A Flaw in Stranger Things
I am that guy…….you all know him, and I make no apologies. I am the guy who sees little details in shows/movies and either points them out for being accurate, or goes to great pains to show where the producers went wrong.
I can’t help this affliction, I just do it naturally – I call it a gift. My wife Stephanie definitely calls it a curse, because there are times we cannot make it through a movie without 5-6 (9-10) stoppages. Now, I am not saying I am Rain Man and able to pull the exact dates out of my head. Instead, I get a feeling when I watch things - and research leads me to what caused the trigger.
Here is an example:
In the movie, Walk the Line, Johnny Cash is shown in an office in Germany. In the background is an R-390 receiver – the same type of receiver he would have used in the Air Force Security Service, where he was a Morse Code operator intercepting Soviet transmissions (although it would have never been mounted like that). Just having that there is a great level of attention to detail - and I have to wonder, was it intentional…..or did they luck into it?
Okay, now that you understand where I am going with this - lets jump ahead to November 6th 1983 in Hawkins, Indiana.
It’s a Sunday night, confirmed by Night Rider being on TV when Mike’s Dad is tuning it (I would love to know if this is Season 2 K.I.T.T the Cat which aired that night) and Mike’s Mom saying it was a school night, but downstairs - a fateful game is taking place.
There is even a poster from John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in the background, which came out June 25th 1982, so it works.
See! Incredible attention to detail! That is until you take a closer look at the D&D game and realize the Demogorgon Miniature used in their game was not sculpted until 1984.
Yes, with three great levels of detail right off the bat - the central piece to the show (and possibly the series, until Vecna shows up) turns out to be Anachronism, and I am not the first person to catch it. While doing research, I stumbled upon an old blog by Brian Roe (over at Roebeast’s Magical House of Sunshine) where he wrote a blog piece about the miniature, even going so far as to reach out to the sculptor John Dennett for an interview. It is through this interview we get this little gem:
RB: How long had you been sculpting for Grenadier when you sculpted the “Demogorgon”?
JD: I began working as a free-lance sculptor for Grenadier Models in 1982 and after a few months was offered a full time position at the company sometime in the early Autumn as I recall. The Demogorgon was sculpted in 1984 and released within weeks of my completing it. That was pretty much the way things moved at the company, soon as the sculpture was finished it went to the mold maker and usually within a day or two was spun for initial casting.
There you have it, straight from the sculptors mouth - the miniature is being used to early. Now, without getting into spoilers, this has huge implications on the show - as the “Demogorgon” is a key feature, so it is a little jarring given how far this show goes to for attention to detail. In fact, why did they settle on Nov 6th 1983 in the first place? While I cannot confirm - I have been reading a lot about the November 7th bombing of the Capital by M19. Considering the covert nature of the lab in Hawkins - could this have been one of the original pitches, as they try to tie world events to there.
