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.
I would genuinely love to know what it felt like for people who lived through major celebrations of this country in decades past, because celebrations right now feel a bit… off.
Queue the Patriotic Charlie Brown voice: It seems like everyone is supposed to be excited. Mattress companies and car dealerships are running their America 250 specials, Walmart has their made in other countries red white and blue products out, and yet there just seems to be something missing surrounding this enormous anniversary for the United States.
Maybe it is just me? If you are feeling it too, maybe it is just you! Of course, for every person feeling that way, there are probably plenty of others proudly hanging decorations and embracing the American 250 celebration with excitement and genuine patriotism. But something feels different.
When you look back through old fishwrappers and faded pieces of history from previous eras, it always feels like celebrations were bigger. Communities seemed more connected. The pride looked more visible. Maybe nostalgia distorts things, but history often paints that picture, with the Bicentennial seemingly being the most brilliant of all celebrations.. even black and white newspapers seemingly are filled with the patriotic colors..
We are fond of these old videos.. and there are plenty more still to be found.. Imagine the hidden videos still tucked away in basements or attics that we don’t even know exist yet!
But all of the images equally give a shock to the senses.. how much things have changed.. progress led to problems. Not all boats were lifted in rising tides and when the water levels are low, we all feel trapped in a daze of old glory mixed with a sense of patriotism in a past sense.. nostalgia has been replaced with anger..
Or maybe this is part of something larger. Perhaps it is simply the slow decline of small town America. Here in northeastern Pennsylvania, many towns have become hollow versions of what they once were. Industry faded. Populations shrank. Traditions quietly disappeared. There was a time when school bands filled long parade routes, floats moved through packed streets, and celebrations felt like the heartbeat of entire communities. That is not necessarily a reflection on the people living there today, but more the changing atmosphere that happens when communities slowly lose population, industry, and identity.
It was a huge deal. I graduated HS in 1976 and my memory of it is that it was mostly just a huge commercialization ploy. There was Bicentennial everything. From toothpaste to special edition cars if they could paint it red, white, and blue, they did. I have no idea the amount of “special edition” Bicentennial crap that was sold with the idea that it would someday become collectible. I suppose some of it actually did but most of it ended up in a landfill.
Another noted the interesting juxtaposition of the bicentennial right after traumatic national events.. After Vietnam and Watergate, the USA was feeling pretty down and the Spirit of 76 made people overall just feel a little better..
One more post from the Ask Old People thread:
It was pretty huge. It wasn’t just the actual birthday, but there was a big wave of subtle/not-so-subtle patriotism leading up to and continuing after 1976. It may have been fueled in part by people desperate to feel good after the turbulent 60s and getting out of Vietnam. There was certainly a lot of Red White and Blue branding going on – for example, Wonder Woman premiered in April 1976.
I’m a little concerned about 2026 – Waving a flag seems to mean something different today than it did in 1976 and it’s hard for me to picture a unified celebration.
That part rings true.. 2026, waving a flag seems to have a whole new meaning.. It seems divisive when it should not be.. It just all feels strange at the moment..
One of the scenes in television history has always been the final episode of The Wonder Years, where Kevin Arnold reflects on the closing chapter of his life in the 1960s and 1970s, including the death of his father, all while beautiful melancholy music plays against scenes of a Fourth of July celebration in his hometown. Fireworks. Americana. Family. Nostalgia. It captures it all:
I think that nostalgic view dominates how people imagine pride itself or great American celebrations. Maybe those moments really were bigger than life.
Maybe these moments never existed quite the way we imagine them, and we were simply led to believe they did. Or perhaps the truth is stranger…. those celebrations once existed exactly as we remember them, but somehow they do not exist in the same way anymore.
So how are you feeling, America?
Soaring with pride?
Or quietly drifting somewhere between nostalgia and sadness at 250?
It’s been months now since the series finale of Stranger Things, and fans are forgetting… they’re forgetting quickly.
