Everyone talks about that magical year when Stranger Things 4 arrived and completely took over pop culture, but I want to go back a little further. I want to talk about Stranger Things 3 and the summer of 2019, because for a lot of us, that was the summer that changed everything.
Think about the build-up. The excitement.. the freshness of what was coming.
This was Stranger Things embracing something completely different. Gone was the darker isolation of previous seasons and in came bright neon colors, the Great American mall, summer romance, arcades, and a season built around the idea that the kids of Hawkins thought they had already defeated the evil… without realizing something even worse was quietly waiting beneath the surface.
It gave us Starcourt Mall, one of the great fictional monuments to 1980s Americana. It gave us Fourth of July fireworks exploding over Hawkins while chaos unfolded underneath it all. It gave us a corrupt mayor bought and paid for, secret Russian experiments hidden underground, and finally let Murray become something more than just comic relief as his character began to fully develop.
Even the monsters felt fresh.
And then it happened.
July 4th, 2019.
The day Stranger Things 3 was released, right in the middle of summer, and somehow everything about that moment just felt perfect.
There was something magical about that summer. Maybe it was where we all were in life. Maybe it was the anticipation of a huge cultural event landing at exactly the right moment.. the posters, the fireworks, that unforgettable trailer, the colors, the music, the atmosphere.
It all clicked.
Even if you think Stranger Things 3 was not the strongest season, and many fans will argue the other seasons were better, there is something undeniably nostalgic about that summer and what it represented.
It embedded itself in our brains.
Hard to believe now, but it has been ten years since Stranger Things first premiered.
And seven summers since the summer that changed everything.
The truth is simple.
We will probably never experience something quite like that again.
And maybe that is exactly why we miss it so much.
