but, for real, loads of otherwise very observant people just don't have huge parts of their brain/awareness given over to noticing what might seem to you or anyone else itt a really obvious ref (kids on bikes, eg). these ppl, btw, are the ppl that are impressed by and are, ostensibly, the target audience of all those "do you see??" articles that point out all the influences on something like ST. they've seen ET and Alien, they're just not consuming media the same way as 'movie heads' do.

also lots of ppl under 30 haven't seen any movies from the 80s!

directly referencing some of the biggest blockbuster films of all time is not some movie nerd shit

xp

Like the side-by-side comparison video that's been floating around is not some sweet Sploid #feels moment for me, it's an assassination of the directors

References aren't good is how I break it down, anyone can put a thing from another thing in a thing, hardly matters how obscure or otherwise it is

directly referencing some of the biggest blockbuster films of all time is not some movie nerd shit

xp

― Οὖτις, Monday, August 8, 2016 12:24 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are you guys missing my point on purpose or something

the referencing all the biggest films isn't movie nerd shit, sitting there and cataloging all the references while you watch it is movie nerd shit. even the big and obvious references! that just isn't how everyone watches or thinks about movies (or listens to music or whatever).

i think sometimes ilx forgets that it is populated by ppl who think about and criticize media, often professionally

avg schmo watching stranger things and not noticing the specific references, even to major films that he has himself seen and enjoyed, is more than likely the norm.

Not sure why we need to walk a mile in the shoes of your Johnny average rube friends tbh, when most of the critical praise (which is what whiney's talking about) is about the tapestry of references it's a bit having your cake & eating it

To put a finer point on it: I think emulating the cinematography and "kids in peril" tension and moonlit flashlights of E.T. is a brilliant way to approach a TV show. Using a very familiar and nostalgic vintage "feel" to launch your original ideas is great

However, I think that poaching entire scenes and plot points is weak as fuck and people have given these guys a pass

I thought this show was pretty cool and some things definitely felt like references but not in a way that broke the narrative flow.

A few moments played with those expectations (although, yeah, in an admittedly basic way before Whiney jumps in saying I'm pleased by the most pandering bullshit), like the moment where the kids are all on bikes and, were it ET, it'd be the moment where ET makes them take flight... but Eleven flips the van

imo any wholesale "poaching" was limited to things that exist in a half dozen films, not "scene recreated exactly from ET"

haha I did groan in advance of the flying bike moment and was a little surprised by the truck flip, dunno whose point that proves

well, his initial point was that it was like a stylized family guy ep, with one jarring call-out after another, loudly announcing themselves as call outs. which is not accurate at all, imo, and why the viewing experience of my average rube friends seems germane --- most ppl aren't noticing all the references/swipes, and the show gets away with it as a result

xp

i think it's totally fair for critics to jump on the wholesale poaching, esp since it has gone almost completely unnoticed by the viewing audience.

i thought all the references -- are they really references when nothing in the whole show is outside the referent? -- felt really lived in and not jokey quotes. not like a "family guy" bit at all! it's a period piece. "period" known v much through movies. something like a cover version.

look i hate all that imgur culture sploid jerkoff nerd shit too but i think something of the warmth of this show missed you completely. does daptones stuff make you mad too?

"I think emulating the cinematography and "kids in peril" tension and moonlit flashlights of E.T. is a brilliant way to approach a TV show. Using a very familiar and nostalgic vintage "feel" to launch your original ideas is great"

^^ I love this element of it!

i could probably overlook my irritation with how cheaply this show lifts from 80s touchstones if the story and characters were compelling, but it failed on that level for me too. rote by its nature, even w/ its few knowing curveballs. couldn't overcome the gross fanservice-y feeling that this is no more than a plastic conglomerate of All Those Things You Like.

kids were good actors though. not their fault.

It Follows is the obvious recent antecedent to this. More than Beyond The Black Rainbow I mean

outside of the score and the similarities with child experiments the similarities with BTBR are ephemeral, imo

even those are pretty much drawing on the same source

I think It Follows is different. Time period intentionally ambiguous, fairly original concept, unique tone. It did have that Carpenter-y electronic score and neighborhood-kids-band-together thing though.

just here to say i think whiney is completely insane

and there's not like some secret high-art way to reference truffaut that is somehow substantively different than someone referencing Aliens, it's not like "Star Wars" was an especially subtle lift of "Hidden Fortress" or something, it's just that the films '80s movies were lifting from are more distant to whiney than the '80s films themselves

also....THIS IS A MOVIE FOR KIDS. WHO DONT HAVE THE SAME CULTURAL REFERENCE POINTS

FAMILY GUY??? gtfo forever

that big iconic scene from Aliens ...that as a 13 year old in 1996 i had never even seen myself. why would a 13 year old today have seen that movie?

like, whiney, this shit is all CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT. Music, too.

