Warning: This article contains one mild spoiler for Stranger Things season four.
The undeniable charm of Stranger Things resonates with fans on multiple levels. Everyone loves a great scary story, a creature feature, a mystery to get your blood pumping. The nostalgia of the series has been written about ad nauseum. How many times do you watch an episode and think, “man, that’s the way we did things in the ‘80s”? Well, we can’t do them that way now, or at least we shouldn’t.
Remember chasing the DDT truck on your bike? Remember lawn darts? Did you know there used to be ashtrays in cars, standard? Yeah.
Last week, part two of season four of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix, and we thought it appropriate to consider the things the kids could do in the timeframe of the show that we wouldn’t think of doing now.
Not having a mobile phone
Most kids today would not be running up any hills. The same technology that has robbed modern children of their childhoods (in our opinion, sonny) would have afforded the kids of Stranger Things a semblance of safety. Not that the Demogorgon or Vecna would be put off by the children’s possession of the iPhone 13 with its A15 chip, but children as young as five now have their own phones, and parents of the new millennium wouldn’t dream of letting their kids go out without a way to reach them.
Early on, we see Joyce calling Mike’s house to see if Will spent the night. When Mike’s mom assumes that Will didn’t come home at all, Joyce feels the need to cover up the fact that she does not know where her son is, and is only just discovering this fact. A victim of classism, whether real or perceived, she couldn’t reveal that her son was “missing” for fear of being judged.
Not having the internet
Who has hours to research a subject on microfiche when a child is missing? The endeavor served Hopper and Powell well, as they learned a lot about Hawkins Lab, the missing children, lawsuits, and cover-ups. But today the research would be a far simpler undertaking, and far less time-consuming. Plus, the added bonus of not being confronted by the librarian you only had one date with and then blew off.
Walking on the train tracks
In the first season, the kids are seen walking on a train track, an obvious throwback to Stephen King’s (and later, Rob Reiner’s) Stand by Me. Remember putting pennies on the track?
In truth, it’s actually illegal to walk on train tracks. And dangerous.
Parenthetically, this episode contains some foreshadowing of the show’s most current events, as we witness an early example of Nancy’s eventual display of total-badassery, in target practice with Jonathan.
Not wearing a seatbelt
Remember seat belts in cars? They were something to tuck into your dad’s bench seats in his Nova, to get them out of the way.
It became the law in 1987 in Indiana to wear a seatbelt — before that, they sometimes didn’t even work. The fine is a measly $25, and as you can imagine, it did take some time to get all citizens to comply; after all, it’s nearly impossible to reach the comb you have in your back pocket with a seatbelt on.
The whole being-out-at-night-on-your-bike-unattended-by-an-adult thing
This didn’t work out well for Will Byers way back in episode one. As a kid in the ‘80s, your bike was your car. With it, you had complete autonomy. In the age before everyone had a black mirror in their pocket, you could just go visit a friend at the drop of a hat. Can you imagine a kid doing that now? Without a helmet? It’s not even possible now with urban sprawl.
In the ’80s, they were known as latchkey kids. The goal was to not have your face end up on a milk carton, not that that ever helped anyone.
Breaking into government facilities
Ok, so, maybe not a safe practice even in the ’80s. But when you have an entire town, and potentially planet to save…
Playing on real playground equipment
Kids in the ’80s got to play on real playgrounds. Merry-go-rounds, seesaws, and monkey bars were still a thing. Anything and everything that you could break bones on or end up in stitches, including free-standing 10-foot-tall slides made of metal that you would slide down, in shorts, in the summer heat. Have you been to a playground lately? Kids of today wouldn’t last 10 minutes with the tetherball and wouldn’t have the attention span for hopscotch.
Ok, end of rant.