Not just the friendships we made with each other, or the rekindled family moments watching the show and talking about theories together… but the friends we had on the show too. They were ours. We cried for Max Mayfield when she faced Vecna. We cheered for Murray Bauman. We stood against the Soviets. We were wrapped in nostalgia.
And now… we just have nostalgia for the nostalgia.
There’s a dullness to it now, like a blunted edge. The new animated series is coming, and no one really seems to care. The fading light of the The Duffer Brothers has cast a shadow over their newest project, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. And maybe that title says more than it should about what happened when we saw the show!
Because something very bad did happen. The fading star of Stranger Things.
It was with us for nearly a decade… and then it was gone in an instant. So fast. Quietly slipping away with that closing credit scene, carried out by the haunting echo of a David Bowie song. It didn’t leave with a thud… it left with a whimper.
Remember the days leading up to the finale? When we were all hoping like hell that Conformity Gate was real… that there was a secret episode coming. One more piece. One more answer. One more night in Hawkins. It never came.
It was never going to. But even now, months later, sitting with it… I still feel like Vecna won.
I know it was just fiction. I know that. But in this world that felt so real… it didn’t feel like a victory. We saw conformity through Mike’s eyes, and the ending felt bleak in a way that lingers longer than it should.
Maybe one day we’ll get that reunion. Maybe the cast comes back, set in the 90s. Maybe we see who stayed friends… and who didn’t. Just like life.
Because that’s the part that hits the hardest… they move on. And so do we. But every now and then, I catch myself. I have to snap out of it… out of that nostalgic fog where I’m thinking about a show that was never real, about people who never existed.
The eulogy-like sendoff… it just lingers there as a reminder. Time moves on and things that feel massive today become memories tomorrow. And eventually they become something we almost forget.
A lot of people dabbled in early internet by using places like Angelfire to express themselves. And until just a few weeks ago, those early internet sites were still there for everyone to enjoy..
They are now gone.
People who didn’t live through it won’t get it. ICQ numbers and AOL names as a contact? People saying “welcome to my page” At the top like you were entering some type of business meeting.. Awkward family photos.. Guestbooks you are being asked to sign!? My ICQ was ICQ NUMBER: 29085260..
This was a great time to be alive during the old internet era. We were like pioneers in the wild west. Sure, by comparison to the wild west and the Oregon Trail game, it’s a much safer environment, and the biggest danger we had was not cholera or smallpox, but instead dial-up connections. However, we were charting new ground. Back then, people didn’t quite know what to make of it. Were things real? Were people real? You couldn’t really tell but chances are in the early net, people exploring online were actually the real thing.
A lot of people were on various pages like Angelfire and GeoCities. And when these pages go away, it creates some sort of a strange void.
It’s almost like thinking your local mall is still open, and then you show up just to see it got knocked down.
There is no Angelfire anymore. And if you had, from the late 1990s to the very early 2000s, anything with family-related events or photographs or stories or blogs, it’s gone. It may still exist on Archive.org, thankfully for that, but for the most part, the real pages of what existed are all gone. Depending on how you felt about yourself 26 years ago, you may or may not like that an archive still exists …
It’s interesting because a lot of people most likely had family websites on Angelfire, and they don’t even know that those pages are gone now. By the time Angelfire told its users that the pages were shutting down, most people had already tuned out. Many didn’t even assume their pages were still working. I, for one, knew mine were still up all these 27 years later. I would go back to them now and then, maybe three or four times per year, just for the fun of it. It was when I went back recently that I discovered it was gone. Then I did some more research and realized they are all gone.
It is like corporate fast food chains. Everyone decries how now they all look the same.. same color, same design, modern. All the colors from the past are gone. The same thing happened with Angelfire and GeoCities. Think about those moving GIF backgrounds. They were horrible to read. You couldn’t tell what the font looked like. The horror sites had blood dripping down. Other sites had sports GIFs all over the place. It was chaotic and even at times ridiculous.
But they were the days.
Let me just picture it. You go to some Angelfire website, and the first thing you see is a GIF of a dancing Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. It has nothing to do with the page. But that’s because the person who made the page loved Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. That’s what Angelfire was like, just a big, giant collection of junk and gunk with words in between. Like AI slop now, but just edited and created by real humans to express their own personal slop.. emblematic of the person who created it.