One mystery I haven't seen discussed anywhere is Hopper finding his daughter's stuffed tiger in the upside down. It's implied in one of the flashbacks that she's seeing something that isn't there, could that be an early attempt at breaking through? Also could her leukaemia just have been exposure to the toxic environment of the upside down?

I don't think his kid has anything to do with this subplot. First off, it happened years ago; secondly, it may not have even happened in this town. I don't think we're supposed to see a link between his daughter's death and the upside down. its just a commonly available stuffed toy that gave him a flashback

3 Feet High and Rising was just a Family Guy episode.

I think It Follows is different. Time period intentionally ambiguous, fairly original concept, unique tone.

yeah I loved It Follows, didn't feel like a pastiche to me

THIS IS A MOVIE FOR KIDS.

wtf now way in hell would I let my kids watch Stranger Things. Maybe if they were, like, 12.

10 at the earliest depending on the kid

David Harbour has hinted that the daughter thing may come up in S2

Kids might dig it, but Stranger Things core audience is ppl who grew up w/ 80s entertainment for sure.

Like I doubt this is killing it as intensely with 10 year olds as it is with the 30 somethings in my Facebook feed.

I haven't introduced my older kid to it, but I should get around to recommending it before school starts.

re: It Follows

I didn't mean that it was doing exactly the same things as this. Just feel like it may have have been an inspiration. Or even helped it to get a green light

that big iconic scene from Aliens ...that as a 13 year old in 1996 i had never even seen myself. why would a 13 year old today have seen that movie?
--Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40)

Like I doubt this is killing it as intensely with 10 year olds as it is with the 30 somethings in my Facebook feed.

― circa1916, Monday, August 8, 2016 1:38 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

obviously it's going to do v well with that demo for obvious reasons, but i think at this point it's just a matter of early adopters. The show's main characters are still 13 year olds, and my memory is that this tends to be the main thing i liked about shows when i was a kid: that they starred kids

David Harbour has hinted that the daughter thing may come up in S2

― Number None, Monday, August 8, 2016 1:36 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that may be but i dont think they've had any moment of the show that suggested this was the intent

I mean, I never saw a Cecil b demille movie at any age but I can get the references from Looney Tunes
― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, August 8, 2016 1:42 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is looney tunes a show that came on at the same time as spongebob squarepants, or arthur?

wtf now way in hell would I let my kids watch Stranger Things. Maybe if they were, like, 12.

― Οὖτις, Monday, August 8, 2016 1:34 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

12 year olds ... are kids

Idk, to me, the great majority of the references are unquestionably THERE, but they don't play out as Family Guy jokes - the show doesn't stop for something that feels weird and out of place so that you know there's a reference going over your head. My guess is that the thirty-somethings sharing this in my feed are loosely divided between people who consume a LOT of media and have re-watched many of the referenced things multiple times, and people who don't, for whom the show is producing an overall feeling that they assuredly recognize as familiar, enjoyable, 80s-ish and fun. Maybe they go "oh, this is kind of like E.T., cool!" once the kids are on the bikes, but they are not going "this is from Altered States, this is from Nightmare on Elm Street..." They let the next episode start because they want to know what happens to Hopper, Joyce, and the kids, not because they get a tickle every time something from a Cronenberg flick shows up. They likely haven't seen any Cronenberg flicks!

It's like the divide between people who immediately were like "hey, Stephen King font!" and people who didn't think of that, but saw it once it was pointed out to them. I'm basically in the first category but enjoyed the show as if I was in the second, because the references are basically woven together into a coherent new thing which mostly maintains a smooth and jointless surface. There were really only a few things that felt over-emphasized and rubbed in my face - the kids playing D&D (just like the kids in E.T.!) was probably the big one.

I wasn't massively in love with this, but it was fun and charming, and had me hooked enough to get through four episodes a day.

Do we know why the agency let Hopper go the first time he was caught in the facility? That didn't make a lot of sense to me, unless they had reason to think that he could lead them to Eleven. Did they just not see him as a serious threat?

12 year olds ... are kids

I hate to break this to you but when busting out demographics for media, "kids" entertainment /= 12 yo, it skews younger. And I say this as someone who has to sort throughout a lot of menus of things "For Kids!"

the kids playing D&D (just like the kids in E.T.!) was probably the big one.

