I thought I might as well put up a thread 'cause I keep saying I'll do more sci-fi club. We might as well hit something most people probably already know.
I'm actually gonna have to duck and cover for this one though, because I haven't actually finished S3 yet.
So yeah, if you're part of the Stranger Things craze go ahead and talk about it, and (ideally) spoiler tag what season you're talking about.
kingmudsy jastinbusher Trombone kleinbl00 JakobVirgil mhr OftenBen plewemt elizabeth blackbootz Meriadoc Tiger_the_Lion _thoracic johnnyFive tehstone rthomas6 War Dala OftenBen bhrgunatha kantos francopoli anatomygeek Purple_Ruby PTR Foveaux ThurberMingus moslydeaf LastingDamageII chowderchowder Merlin openloadmovieshd bennylenny darlinareyousleepy chowderchowder bhrgunatha spencerflem
Before everyone else piles-in, I wanted to remark on the cultural 80'sification that Stranger Things has marked. There was a point where I hated everything 80's--music, style, etc. I'm pretty much entirely flipped on that now. It didn't entirely start with ST though. For me, before that it was watching Twin Peaks for the first time, vaporwave, unomoralez's tumblr, early X-Files episodes (though that was more 90's), an obsession with synths, and so on. I suppose the 80's revival was always inevitable, but it seems like a thing that should be included in an ST discussion.
Apropos of nothing, if you're enamored of all things '80s, allow me to wholeheartedly recommend Halt & Catch Fire. Speaking as someone who was the first kid on the block with all the hot computers (a byproduct of my dad's job), with 5-10 different computer magazines delivered a day, who actually had the computer season 1 is based on, H&CF is legit. I've argued that H&CF is the show Mad Men should have been. While Mad Men is about all the soulless people of the advertising industry and all the evil shit they do to each other simply because they're soulless, H&CF is about genuine humans trying to do the right thing in a complex environment and it gets extremely poignant.
I actually just linked his website. When I said tumblr, I guess I was actually thinking livejournal, which has a bunch of random assorted aesthetic snippets between the normal art. But yeah, love me some unomoralez.
One of the most annoying thing about the '80s was the ridiculous 'boomer adulation of a certain flavor of '50s nostalgia - a world of poodle skirts and Chevy Bel Airs, not so much one of Atomic Cafe and the Korean War. It bugs me now when I go to the grocery store and hear all the 1-hit wonders of my youth because they're cheaper to license. The '80s have become Dream Academy and Baltimora, a pastiche of Goonies tropes and Double Mint commercials. Because I guess when you're Apex Consumer the world must bend to your nostalgia. That's fuckin' Stranger Things. Netflix isn't terrible. It's basically mid '90s USA Network - a bunch of bullshit, a bunch of reruns, a couple passable episodes of JAG. But they're well aware that they sell nostalgia, pure and unfiltered, without any of that nasty insight or metaphor. So yeah. Thaw out Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine. Surround them with off-brand Goonies. Give them a vague horror plot that's just reminiscent enough of X-Files and The Thing that it tickles the irony bones but holy fuck whatever you do don't be creative. I gave Stranger Things a season and some. We finished Season 1 and then sort of started Season 2 out of some sort of obligation but our hearts really weren't into it. I think it's worth asking how old everyone is - a Facebook friend of mine posed the question "Is there anybody watching and enjoying Stranger Things that wasn't around the first time?" and the answer was 37 variations of "no, but...".
Yeah, that sounds right. I loved season 1, season 2 was fine, but I haven’t been feeling the same magic that was there at first. I'm a little surprised that ST isn't appearing on that chart. On the radio, talk about Netflix marketshare is Stranger Things this and Stranger Things that, but it's not even their most popular original series.I gave Stranger Things a season and some. We finished Season 1 and then sort of started Season 2 out of some sort of obligation but our hearts really weren't into it. I think it's worth asking how old everyone is - a Facebook friend of mine posed the question "Is there anybody watching and enjoying Stranger Things that wasn't around the first time?" and the answer was 37 variations of "no, but...".
There's what the intelligentsia watches and there's what everyone else watches. Firefly failed not because not enough people were watching it but because it was the most expensive show Fox made that year and nobody was watching it. NBC-Universal was dragged over the coals for not having the courage to put Battlestar Galactica on NBC or even USA but instead hiding it on SyFy but NBC knew that at best, they'd get "mildly successful" on broadcast (Galactica did 3 million viewers on debut at a time when summer re-runs of NCIS were getting 12m). Everyone I know is talking about Love Death and Robots but Fincher or no, nobody's watching it. And for a while there it was all about The OA but that's probably because they pushed it hard. From a media perspective, all this shit is so sub rosa that I didn't even know The OA was produced by a dude I've partied with until it was brought to my attention. Shit's to the point where even the marquee stuff goes unnoticed. Meanwhile, The Price is Right and Jeopardy continue unabated. Hell's Kitchen is on like Season 24. CBS runs the holy trinity of Amazing Race, Big Brother and Survivor (and now they're trying out Love Island). Where is Netflix actually making their money? Great British Baking Show of which they've only run 2 (low-rent, low-talent, low-production-value) seasons. 19 million people tuned in to see what happened to Jon Snow. 105 million tuned in to see what happened to the 4077. Market be different.