Stranger Things

Countdown to Stranger Things Season 3: 10 Best '80s References in the Netflix Series

The nostalgia is strong in Hawkins, Indiana.

Stranger Things Season 3 will debut on Netflix on July 4th, and so we’re counting down to its launch this week with a new story each day about the beloved series. Today, we get nostalgic for that crazy time known as the ’80s! And be sure to also check out our Stranger Things: Season 3 spoiler-free premiere review.

We're feeling sentimental -- not just for Stranger Things’ first two seasons, but for the halcyon 1980s Stephen King meets Steven Spielberg inspired universe in which the series takes place. The show's creators, The Duffer Bros., were born in 1984 and, like all good Gen-Xers, are obsessed with the pop culture of their childhoods, directing modern audiences to look to the 1980s as the glory days for a thriving pop horror environment that we may never have again. They achieve this by jamming Stranger Things full of innumerable pop culture references, both obvious and subtle, to things they likely grew up with.

As such, savvy viewers may begin taking a mental tally of the '80s references they can spot in any given episode. Some are downright obscure (did anyone anywhere actually own a poster advertising the 1983 record Filth Hounds of Hades by obscure British metal band Tank?), and some are so familiar they've simply become part of the pop vernacular at large. Either way, we’ve compiled the following list of '80s references that we consider the best…
73 Images From the Stranger Things 3 Trailer

10. All the '80s Music

This one is kind of a gimme, as anyone futzing around with a large library of '80s pop music could likely assemble a reasonably historically accurate '80s mixtape entirely by accident. Heck, just type “Wang Chung” into Spotify and you can have the entire mainstream '80s pop music scene recreated in a split second. But, dammit, if those playlists don't always do the job. Those of us alive in the 1980s will only need to hear the opening drum riff of “Whip It” to start having flashbacks (and you totally started imagining the riff, didn't you?).
The more carefully curated soundtrack to Stranger Things doesn't contain too many deep cuts or B-sides or surprises – how many film and TV soundtracks contain The Police's “Every Breath You Take” or The Clash's “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Many, many, many – but its particular line of '80s pop selections do a perfect job of evoking the era. “Talking in Your Sleep” by The Romantics gets me every time.

9. Ghostbusters

The second season of Stranger Things was set in late October of 1984. Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters had opened only a few months previous on June 8th. As I recall from my own childhood, many youths at the time dreamed of going as the Ghostbusters for Halloween (indeed, to this day, quartets of friends gather to dress as the Ghostbusters for Halloween), but few kids actually had the resources and the gumption to put together a proper group costume. To see the central kids from Stranger Things dressed as the Ghostbusters – as they were in the first three episodes of season 2 – wasn't just a fun nod to one of 1984's biggest hit films, but a weird wish-fulfillment fantasy for the kids who always wanted to dress as Ghostbusters, but who never had the chance.

8. They Live

John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi film They Live was a clever satire of Reagan's America wherein a drifting blue collar guy discovered, via a pair of high-tech sunglasses, that aliens were hiding among us and that advertising was selling us subliminal messages encouraging obedience and nescience. See it immediately. It's great. Anyway, They Live featured a notoriously looooong fight scene between “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Keith David in an alleyway. The scene does have a dramatic purpose, but many viewers were left baffled by its length.

In episode six of Stranger Things, Jonathan and Steve have a fight over a graffito. It's in an alleyway. It goes on for a long time. Not as long as in They Live, but a noticeably long time. There's no way the Duffer Bros. weren't making a deliberate reference to They Live here.they-live

“Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live.

7. Gremlins or Perhaps Pod People

In Season 2 of Stranger Things, Dustin came into the possession of a baby Demogorgon that he kept in a turtle tank and fed Halloween candy. Dustin named the critter D'Artagnan – or Dart – after one of the three Musketeers on a candy wrapper. Eventually it became vicious, ate a cat, and escaped.

There have been numerous 1980s films about kids discovering creatures and secretly caring for them, most of them inspired by E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, but the scenes in Stranger Things are more evocative of Corey Feldman playing with Mogwais in 1984's Gremlins than they are of Henry Thomas in E.T. Plus Dart is potentially malevolent like a Mogwai, and not a peaceful empath like E.T. It's entirely possible too that The Duffer Bros. are also fans of MST3K, and they were nodding in the direction of Juan Piquer Simón's dirt-cheap rip-off Pod People from 1983. I like to think it was the latter.

6. Scanners

The character of Eleven, played wonderfully by Millie Bobby Brown, is clearly inspired by Charlie McGee, the main character from Stephen King's Firestarter (adapted to film in 1984 and sequelized in 2002). She has psychic powers and is the result of a shadowy government experiment.

But Eleven doesn't start fires with her mind; instead she can instead float objects, flip cars, and potentially kill with her thoughts. The scenes of Eleven hatefully staring at bad guys while they clutch their heads and develop facial bleeding problems is less evocative of Stephen King's novel than it is of David Cronenberg's 1981 sci-fi film Scanners. In that film, a rogue team of psychic soldiers, called scanners, use their powers to explode one another's brains. If you know nothing about Scanners, you at least know about its famous head explosion scene, one of the most perfect in cinema history. The Duffer Bros. have definitely watched Scanners more than a few times.

