Stranger Things is a show about kids that could even be mistaken for a kids' show, but
grown-ups watching the series will notice a lot of details that might escape a younger
eye.
This is what only adults notice in Stranger Things.
At first glance, Hopper's just a likable, classic tough guy caricature.
He drinks every night — not just a beer or two, but drinking to the point where he's
numb drunk.
In season one of Stranger Things, his office knows every morning means, quote, "coffee
and contemplation."
Hopper rips cigarettes all day and when he's not downing a delightful combo of Eggo waffles,
whipped cream, and candy, he's regularly devouring plates full of fried meats.
As a kid, it seems funny how he eats like a slob, but as an adult you wouldn't be wrong
to think the man is an alcoholic just a few terrorist fistfights away from a heart attack.
Hopper spends basically every day in season one hungover.
He doesn't get drunk as much in season 2, although he has a nightly beer, or three,
or six.
He's the kind of man who's likely never eaten a salad.
Nor could one imagine him on a treadmill, though he does have a pretty physical job
filled with stress and the occasional protracted fight with a Russian Terminator.
While in the '80s it was still pretty acceptable to survive off nothing but greasy meat, that
wasn't a healthy way to live.
Throw in Hopper's heavy drinking, and you have a man who today would be considered on
the edge of physical collapse.
Mike and Nancy Wheeler are two of the most dynamic, interesting young people in Hawkins,
which makes it astounding that their father is as much of a detached non-presence as possible.
He's completely oblivious to the fact that both his children are wrapped up in a multi-dimensional
battle against a super-monster.
So is Mrs. Wheeler, but eventually she seems to realize that something is up with her kids.
By season 3, we learn that there's more to her than meets the eye, and if anything, she's
simply been dragged down by her narcoleptic husband.
Mr. Wheeler, despite all the drama revolving around them, never notices anything out of
the ordinary.
Aside from a speech about teamwork he gives to Mike, he spends most of the time at home
sleeping.
Even more, Mr. Wheeler is a dud of a husband.
At the end of season 2, we see Mrs. Wheeler's jaw drop when Billy stops by while her husband
is passed out in his easy chair.
By season 3, we realize how unfulfilled Mrs. Wheeler is in her marriage when she makes
plans to meet Billy at a motel, even though she doesn't act on them.
Mr. Wheeler is an inattentive father and husband, but in reality, it's tragic that he's surrounded
by people so full of life while he densely snores away.
Yes, these kids are nerds, choosing to hang out in the Hawkins AV Club instead of the
football field, with basically no friends outside their group except their science teacher.
In fact they may be the whole of the Hawkins AV club.
For their public school to have a ham radio and an AV club is certainly out of the ordinary.
But nerds or not, they have some pretty expensive hardware.
Their radios, the Radio Shack TRC-206, TRC-214, and TRC-219, weren't cheap.
Plus Dustin has a headset and later builds Cerebro — a portable super-powerful radio
— at science camp.
The boys certainly have free rein to play with expensive toys.
While their parents were likely more than happy to encourage their scientific endeavors,
the walkies and hundreds of batteries they must go through in a year would make a pretty
expensive outlay.
And this is before everything had USB charging cables.
Murray Bauman is the consummate matchmaker in Stranger Things.
When Jonathan Byers and Nancy Wheeler come to him in season 2 for help, the two teenagers
have a bit too much vodka and wind up sleeping over.
Bauman is surprised they're not together and says they should just have sex.
They protest, and Jonathan volunteers to sleep on the pullout.
That night, the teenagers can't sleep, and when neither can hold out any longer, they
take their friendship to the next level.
The next morning at breakfast, Bauman asks with a wry smile,
"How was the pullout?"
A kid watching will think he's just joking about the fact that Jonathan didn't sleep
on the pullout sofa bed.
A grownup, however, will see the double entendre he makes with the pullout sofa and a particular
move that happens in the bedroom.
During interrogation, the Russians give Steve and Robin a truth serum.
The drug could be anything, but based on the reaction, at least in a grown-up's eye, it's
likely a psychoactive drug.
It's worth mentioning that MKUltra, the program that gave rise to Eleven's psychic powers,
was known in the real world to experiment with hallucinogenics and psychology primarily
for interrogation purposes.
When Steve and Robin start laughing and joking with each other, to kids they seem drunk;
but adults will understand that they're tripping.
"They seem drunk."
"Why would they be drunk?"
After having a mind-blowing experience watching Back to the Future on hallucinogens, Steve
lists it as one of his favorite movies when he interviews to work at a video rental store.
While sitting outside the theater, the lights on the ceiling of the mall begin to send off
chasers for Robin and Steve.
That lands them in the bathroom, throwing up and then having one of the greatest heart-to-hearts
in Stranger Things history.
Considering that these two were dosed with some strong psychoactive drugs, Steve's quick
recovery and ability to drive a car are pretty astounding.
There is no way to explain how it was having only one phone in the house.