― Silence, followed by unintelligible stammering. (Doctor Casino), Monday, August 8, 2016 1:52 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i haven't seen ET in quite a few years so i assumed it was a meta-ref to freaks & geeks, lol

Do we know why the agency let Hopper go the first time he was caught in the facility? That didn't make a lot of sense to me, unless they had reason to think that he could lead them to Eleven. Did they just not see him as a serious threat?

― jmm, Monday, August 8, 2016 1:54 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they were just going to make him seem crazy

it wasn't just thrown in there for no reason either. The bit with El explaining the upside down using the board was quite cleverly done I thought

They also took the opportunity to bug his house so I think it was also a "figure out how much this guy knows" deal. Their coverup had already gotten messy with the murder of the diner guy, maybe they figured knowing where the police were at in their investigation would enable them to anticipate it or tie up loose ends more cleanly. I think hoping he would lead them to El also makes sense. OTOH they're apparently not listening to the bug very closely, because he completely trashes his house and ultimately unscrews the light where the bug is (which you think would be a kind of loud, very obvious development over the microphone) and it doesn't seem to affect anything that happens.

Yeah, the board was good. I just meant that there was a LOT of the D&D stuff, just it came up in so many scenes. I would have been okay with them having some other interest appropriate to dorky kids of that age and time period. Not a huge gripe, just something that felt more like a reference-for-the-sake-of-a-reference than some of the other stuff.

I mean, I never saw a Cecil b demille movie at any age but I can get the references from Looney Tunes
― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, August 8, 2016 1:42 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Looney Tunes (or even the 90s pastiche stuff like Animaniacs) is a much better jumping off point than Family Guy. I mean, Family Guy's entire shtick isn't that things are references or done in the style of an old tv show or movie, but a half-assed riff directly on the source where they either say "remember this episode of the A-Team" followed by a reenactment of some truck jumping off a ramp. You can enjoy the Looney Tunes stuff without having seen the original, but you get the underlying joke if you know what they're referring to.

tbf there are those Looney Tunes moments where it's just "Look, it's Peter Lorre, but drawn as a cartoon!" or whatever, which totally went over my head as a kid, and generally aren't funny in their own right. But those are few and far between I think.

To me, this was a mix of Spielberg themes, but with a Stephen King plot.

Only the characters aren't graphically wounded by the monster by the end of the story, with a strange amount of attention on the physical rending of their bodies as meat. Maybe the slashed hands thing counts?

Only Douchey Steve is visibly fucked up, and that's due to a protagonist.

I think I own the same model of Pentax Jonathan uses. Given to me by my dad who bought the thing in...1983(ish).

Every so often the collision of the two Stephens yields something that doesn't exactly work tbh - like, the bullies are straight out of It but their acceleration into really dangerous territory happens super suddenly and then they're effectively defused as threats. In the Spielberg world they are still, basically, kids, and certainly not suffused throughout with the dark creepiness of PURE EVIL LURKING BENEATH ALL THAT SEEMS GOOD. It basically worked for the purposes of what the story needed, but it didn't really ring true for how things had been progressing. (It also kinda lets the cat out of the bag, since now Random Suburban Bully's Mother also believes in El having psychic powers. But I guess the pile of corpses at the high school would also create some problems in that vein...)

I would totally let me 9-yr-olds watch this, but they are not usually freaked out by movies. Kinds wish I'd watched it with the the first time around, because as much as I liked it, re-watching an 8-hour movie is a bit much...

Kinds=Kinda

Idk, to me, the great majority of the references are unquestionably THERE, but they don't play out as Family Guy jokes - the show doesn't stop for something that feels weird and out of place so that you know there's a reference going over your head. My guess is that the thirty-somethings sharing this in my feed are loosely divided between people who consume a LOT of media and have re-watched many of the referenced things multiple times, and people who don't, for whom the show is producing an overall feeling that they assuredly recognize as familiar, enjoyable, 80s-ish and fun. Maybe they go "oh, this is kind of like E.T., cool!" once the kids are on the bikes, but they are not going "this is from Altered States, this is from Nightmare on Elm Street..." They let the next episode start because they want to know what happens to Hopper, Joyce, and the kids, not because they get a tickle every time something from a Cronenberg flick shows up. They likely haven't seen any Cronenberg flicks!

It's like the divide between people who immediately were like "hey, Stephen King font!" and people who didn't think of that, but saw it once it was pointed out to them. I'm basically in the first category but enjoyed the show as if I was in the second, because the references are basically woven together into a coherent new thing which mostly maintains a smooth and jointless surface. There were really only a few things that felt over-emphasized and rubbed in my face - the kids playing D&D (just like the kids in E.T.!) was probably the big one.

