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

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