Stranger Things

You probably wouldn't say it based on my luscious head of hair and boyis looks' n charm, but I'm a kid of the eighties. The eighties in which we had to make do with only two transmitters: Nederland 1 and 2. Transmitters that were often also beeping for up to six hours on the test screen. Our grandfathers and grandmothers may have survived the starvation winter, but the fact that my entire generation has had to grow up with a glaring lack of home entertainment is simply hidden away in all history books for the sake of convenience. Disgraceful. A few times a week there was a party, then you could stay up a little later in your He-Man pajamas with a bowl of paprika chips on your lap - it was that or natural, you had no more flavors - a little later for Airwolf, Knight Rider and MacGuyer. Good memories. CBS will release a remake of MacGuyver later this year, but of course we already know in advance that it can never match the original, so we are going to boycott it en masse. However? Despite the fact that your TV seemed to experience a lot more intensely than nowadays - I know, grandpa explains - due to the limited selection, you had to be in the cinema for the real fireworks. On the basis of your father to actually just a bit too exciting films like Gremlins, The Goonies and ET and then of course not sleeping for days. Own fault. It was the time when a very young Steven Spielberg squeezed one supernatural adventure movie after another and we ate it like sweet cake. For all people in their thirties and forties who now and then reminisce with melancholy on Stand By Me, The Thing and Aliens, Netflix now comes with a song of praise to all those 80's classics, Stranger Things. If your main concern as a sheriff is to have enough strawberry jam in your donut, then you know you are not enforcing the law in one of the largest counties on the planet. Hawkins is a small dormitory town in early '80s Indiana. Not much going on in Hawkins. You could say it is a kind of Boxtel, but with more pick-up trucks and bigger cups at McDonalds. It is therefore a shock when, amid all this lingering dullness, the young Will Byers suddenly seems to disappear into thin air. Will's mom and friends like a good scavenger hunt, so they join the sheriff to get the magnifying glasses from the attic and go out, not knowing the utter insanity they throw themselves into. Stranger Things is described by Netflix as an ode to the 80's supernatural classics and nothing too much is said with that. During the first episodes you sometimes really have the feeling that you are watching the director's cut of ET. Extreme close-ups of rattling BMX rear wheels; big, intimidating men in white suits who get oxygen from a vacuum cleaner hose and special effects that I think look deliberately nice and clumsy. It is all there and accompanied by synthesizer tunes that Kraftwerk would not ignore. Fine. But is Stranger Things also fun for people in their twenties who only know the 80s from the The A-Team reruns on RTL7? I think so. For them it is in any case 'new' and that is also the pitfall for Stranger Things. For older viewers, it can at some point start to feel like a repetition of moves. The government as a continuously threatening force, secretly conducting the most insane experiments; bullies vs. the nerds at a typical American high school and the Predator-like sounds of the magnified evil, we've all seen it before. So you could say that the power of Stranger Things is also its Achilles heel. The question now is whether you watch it for the trip down memory lane it is or whether you “used to be everything better” muttering on the Waterlooplein in search of a still working video recorder for your dusty Blade Runner and The Fly tapes. bing again. I think I'm going for both.

Great series, great actors, great plot. Particularly enjoyed Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin). Fantastic music!