― Silence, followed by unintelligible stammering. (Doctor Casino), Monday, August 8, 2016 1:52 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^this is p much what i was trying to say that whole time

I would totally let me 9-yr-olds watch this, but they are not usually freaked out by movies.

totally get this, but that's different than saying it's FOR kids. which it definitely isn't. It's for people who remember the 80s.

I dunno. Feels like a movie for kids of the eighties? Like the ones who could ride around on bikes by themselves without parents mediating every interaction? That's the bit of nostalgia that got to me the most...

Movies and television shows are a contextualizing machine when it comes to viewing contemporary times and shape the idea of what a time period and place are about, but it's an incomplete picture, a lens that shows things relevant to the plot.

By the time I was a teenager in the 1990s there was still a stream of movies and tv shows about the 1960s/1970s, especially the counterculture, music, and politics, but they weren't made for people who lived through those times. And the lens they used to portray the 60s/70s wasn't the viewpoint of someone who lived during that time, even if they were produced by people of the right age to have lived through the era. They were second- and third-hand accounts of music scenes, protests, festivals, and politics.

I'm sure there are younger people who are seeing shows like Stranger Things and reading about these nods to 80s movies and watching those and contextualizing E.T. as the real 80s but it's still a fictionalized view on the past.

totally get this, but that's different than saying it's FOR kids. which it definitely isn't. It's for people who remember the 80s.

― Οὖτις, Monday, August 8, 2016 3:02 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its a show about kids, that involves monsters. i know we're in this weird zone in pop culture history where it's assumed that 30 years olds are the predominant audience for everything, but this is still a kids show

a "young adult" show if you prefer

i said earlier this actually reminded me as much of young adult books i used to read when i as a kid as it did movies from that era....these books, of course, were written in multiple decades (50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, early 90s) but in its themes it was v reminiscent for me of "young adult" culture in general

but again, the target of pop culture generally is children

some movies are better made than others but whenever you go to a contemporary movie that has a lot of current music, fashion, and events referenced and think about how cheesy and ephemeral those elements are.... 20 or 30 years from now someone is going to point to that film as a reference to "how things were"

& yeah, mh OTM

This was just ok for me. Beyond the set-piece references, it didn't actually feel like something that would have come out in the 80s -- more like something that couldn't have been made before the 90s and X-Files. I wished they had explained more explicitly what exactly they'd tapped into, as far as that other dimension, and the monster and all that. Like, this is clearly a major scientific discovery, but the closest explanation we got was Eleven's "upside down" world.

Anyway, the acting was good, and I thought the writing (as far as dialogue) was pretty good. Just not all that into the ending, or if I think about it too long, the basic premise.

isn't a huge subtext of people saying, "yes it is pastiche, but it's very well done & the characters are well-drawn & it's still unpredictable" etc. basically "this won't just appeal to 30something '80s ephemera-spotters & film nerds"? Isn't that, like, the entire point of people's praise at some level—that this is art that does not require you buy into some closed-circuit respected canon of film or require a degree in pop cult studies to enjoy it?

(xp)

Interesting thing about contextualizing previous times is that the IT miniseries itself had half of it set in 1960, thirty years earlier.

This was just ok for me. Beyond the set-piece references, it didn't actually feel like something that would have come out in the 80s -- more like something that couldn't have been made before the 90s and X-Files.

lol the criticisms have gone from 'too much like the '80s references' to 'not enough like the 80s references'

it's fun for the youth, it's trainspotting for the olds

you can cherry pick all your favorite elements from movies you like to make a new movie! people do that all the time.

it's like being a 90s kid who was really into sample-heavy rap and then getting into soul/funk but you have glaring blind spots because you're weighting the prime cuts and stuff with really good breaks over what was actually popular at the time

"have gone"? it's different people talking about it

well,not even sure I expect any show/movie to really capture the time it's going for -- nobody experiences media like they did in the 80s anymore, and for storytelling purposes, it's not even a criticism from me to say it's not like something that would have happened in the 80s. Really, I stopped thinking about the 80s past the first couple of episodes, because the time period doesn't matter that much to the story IMO

im not saying he's being hypocritical or something, i just think its funny when ppl try to take down a piece of art from contradictory POVs, find it usually says something about the art itself that no one can agree on even the basic framework w/ which to evaluate whether it succeeds for fails xp

word that makes sense xp to dominique

It Follows drove me insane with its weird non-specific timeframe & incongruous "vintage" shit just plopped here. there was no fucking point to having any of that shit except as an excuse to put a cool musle car on the cover

Stranger Things made the era part of the story & not just a reason for a girl to have a fucking perm. wired telephones & incandescent lights & magnetic compasses were part of the story & visual signposts for monsterousness etc

