Hey guys! How was everybody's weekend? Mine was pretty good. Friday was probably the weirdest day since Brad dropped by with a bunch of stuff for me, including an Anime series on Blu-ray, the first two seasons of a really cool show on DVD and a few Funko Pop figures. Let's also not forget that the world lost a great man on Friday, when Chadwick Boseman passed away after a four year battle with cancer. He'll be sorely missed not only by Marvel fans, but by people all over the world. I'll be watching Black Panther and writing about it at some point, but right now I wanna talk about Stranger Things. It's the first post in a new column that I thought up called Geek Talk from the Basement where I just talk about geeky things as well as not so geeky things that I'm also interested in. I'll go into more detail in a later post. Right now though, let's talk geek!
So Stranger Things is a show that I had no idea would resonate with people the way it has. I mean it's pretty much Horror and not everybody into it, it's set in the '80s, and it's a Netflix Original Series. One of those things alone would never have garnered the attention this show has gotten, so I definitely didn't think that the combination of all three things together in one show would work at all.Yet, somehow, it did, and it does. It's also a show that I don't even remember how I heard about it. People just started talking about it on Facebook and, like usual I had no idea about what they were talking about any more than I did in 2011 when Game of Thrones first started.
I'm pretty late to the party when it comes to Stranger Things (and Game of Thrones, but that's another post for another time), Being that it came out as my parents and I were just settling into the house we'd just moved into, and then right after I was dealing with abdominal surgery and then months of being stuck in bed, recovering from said operation and I just never got around to watching it, even though we had Netflix at the time and I was watching Riverdale at the time. Then finally, last year I watched the first season so I could review it on the old blog. Then I never got back to it. I definitely will at some point, maybe after my watch through of Full House and Fuller House.
The thing is is that I'm not a huge Horror guy, so watching the first three seasons back to back wasn't something I was willing to do. I mean it's not the goriest or the scariest show in the Horror genre, but the first season was pretty heavy, especially since I finished it in three or four days, so trying to get into season 2 right away wasn't going to happen right away. Plus I think my other shows were coming back by that point, so I didn't have as much time to binge anything and still go to bed at a decent hour. Like I said, I'll get back to it eventually, I'm just not in a rush to do so.
As I said, I've only seen the first season, but I really enjoyed that first season. There was a lot to love about that season. The characters were great and there really wasn't any that I didn't like. At least none that I wasn't supposed to dislike. Whereas the villains were perfectly unlikeable. Which works for me. And being a geek, the kids resonated with me, since they like some of the same things that I like, even though they're kids in the '80s and I was a kid in the '90s. I've also never been into Dungeons & Dragons like they are, so I don't have that connection. But just as a geek I could appreciate those references even though I'm not familiar with D&D. Joyce and Hopper were also pretty great characters too. The story was also compelling and gripping.
I think what astounded me the most though is how popular the show got. I mean, I think it grew slowly at first, because I don't think I actually heard anything about it until just before the second season aired in 2017 just because I was pretty busy with stuff and none of my friends at the time were into it much. So I probably saw memes about it online, but I didn't find out what it was until just before the second season was released. What's funny is that The Goldbergs had been doing '80s references for three years before Stranger Things started, but Stranger Things made the '80s popular again.
I think what drew people to this show, because I know it's why I like it so much, is the fact that all of the characters are believable. Even Eleven is a believable character. We can relate to pretty much all of them. And equally too as most of the time with shows like this, we can either identify with the adults or the kids, not both, so that worked pretty well too. And with how compelling the story is, it's enough to keep the audience interested even beyond the '80s references. At least for that first season. I haven't seen the second or third seasons yet, so I can't speak to those yet. So I'll probably talk about Stranger Things again after I've finished the second and third seasons.
That's it for Geek Talk from the Basement this week. I'll be back tomorrow, with what Geek Talk from the Basement is going to be and then next week I'll write about another topic, be it a comic book, a movie, TV show, video game or book. Later.
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