5. The Goonies/It/Stand By Me/Dreamcatcher/E.T.

This entry is kind of a catch-all for the basic character structure of Stranger Things. It's about a group of rowdy boys and one girl running afoul of evil government agents and mysterious Lovecraftian demons from the Upside Down. There were many, many, many pieces of pop culture ephemera from the 1980s to feature this structure. Divorce rates were skyrocketing in the late '70s and early '80s, so perhaps Hollywood responded by telling many tales of kids left bereft of supervision. But who is to say? Regardless there was a wave of it in the 1980s, and Stranger Things is tapping into a character setup that is now perhaps archetypal.

As such, comparisons to The Goonies or E.T. are totally apt. Stephen King also famously wrote many stories featuring a plucky group of suburban boys confronting the extraordinary. It was the structure of Stand By Me, of It, and even of Dreamcatcher.
Stranger Things 3: Final Trailer Breakdown

4. The Evil Dead Turducken

Jonathan has a poster for Sam Raimi's 1981 video nasty The Evil Dead on his wall. That's pretty cool. We all love The Evil Dead, and The Duffers likely watched that one innumerable times. Seems pretty straightforward.

But there's an interesting piece of trivia about an Evil Dead poster that the Duffers may also have been referring to, and it goes to a “rivalry” between Sam Raimi and Wes Craven. Briefly: In Craven's 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, what may be a poster for Jaws appears, ripped and tattered, on the wall of a dilapidated camper. The comment may be that Jaws was popcorn horror, while The Hills Have Eyes had edge. Sam Raimi, having seen this, and wanting perhaps to give Craven a gentle ribbing, featured a The Hills Have Eyes poster similarly ripped in The Evil Dead. How cute. Craven responded in kind by featuring a scene from The Evil Dead playing on a TV in his 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Raimi then hung Freddy Krueger's glove on a wall in Evil Dead 2. The final exchange between the two was in Craven’s Scream, when the lead teens of that movie, mulling over which horror movie they want to watch, bypass The Evil Dead in favor of Halloween.

This is all very oblique, of course, and I may be reading too much into a mere poster, but it's not entirely unlikely that The Duffers, as deep-cut Gen-X horror fans, knew of this little back-and-forth between Raimi and Craven, and paid homage to it with this Evil Dead poster.

3. John Carpenter as a Composer

John Carpenter, one of the best filmmakers of his generation, famously composed the scores to most of his movies. His music tended to be dreamy, repetitive, and often very synth heavy. Carpenter liked to shoot his films without music in mind, and then improvise the score on his guitar after the fact. The resulting sound has, in recent years, become a go-to sound for many '80s-inflected horror projects like It Follows, The Guest, and, yes, Stranger Things, composed by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein.

The score for Stranger Things most heavily evokes Escape from New York, as that was Carpenter's most notable synth soundtrack of its decade. You may also hear other Carpenter films quoted in certain musical cues, however, including Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog.

2. $%&# You, Dragon's Lair

If you were an arcade-bound youth in the early-to-mid 1980s, then you know what Dragon's Lair represents. Unlike other arcade games at the time, Dragon's Lair was not pixelated, but fully hand-animated by the studio founded by master animator Don Bluth (An American Tale, The Land Before Time, etc.). It was a quicktime-event-based game (before the term “quicktime event” was invented) that gave players approximately .0000001 seconds to respond to an on-screen threat. When you died, you pumped in another quarter and lost again. Boys kept coming back for the animation and for the sexy princess Daphne. No one ever, ever, ever beat the game. Ever. If you said you did, you're lying.

The opening episode of the second season of Stranger Things openly featured the very real frustration of playing Dragon's Lair. The gathering of quarters, the anticipation that THIS TIME you'll get past the second challenge. The heartbreak of losing after a mere few seconds of gameplay. The Duffers didn't just refer to Dragon's Lair. They knew what it represented.The boys experience the agony and the ecstasy of Dragon's Lair.

The boys experience the agony and the ecstasy of Dragon's Lair.

1. Avant-Garde

This may seem like a flimsy reference to put at #1, but the graphic design on the Stranger Things logo is 100% perfect for communicating what kind of show it is. You didn't need to see any footage of Stranger Things to know that this was going to be a Stephen King inspired '80s-tastic horror show. I even began picturing the characters and the monsters... all by looking at the show's logo.

The font used in the Stranger Things logo is called Avant-Garde. It's laid out with a larger S and R with the word “Things” nestled underneath. Why was this logo so evocative? If you look up the original book cover of Stephen King's It, you'll find that the author's name was laid out in the same fashion. The font on Stephen King's name was technically a font called ITC Benguiat (I had to look it up), but the Stranger Things font is similar enough that you can easily blend the two in your mind.

Yes, yes, it's just a font. But it goes to style, tone, and many other things that dictate the overall feeling of a TV show. It's important. And it was a brilliant '80s reference unto itself.

What are your favorite 1980s references from Stranger Things? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Countdown to Stranger Things Season 3

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Franchises:Stranger Things
Release Date:July 15, 2016