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

the outsiders ?

more like Happy Days

haha yeah

well at least theres something to look forward to on halloween

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zDROsb5n40Y/VxkwRxr3n1I/AAAAAAAADBA/gWQNn8KE8V4u0HyF4M4s4yHNyjhNXBWMQCLcB/s1600/anigif_enhanced-6281-1393461534-20.gif

I don't think I even grasped as a kid that Happy Days was nostalgia, I thought Milwaukee was just like that

same lol

To be fair, Happy Days itself was a spinoff from American Graffiti, which was the early seventies, which really wasn't that far removed from the fifties.

Happy Days was a spinoff from Love American Style

that ran through 1984, and was heavily syndicated throughout the 80s

it's a tangled web

Beginning as an unsold pilot filmed in late 1971 called New Family in Town, with Harold Gould in the role of Howard Cunningham, Marion Ross as Marion, Ron Howard as Richie, Anson Williams as Potsie, Ric Carrott as Charles "Chuck" Cunningham, and Susan Neher as Joanie, Paramount passed on making it into a weekly series, and the pilot was recycled with the title Love and the Television Set (later retitled Love and the Happy Days for syndication), for presentation on the television anthology series Love, American Style. In 1972, George Lucas asked to view the pilot to determine if Ron Howard would be suitable to play a teenager in American Graffiti, then in pre-production. Lucas immediately cast Howard in the film, which became one of the top-grossing films of 1973. Show creator Garry Marshall and ABC recast the unsold pilot to turn Happy Days into a series

The people I know most into this show are 12, tbh, so the fact that they are so into it despite not getting most of the references says ... something. Maybe that it's successful for the same reasons the stuff it references/rips off was successful?

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, February 8, 2017 2:41 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is what i figured would happen

cue whiney insisting only 30 year olds who watch too much tv could care about this

my experience on ilx is, only 30+ year olds who watch too much tv expend tons of energy hating this lol

http://i1247.photobucket.com/albums/gg622/bizarrogazzara/Mobile%20Uploads/05DF3020-1549-474B-8BD3-74D2291D36AF_zpsk47ln2ty.jpg

finally watched this. binged the first 5 episodes. really good! Winona Ryder is really taking me on a journey here. wow. seeing the cop start out skeptical and quickly realizing he is way in over his head is amazing. this stuff is well-written, well-acted, and well-directed. great stuff! i hope they keep the mystery element, my only fear is we learn too much and it becomes mundane.

at any rate the above whining about nostalgia is hilarious. wow you guys have seen Gremlins, let me get you a medal.

Major "Stranger Things" vibe last night from "Return from Witch Mountain" scenes where Tia (lost telekinetic/telepathic girl) goes to clubhouse of local gang of four boys (one black kid + three white kids, incl a super-goofy Poindexter Yothers, brother of Tina)

ffffuck forgot about "witch mountain". kids were SUPER into that when i was little.

I found "Return" - or maybe the junior novelization - fascinating because I was fascinated by anything that threatened a nuclear meltdown or explosion as part of the plot. And it was so grey and beige and creepy.

as a kid I remember fixating on just what really *was* the deal with the kids in the Witch Mountain movies. I don't think their background (are they aliens? mutants? witches?) is ever really explicitly spelled out. "Return" is not good but it is p odd - Bette Davis and Christopher Lee stumbling around laboratory castle sets etc.

huh apparently it is spelled out in the first movie, maybe I was just confused cuz I all I saw at the time were the sequels

Anyone seen Watcher in the Woods? Another Disney/Bette Davis horror flick for children, super fucking creepy (for a five year old).

http://www.themilkshakeboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/watcher3.jpg
http://www.themilkshakeboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-05-at-12.45.47-PM.png

haha yes my wife brought that one up while we were watching the Witch Mountain film

i've really been wanting to rewatch watcher lately

Kids in Witch Mountain were aliens.

I watched Watcher a few years ago. It's a very satisfying combo of "not as scary as you remember" mixed with "fucking hell, this is supposed to be a kids' movie?!?"

This scene was almost in a Disney movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkpf2IzmMVg

That's *almost* a pretty cool monster, but I guess not everyone's Stan Winston. It still would have scared the fuck out of me, obvs.