If all you see is just a bunch of references chucked into a lazy smartypants blender then I dunno, I kinda think you're deliberately ignoring the storytelling to make a point. There is a perfectly well-told, engaging & genuinely moving story here.

i mean i know I'm always pollyanna with this shit but those kids acted their butts off & winona was awesome & it if it was a book i'd read the shit out of it. it was fucking good TV!!! and whiney jfc if all you have is that it lifted from ET & some shit about fucking Family Guy like SERIOUSLY that a lazy hot-take even for ilx

but again, the target of pop culture generally is children

I don't think this is true at all but you have a funny definition of "children". Huge swathes of pop music w bleeped words, vast majority of blockbusters being rated PG-13 etc. I'm cool with all those things existing, what do I care - they sure aren't for me, but nor are they for 8yo. They're for people w large amounts of disposable income and time to kill ie teenagers and 20somethings

The funny thing is that the fictionalized 80s of E.T. and The Goonies was "real" to me as a kid in the 80s even though it didn't actually resemble my suburban life much at all (or maybe because of that). I lived on a short cul-de-sac street, right off a main drag that was definitely NOT bike-friendly, and so the handful of kids on that street were kinda all I had to go on. There was a bit of tromping around in the woods out back of our houses together and that was good, but nothing interesting ever happened really and we didn't have a clubhouse or anything. Also, Atlanta suburbs weren't exactly as lush and magical as the Pacific Northwest thing Spielberg and company were showcasing.

Still, these things press buttons well. As a kid on that street, I was drawn to tons of media - some of it decades old - that had this convincing imagery of large groups of kid-friends getting things done together, having adventures, evading rival groups of kid-friends, building clubhouses, communicating by walkie-talkies and meeting up on each other's porches without parental involvement. A lot of those things were reinvented for boomer or Gen-X kid-fiction, but by people whose childhood world (I think) was really more small-town America. I haven't really done the digging here but I'm thinking of e.g. Beverly Cleary, born in 1916 in a small Oregon town, but with her books starting to appear in 1950 and obviously still wildly popular in the 80s and I hope today. (She's still alive, btw! Always blows my mind.) Anyway, some of the nostalgia I get from Stranger Things is a nostalgia for the warm childhood feeling of imagining those experiences, more than having them. I think that's okay! That's the real experience of my life and lots of other people's lives probably, even if it happened through mediations like blockbuster family films.

I mean back in the 80s the monoculture was definitely by and large for children, there was a middle ground that aimed to be as inoffensive as possible to attract the widest possible audience (the kids AND the adults! crazy!) Nowadays things are atomized and what's left of "mainstream" media culture targets the biggest demo w time + money and that is not children.

this is maybe for another thread...

xxp

caught some of this while the missus worked thru it over the course of a week or so, she loved it, fwiw she is also 26 and I suspect most if not all of the "references" flew right over her head

I thought the end was pretty funny, like they go thru all of this unimaginable horror and winona and cop guy have to wander around silent hill and of course the monster thing but! one month later...everyone is hunky dory, back to d&d nights no biggie.

also my three year old daughter caught some of this too, was very fascinated, not frightened at all, I think she's going to be a weirdo tho so ymmv

eh 3yos have no idea what they're seeing half the time, no context

convincing imagery of large groups of kid-friends getting things done together, having adventures, evading rival groups of kid-friends, building clubhouses, communicating by walkie-talkies and meeting up on each other's porches without parental involvement

This is otm, and one of the things that Stranger Things got right IMO. Maybe not surprisingly, had the urge to watch Stand By Me soon after, as that was one of many movies back then that did this.

When I was a kid, seeing a movie where kids were the heroes and got stuff done -- it just made me want to be those kids, to have those adventures. It seemed like something me and my friends could realistically do, and Stranger Things definitely touches on that idea.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/stranger-things-survive-talk-their-creepy-nostalgic-score-w431789

What did you have to do differently for the show than your record?

Dixon: Just dealing with a film ... or a TV show, there's a broad range of emotions that you have to touch on, and a lot of that's a little more childish, a little more playful, than something that we would release as Survive. So, out of the necessity to tell the story, we're gonna write stuff that just would never make it out on a Survive album.

How do you know when you have the right mood?

Dixon: When it makes you feel cool. Like, "Oh, I feel cool right now." It's like, "I could be driving around in the car listening to this and feeling pretty good."

It's funny because Internet forums where they talk about music like this, driving is the overarching imagery.
There's obvious, like, Drive or whatever all that shit is. And we kind of have that, but we try to keep it a little back from that whole overly Eighties.

Your stuff's a little bit darker too.

