by Celedam » Sun Sep 18, 2016 10:27 am
Two things that bother me about Stranger Things: the music is wrong, and the slang is wrong.
The music is always a few years off, in one direction or the other. The series is supposed to be set in 1983, but much of the music is from either the late '70s or the late '80s. It seems like each song was chosen more for how its title or lyrics relate to a scene, rather than for how the song might help set the tone of the period.
And the slang… well, for one thing, no one ever said "douche" or "douchebag" back then. That's relatively new, as slang goes. Back then, it was "dork", "dweeb", "spazz", "retard", and so on. Also, there's not nearly enough "righteous" or "awesome".
These things bother me because I was pretty much the same age as those kids at that time and I actually remember what it was like. So as I'm watching, I simply don't have any feelings of nostalgia. It feels like the creators are giving nods to specific movies like E.T., Poltergeist, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Thing, but the series itself is still very much a modern production and not really an homage to the 1980s.
Waitaminute…
*googling*
Of course. The Duffer Brothers were born in 1984, which means they're children of the '90s, not of the '80s. And that's what feels wrong to me about Stranger Things: it's a '90s view of the '80s, through the lens of video rentals and TV reruns. In the '90s, those movies were firmly established in pop culture history, but they were no longer actually part of pop culture.