Younger people will never understand the necessity of taking a phone call standing in the kitchen,
in front of anyone who wants to listen, because the phone was mounted on the wall next to
the kitchen.
For the grown-ups who mostly remember it, the central shared phone brings back conflicted
memories.
Yes, there was something nice about not always being accessible.
But it hindered mobility and privacy.
Sometimes that short cord was replaced by a long one you could stretch into any room
in the house, though it was easy to figure out when it was a private call.
And even if you were in another room, you could never guarantee the call was private
— like when Mrs. Wheeler picks up the other phone to listen in on Mike's call with El,
only to hear him lie about his grandmother being ill.
As an adult in the era of playdates, constant chauffeuring, and stranger danger, it can
be shocking to recall a time when parents let their kids go off on their own all day.
Yet, the kids of Stranger Things bike around by themselves from house to house, over what
is likely miles of empty road.
In season 3 of Stranger Things, Lucas's 10-year-old sister, Erica, is left completely unsupervised
at the mall.
Her parents don't even seem to notice that she spends basically a day in a Russian bunker.
In the '80s, kids were mostly left to their own devices.
They made friends on their own, biked home by themselves, and their parents let them
take care of themselves most of the day.
Sure, that lack of supervision allowed Will to be snatched by the Demogorgon , leaving
his brother in charge of surveillance duty.
But it also empowered the kids to figure out what was going on and save him, and eventually
the town, without parental intrusion.
The old world was very disconnected compared to our present world, which adds a lot to
the story in Stranger Things.
Only grown-ups will fully notice and remember how disconnected it was.
After all, how many times is everybody separated and looking for each other in this show?
If they had cell phones, they could easily call each other to figure out where everyone
else is located.
Yes, the kids do that with their walkies, but as we see in season 2, they're not always
equipped with these handy devices.
In the modern connected world, however, people are constantly cell-phone accessible.
Today, many parents have GPS trackers on their kids' cell phones, but in this series, there
is no easy way to figure out where the children are.
In season one, we see how much time Hopper and company spend researching to find out
that HNL was involved with MKUltra.
In season 3, when the group doesn't know Planck's Constant, they have to get Dustin to use his
super-powerful radio to connect to his brainiac girlfriend, Susie, in Salt Lake City because
she is the only person they know who understands the mathematical formulation.
With the Internet, however, you can look up Planck's Constant in half a second.
"Planck's Constant is 6.62607004"
In season 3 of Stranger Things, we see the impact the Starcourt Mall has had on the small
town of Hawkins, Indiana.
Before malls, people walked through downtown areas, going to random shops and — in bigger
cities — department stores.
But shopping was mostly about independent shop owners and locally-owned stores, or sometimes
mail order.
Then malls brought in chains owned by far-off conglomerates, and while everybody protested
the death of downtown districts, the malls became a central point of American culture.
They started in big cities but quickly spread to smaller towns.
Many adults have memories of the early days when they would go to the mall and spend a
few hours walking around, shopping, catching a movie, and eating at the food court.
This type of shopping center dominated for a few decades until the internet came around.
Now, malls are lamenting their demise at the hands of e-retail.
Ironically, buying local in-store or online at downtown shops seems to have made a great
resurgence.
Kids today may never understand how, for a brief while, malls were king.
In season 2 of Stranger Things, Steve and Nancy go to the home of Barb's parents to
talk about her disappearance.
The parents couldn't get it together to cook so they ordered KFC for dinner.
Joe Keery, who plays Steve Harrington, spouts ad-worthy lines about the finger-lickin' good
chicken, and adults who grew up with overt product placements would likely take notice.
Brands in storylines were a constant since TV evolved into a machine driven solely by
ad revenue.
They were eventually replaced by more expensive commercials, followed by the service subscription
model.
And another product placement an adult might notice?
New Coke.
Lucas sounds like a commercial as he pontificates to his friends on the quality of this soda.
In 1985, New Coke was an attempt to revitalize the brand and Lucas's description sounds like
perfect advertising.
Coca-Cola even reissued "New Coke" as a tie-in to the show.
In that regard, Stranger Things has used an old marketing trick in a tongue-in-cheek way
to bring old-world marketing to modern television without pricey commercials.
California may have lost some of its luster, given the growth of other cities and the high
cost of living, but in the '80s, it was the place to be.
While Chicago enjoyed popularity thanks to John Hughes, and New York has always had a
strong presence, many movies and TV shows about adolescence in the '80s were set in
California.
In many ways, the trends found in California trickled to the rest of the country, as evidenced
by Lucas and Dustin using popular phrases around Max.
"You're super smart, and you're like 'totally tubular.'"
This was the era before social media and online shopping, when the only way to know the trends
was to be in the epicenter.
So to leave that world would almost be like falling back in time.
Small towns could be a season, a year, or more behind the trends.
Billy is infuriated by this, though his status as a guy from California gives him instant
cachet in Hawkins.
With that said, leaving California for someplace else would have hit harder in 1984 than almost
any other time in history.
Because of this, a person can almost understand Billy's frustration.
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