Stein: Yeah. You have to mix it real warm and, like, kind of almost questioning what era it's from

Dixon: Yeah, we're definitely more interested in Seventies-style production than Eighties, which I think is the difference. A lot of those types of bands will go for the super cold stuff … that sounds really digital, and we kind of ... I mean, I don't know if we've accomplished that goal, but we're just drawn to Seventies recording styles a little more. I mean, Eighties is great, and we love all that stuff too. But we try to make it sound a little warmer.

Stein: Some depth and some movement to the dynamics of the track, just more life in there than just, like, smacking the shit out of the speakers.

So, how did you two hook up with the Duffer Brothers for Stranger Things?
Dixon: They're fans of Survive somehow and it's kind of a mystery ... like, they don't really know how they found us. But they did, and then they emailed us and asked if we were available. They put our song "Dirge" from our last LP in their trailer for the show. Like, they made a little mock trailer to pitch their concept to Netflix, and they had the song "Dirge" in there. They were like, "Oh, shit. That works pretty well for the trailer. It kind of got the vibe across."

What was the process you used to compose for 10 hours of television?

Dixon: I mean, we've been recording for years, and there's tons of stuff that we've always kind of known would be good for films, so we had some of that stuff lying around. And when they hit us up, we sent a lot of that stuff over just to say, "Hey, here's some different moods that could work."

And some of that stuff ended up being used, but a lot of it ended up being re-worked. And after we sent that initial, kind of, dump over to them, they picked a few things out, and then asked us to do a little more for certain things ... like write a theme for some of the characters to use ... to pitch to the producers and stuff. We got involved really early, before they had even cast anyone. And they used the demo that we'd sent to play against the auditions, which kind of helped them decide, you know, whether or not they wanted to use us ... and I think it may have also dictated who they cast for some of the characters. So, that was cool.

Stein: We were just writing ... just trying to, you know, imagine who these characters were. And we'd seen a little bit of the aesthetic they were going for. But there weren't scripts yet, there were just, like, these vague, kind of character descriptions. And to make scenes based on those ideas, you just had to ... kind of imagine what that was and feel it out and send it over. And some of those things actually just locked in and like stayed very early on

Dixon: And before we had even gotten the job. They basically told us like, "We know you can do scary shit and dark stuff so you need to show the producers that you can do some of the more lighthearted things."

Was there anything that you had in mind as a guide for your more lighthearted material?

Dixon: For me, there's this warm, fuzzy feeling that a lot of Nineties R&B like INOJ and even some like Mariah Carey. It's hard to explain, but there are certain notes that just sound like being a kid to me just because that's when I grew up I guess probably. Some of that stuff was kind of an influence for me on learning some of those kid themes I guess.

Was there anything that they came back to you and were like, "This is too scary"?

Dixon: No, they were like, "Make it scary as fuck." They're like, "We want to scare the shit out of some little kids ... and adults, so go for it." Especially for some of the more intense scenes, they were like, "Just make it go even harder. Make it as crazy as possible."

metainformative actually

def pushes that button, very common feeling

xp

Atlanta suburbs weren't exactly as lush and magical as the Pacific Northwest thing Spielberg and company were showcasing.

Half of what I loved about this show was that it reminded me of playing in suburban Atlanta woods

xxposts:
speaking of 3yos, the little sister character gave maybe the best small-child performance I've ever seen during one particular dinner scene (forget which ep, one of the earlier ones)

It doesn't sound exactly like it, but the theme reminded me of my favorite piece of library music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7HzC57HDZs

We had some good woods like I said, but so much more of my childhood landscape was parking lots and malls/strip malls. Stranger Things maybe waffles a little between "suburban" signifiers (the school buildings, the Wheeler house) and the more general small-towniness (the four-person police department, the town square/library/main street area we see a few times, the Byers house). It's easy to imagine a place where those spaces coexist, but it wasn't exactly the world where I grew up.

Funnily enough, it actually was filmed outside of Atlanta, in Jackson, GA - and the evil laboratory building is in Virginia Highland, twenty minutes from the house I grew up in. I went to summer day camp just down the street! So yeah... Stranger Things felt like my childhood, but not exactly my childhood.

imo pop culture is for people who are unburdened by 40+ hour work weeks, home ownership, and child care. in other words, a rather large portion of the population in our current underemployed, real estate-unburdened, family-deferring times

yeah this had some great acting all around. I teared up a bit when the mom finally found her kid again, and I didn't watch enough of this to be at all invested in the story or characters so, good job winona. music was good too

mh not sure I buy that - - - think of e.g. prime-time sitcoms or the late shows, they may be pitched at a level where the kids can enjoy them too (and often are or have been) but the basic premise is surely "take a load off at the end of your work day and spend some time with these friendly characters" etc. etc.

does anyone actually watch sitcoms and late shows? the only ppl I know who do are retired.

nobody watches television

it's strange they keep broadcasting it

I am pretty sure sitcoms and late shows are very popular even though I never see the latter and encounter the former only in reruns at the gym. I am also probably not a typical American. But are we talking "now" or generally about "pop culture"? Like, was Mary Tyler Moore specifically for "kids"? All In The Family? Setting aside sitcoms, what about cop and courtroom shows? I think these bore kids to tears but surely they are "pop culture."