I don't think their background (are they aliens? mutants? witches?) is ever really explicitly spelled out.

It is spelled out, but it is in a such a low-key way it doesn't really make a strong impression! They're aliens... but hey, also this black cat is going to live with the old guy in a Winnebago now, which is equally amazing.

woop woop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgS2L7WPIO4

Trailer creeped me out, good sign.

I already know Shakey is going to extra hate this just because of how many time-specific pop culture references there are (and probably the Thriller interpolation too).

But idgaf I have already watched it five times.

Great trailer.

so down w this

btw is America turning into France? forever reliving its "best" days, like a baseball player who keeps the haircut from his career year?

i mean, this stuff hits all my buttons so idgaf but sometimes i wonder...

I already know Shakey is going to extra hate this just because of how many time-specific pop culture references there are (and probably the Thriller interpolation too).

This is where I'm at but I mostly blame the Ready Player One trailer. But hey as long as there are some homages to more recent stuff I haven't seen as with season 1...

I agree, this nostalgia craze is so weird and unprecedented, I've never seen the like, oh my stars and garters.

Hmm, I want to say it's relatively new to have the actual properties show up? That is, they are wearing Ghostbuster costumes in the trailer. And obviously in Ready Player One there are actual toys and Back to the Future cars and whatnot. Is that a relatively new thing? When was the first movie to feature kids playing with, say, actual Star Wars toys? I dunno.

http://brandedinthe80s.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ET-1.jpg

ET, btw, in case that extremely vague and confusing image didn't speak for itself.

haha was just about to post this image:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zuAKSFbVrGA/TWb0TOfyQHI/AAAAAAAACAI/RTiy0NLpdDQ/s1600/et+halloween+yoda+cameo.JPG

I figured that was more Steve and George in-joking, the same way Stripe hiding among ET dolls in Gremlins was a little Steven in joke, too. But neither of those are nostalgia, really, since they're referencing contemporary stuff. Hmm. What were the primary Halloween costumes in ET? Totally generic, right? Pirate, ghost, etc.?

Hmm. Back to the Future I guess has a Darth Vader reference, but that's also a sort of contemporary in joke, since "I am your father" is an iconic cultural line. Revenge of the Nerds (year before Back to the Future) has the guy wearing a Darth Vader mask.

marketing is not a new thing. youth culture itself is probably a new thing post-WW2 but most IPs are thinly veiled rehashes of classic myths and legends we have referenced in media for thousands of years. im sure there are Shakespeare era plays where a kid is playing with a doll of King Arthur or whatever

xxpost Yeah, but those shitty mask & highly-flammable vinyl costume combos were all the rage back then.

Really, you can probably blame boomers for the initial commodification of nostalgia.

any period piece is going to need cultural signifiers. for kids they have toys and action figures. for adults they drive old cars. the difference is nobody is crying nostalgia marketing when a stationwagon is in a movie because there aren't any station wagon movies out nowadays.

I guess a difference with stuff like Stranger Things, I suppose, is that while nostalgia by definition infuses many period pieces, the show also approximates the look and feel and vibe of things made around that time. So it doesn't just recall ET, it's at times made to look like ET, or sound like ET. It's a more pervasive multifaceted nostalgia. Unlike, say, Guardians of the Galaxy, whose central character is driven by nostalgia but which otherwise is thoroughly modern looking and therefore more ironic in its references.

I mean, there's nothing particularly new or 2010s-ish about nostalgia films with period dress and wink-wink things for people The Right Age. The boomers did this endlessly, with American Graffiti and Happy Days and I Want To Hold Your Hand and A Christmas Story and Forrest Gump and so on and so on. Before them, there were plenty of postwar Hollywood films playing up the still-in-living-memory 20s and 30s (running from, say, Singin' in the Rain to The Sting). If we're talking specifically about the use of consumer products and media artifacts, deployed at this density, to evoke childhood and time-and-placeness that might possibly be something new, since the sheer quantity and variety and brand-mobilizability of merchandised crap for kids surely spiked after the release of Star Wars... but idk.

Probably closest in terms of "hey, remember this barrage of things from When We Were Kids?" are list songs like Jimmy Buffett's "Pencil-Thin Mustache" (1974) and the Statler Brothers' on-the-nose title "Do You Remember These?" (1972).