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by WirelessGigabit 1139 days ago
This was the first reason I got hooked on Stranger Things.

The music. It reminds me of a time and space I've actually never lived in. And it probably never existed like that. Yet growing up it is very much how I believed North America looked like.

4 comments

It pretty much was just like that (I was there). One of my favorite "biographical" movies that nobody's ever heard of is Explorers:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/

The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much of it was actually more functional (didn't require instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it wouldn't matter anyway.

Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering, because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record. And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I miss most.

"it's the stuff dreams are made of"! also, flight of the navigator is an amazing movie https://archive.org/details/FlightOfTheNavigator1986
There's a great breakdown of the special effects that were done on a shoestring for that movie. I recommend doing a search for it.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8

It’s by Captain Disillusion, probably the YouTube creator with the highest continual quality.

That's the one! Thanks!
I really loved the first part of The Explorers. The ending was just so camp though.
I'm surprised at how often I see adults rewatching Flight of the Navigator, even though it's very much a kid's movie. Harry and the Hendersons is particularly fun to watch now if you are a Poirot fan.

Nostalgia tripping on the 1980s seems to rarely if ever include Max Headroom. To me, he was the essence of my high school zeitgeist. Maybe younger people today think he was too weird to have actually been a big deal. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU)

You might enjoy the archives of Over The Edge[1] which I always felt like it captured the zeitgeist of 80s culture. (Edit: better link to internet archive [2])

[1] https://kpfa.org/program/over-the-edge/ [2] https://archive.org/details/ote?

This is so on the money. I feel they managed to capture exactly how the America of the 80s looked like in people's imagination.

I also feel it is a genuine adventure movie that is told from the perspective of kids, but again exactly how adults will remember their childhood adventure dreams.

There's scary stuff, they don't shy away from showing quite disturbing imagery, but it's never about the shock value.

You should check out Alex Ball's deep dives into analog synths of the 70s and 80s. Particularly the full documentary on ARP.
Factoid tidbit: The popular, groovy, timeless, excellent Inspector Norse by Todd Terje was made *entirely* with the sources from the ARP 2600. Drums and all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebjXsc0UjdQ

Behringer sells a 2600 clone for $500. Price just dropped so I've been trying to justify not buying it. I really don't need it
Yes
Yeah, I grew up in that time and I'd say it's reasonably accurate. I would have loved this show during the time period it's set in.

I was on my bike every. single. day. I actually bolted an antenna onto my handlebars for my FM Walkman.

And YES I have had sex. With partners.