Like, isn't the infamously "coveted demographic" 18-35?

I'm talking about now not 30 years ago

eh 3yos have no idea what they're seeing half the time, no context

having spent just about all day everyday with a child who is now 3, I think this is a tremendous underestimation of 3yr olds, better suited to <1yr olds maybe, though certainly a 3yr old has considerably less context to draw on than a 9 or 10 or 20 or 30 year old

Also figure that sitcoms are still popular with someone, though it isn't me. And though I do wonder how many people still watch TV like I used to, just flipping through broadcast and syndicated channels -- I doubt the key demographic has changed much. *Maybe* a little younger, but when I think of the prime pop-culture-interest age, 18-35 doesn't seem far off.

oh I agree, I was using "pop" in the ilx sense which usually has two necessary traits
- it is ubiquitous
- it does not exist

wins otm, in other words

idk about you're 3yo but mine basically has no concept of death or what happens when, say, someone actually loses an arm. He would probably understand what was happening if he saw someone get shot, but there's degrees of how traumatizing that might be depending on how it's portrayed. otoh he is cool with watching giant alligators swallow things whole, for ex. cuz that shit is just cool. but I can tell it's all kind of abstract, he doesn't register what he's watching as actually happening, it has no real emotional weight for him.

he might be sad if he saw a minion get dismembered lol

xxp

I haven't introduced my older kid to it, but I should get around to recommending it before school starts.

― how's life, Monday, August 8, 2016 2:39 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He's upstairs watching it with his mother and I just overheard 'Mom, they are so imitating Freaks & Geeks here!'

ahahha. this show, man, it's nothing but year-2000 sitcom references lazily flung onto the screen to get re-blorps from millennials who don't know any better.

thought it was weird when Will said he was 'watchin the game, havin a Bud"

"WASSSSSSUP... over"

https://i.imgflip.com/18n01p.jpg

d'oh, beat me to it

omg these kids are so cute

http://cdn01.cdn.justjared.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ryder-sthings/winona-ryder-gets-support-from-scott-mackinlay-hahn-at-stranger-things-02.JPG

I love that the actress who plays Eleven is named Millie Bobby Brown

otm

funny thing about ensemble casts, did modine have any scene with any of them besides El? how many scenes did winona have with them? but still.

tbf Will himself barely had any scenes with the other kids

I think Modine's only scene w/ the kids was that brief moment in the school when he finally found them but then he got (presumably) eaten not long after

someone said on twitter that Modine "looked like Treat Williams in old-person makeup" & I feel that this is hilariously otm

haahahahaha

dang that kid's teeth came in since they shot the show

Nice peewee herman outfit, keepin it period

finished this last night.... pretty much the most enjoyable watchy show ever.

one episode left to go and my impression of this show continues to go downhill - every single goddamn thing in it evokes something else, sometimes in the most hamfistedly obvious way possible (bike + vans chase scene, the especially lazy "Under the Skin" rip, kids' dialogue referencing D&D in *every scene*, etc.) I dunno this is really lovingly done but it's also annoyingly empty, there is literally not a single unique idea or original thought or twist or provocative angle to any of it. One thing I like about horror and sci-fi is their capacity to deliver surprises within familiar tropes - and this has none of that.

Anyway, some of the nostalgia I get from Stranger Things is a nostalgia for the warm childhood feeling of imagining those experiences, more than having them. I think that's okay!

This is a lovely thought and also OTM

those kids acted their butts off & winona was awesome & it if it was a book i'd read the shit out of it

This too

Seriously I have trouble with people complainng about Winona being too oddball and shouty - I feel like she totally killed this (as a usually kinda so-so actor it's possibly her best performance even)

Loved the scene with her ex where he talks about using the money to send the older kid to college, and she's all, "O RLY, what college?" and he replies, "Whichever one he wants" and she's all "NYU MOTHERFUCKER GET OUT OF MY HOUSE."

