Stranger Things Season 1

Summary

When a psychic experiment opens a portal to another world it’s up to 4 kids and a few adults to stop the entities coming through and, with any luck, to close the rift for good.

Buttonface Says…

Ya know, by the time anyone reads this it will be too late. Pop culture will have chewed this up and spit this out.

This message is really more of a time capsule. This show is really good. The Duffer brothers have taken all this from the Silver Age of horror and sci-fi thrillers and turned it into something beautiful.

Buttonface Character

Season 1 of Stranger Things was a bit of a mind-blower for many of us. The idea that we would ever see anything that captured the imagination of the films we had grown up with seemed impossible and it was all the more shocking that it would come from the new version of Television, streaming services (In this case NetFlix). The story pulls together elements of many beloved gen-x-er movies such as E.T., IT, Stand by Me, Invaders from Mars, Critters, etc. It also uses other fiction and art of the time for inspiration such as Dungeons and Dragons and multiple video games. It can be a little silly at times the placement of pop culture ideas and tech of the time, but to be honest, the time was a little silly. The placement is pretty accurate.

It’s possible this creation will land in the same category as the retro recreations of Quentin Tarantino (not in its genre but in appreciation of the fan-boy-ness of it), but the world grows more and more fickle every day. Everything becomes a joke eventually and few survive.

If you’re not sure what I mean, think back to whatever decade you grew up listening to music in and now realize that as far as most people are concerned, all the music from that decade is summed up in a 10 song playlist on Spotify.

Do I seem defensive? I am. I am a lonely lover of most things underground and have seen them chewed up and spit out by pop culture at large, with little appreciation for their beauty.

I realize that there is little I can do about this. I guess if I had one wish on the topic it would be that people put the creation of any piece of art within the context of the time of the creation. Art evolves and builds a temple. The stones at the bottom deserve our respect. Stranger Things is not a keystone yet, and may never be, but it fits perfectly with its other stones.