that showdown with her ex was so good, winona spitting fire

Totally. Also I love the final dinner scene revelation where are you realise Winona and her two sons all have the same haircut

lool omg

https://soundcloud.com/dj-yoda-uk/the-stranger-things-mixtape

(August 10, 2016 – Los Angeles, CA) – Lakeshore Records will release the STRANGER THINGS - Original Netflix Series Soundtrack in two parts. Volume One releases digitally August 12th and on CD September 16th. Volume Two releases digitally August 19th and on CD September 23, 2016. Both volumes feature the original score by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, members of the popular Austin experimental synth band S U R V I V E.

it's a shame there's not a 2xLP Mondo nosebleed-splash vinyl or w/e

this whole show was basically a mixtape

i'm sure there will be vinyl, how could there not be

http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/08/the-soundtrack-to-stranger-things-is-being-released-this-friday/

oh we already said that.

dog latin's post was an homage to the earlier posts

lol

I hope some fan does a side-by-side comparison

haha

time to poll the soundtrack

Sorry, ILX, not feeling the love.

Sadly realizing that the Netfix-ization of television is obliterating online discussion for anyone who doesn't binge the thing right out the gate. Sad!

Anyway, finished this last night, pretty much loved it sans reservation, don't have a whole lot to add that others haven't already said. Pastiche was fun and felt very self-aware (one ref everyone seems to have missed is that the specific X-Men issue they referenced early on was part of the Dark Phoenix Saga, and El seems very Dark Phoenix-y) but it wasn't distracting for me at all (congrats though Whiney on your Family Guy troll which certainly got the traction you intended, your predictable responses to the mere acknowledgement of pop culture never disappoint). I think they did a pretty masterful job of cherrypicking and remixing scenes and tropes they felt resonated and makingit all cohere into something of their own. I look forward to future projects from these brothers.

Funnily enough, it actually was filmed outside of Atlanta, in Jackson, GA - and the evil laboratory building is in Virginia Highland, twenty minutes from the house I grew up in. I went to summer day camp just down the street! So yeah... Stranger Things felt like my childhood, but not exactly my childhood.

― Silence, followed by unintelligible stammering. (Doctor Casino), Monday, August 8, 2016 4:23 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So yeah that's probably another reason this resonated with me. Besides being around the same age as the younger kids in that time period, Georgia and Virginia and Indiana were the first three places I lived within the first like seven years of my life. The scenery looked and felt v familiar.

I couldn't figure out why this had me wanting to watch V but then I realized that the time when this was set was roughly when V came out and it was the first scary thing I ever watched and those kids would've definitely been watching V if they hadn't been busy extracting their friend from the dark dimension.

i wasn't allowed to watch V but yeah it was a very big deal with my friends

Sadly realizing that the Netfix-ization of television is obliterating online discussion for anyone who doesn't binge the thing right out the gate. Sad!

I miss being able to check into threads like this once a week instead of having to wade through the entire thing only after finishing the show (which I just did last night).

I liked this a lot, as I would have been 9 1/2 when it took place so it was absolute nostalgia bait for me. Kind of like with the Americans though I keep second guessing word usages and slang, like I really don't imagine kids in Indiana in 1983 would use "chill" to mean hang out, but maybe I'm wrong?

It was hard to not see every little thing as a reference though, like were they consciously aping the A-Team and Macgyver and Home Alone during the booby-trapping of the house, or are they only so many ways to do something like that? And based on the internet love for Barb I thought she would have been on screen for more than ten minutes or so.

I liked the end more than I thought too, as it works as a single season ending or as a cliffhanger if it ended up getting picked up for another season, sort of like the first season of Better Call Saul and probably most other shows nowadays.

https://twitter.com/egg_dog/status/764375817765912576

Scott's right about the language, and "chilling" was not the only problem. "Suffers from anxiety"! "I GET it" (which apparently is now required by law to replaced the phrase "I understand" in all American tv shows)! But the acting was terrific, and if there were detail slips on the language but the characters and story were complex, it's forgivable (but they need to hire a writer over the age of 45 if they really want to get it right).

Mr. Clarke and Barb need to be next season's heroes, Mike's dad next season's monstrous villain.

Amazing casting, although I found Natalia Dyer's BMI distracting and I hope that she (the actual human being) is not in trouble. She is terrific.

Ultimately, I found the spot-the-reference/hey-look-at-this-prop elements a little annoying but mostly ignorable (got annoyed by the cars, but I suppose they had to use what hasn't been junked or has been restored -- but Barb and Steve were in ridiculous vehicles for who they were in 1982) because ooh boy the acting!

Mike's dad is the most underrated part in this thing. I loved his sure and steady way of confidently shit that was totally wrong. Ain't that just like a dad.

confidently STATING

Amazing casting, although I found Natalia Dyer's BMI distracting and I hope that she (the actual human being) is not in trouble.

i also found this distracting