Angelfire is actually what led me to learn HTML coding. Now listen, my coding is not really as necessary these days as it once was because of AI or structured websites that are already created for people in a box, but back then, you had to learn the old-fashioned way. Not only were you on Angelfire and your mom was telling you to get off the internet so she could make a phone call, but you were in the middle of saving your index with HTML coding, which might have broken the entire thing, and you just couldn’t find out until mom was done with that call.
No calls cut us off now, but internet outages still happen, and when they happen, now they’re bigger.
I think in a way people will look back and romanticize things like Angelfire a lot more than what they deserve. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the easiest time, and the websites were clearly not the nicest. But it was something. It was almost like your little space on the internet—somewhat like what MySpace was. Literally the term “MySpace.” Then Facebook came around and changed the game. Things always come around and change the game. That’s okay, it’s the natural progression of how these things work.
But what seems to be painful is that with all the changes, we’re running out of space for the old stuff. The old internet was extremely important, and people who didn’t live through it will never quite understand or appreciate the daily happenings online. There was no social media and had to learn how to find things yourself instead of things being sent to you because of an algorithm. You sought out websites and found your favorite writers or bloggers and communicated with people in a personal way.
Social media is constant now. So much so that it’s overwhelming. This is not natural for our minds, folks.
But back then, you were slower about this. You were more methodical and could carve your path on the internet the way you wanted to, not the way a corporation would feed it to you.
There are people out there who have done their best at preserving the internet. Some have preserved GeoCities. I don’t know if Angelfire was ever really preserved the same way. GeoCities felt like one of the first real blog-style platforms where people kept updating things, and eventually that morphed into Blogger and everything else that followed. Angelfire felt different because it was more static. More like a personal statement. A website before websites became what they are now.
Angelfire didn’t collapse because of some dramatic scandal. It just… faded. Lycos, its parent company, quietly shut down the free hosting after years of decline. The internet moved on. People moved on. The infrastructure got old and the demand disappeared. And one day, something that existed for decades just didn’t anymore.
On Friday, August 21, 2026, I’ll be screening “H4” right next to the former Vincent Drug building featured in the film – at The Bambino restaurant on their outdoor patio, located directly beside Vincent Drug. The restaurant will be serving pizza and desserts all evening and as the sun goes down over Midvale, Halloween music will echo through the night… and The Shape returns!
This is the hottest nostalgic Halloween ticket of thr summer!
If it was 1971 and you really liked clowns, chances are you could have filled every room in your house with these amazingly frightening lamps straight from the JCPenney catalog.
Don’t be too scared .. it’s just a little taste of John Wayne Gacy in every room… or Pennywise the Dancing Clown… or even that infamous clown from Poltergeist, though that one hadn’t yet terrorized anyone because this was 1971.
Maybe clowns were more simple and less sinister back then. Maybe all the clown-related events that have unfolded in the decades since have slowly morphed our collective clown repertoire into something darker. Because when I look at this picture, I don’t just see playful décor. I get a little heebie-jeebie feeling. There’s something about that blank, wide-eyed stare that hints at carnage rather than comfort.
I can’t help but wonder how many kids had one of these glowing in the corner of their bedroom. And I wonder if any are still around today.. tucked away in the back of an antique shop, or sitting quietly on some auction block.
Not that we’d buy one.
But we’d definitely like to see it… preferably displayed in someone else’s house.
This morning when I woke up, I noticed that Netflix added a new category to its main page called Let’s Pretend It’s 2016. It features movies and television shows like the Ghostbusters remake, The OA, and of course Stranger Things, since Season 1 appeared ten years ago.
Seeing that listing was a reminder of just how many things have come and gone on Netflix… and, honestly, how much better things used to feel. Over the last decade, everything seems to have gone downhill. So much of what’s released now feels rushed, made without much care or concern, with lackluster scripts and very few fresh ideas. But go back just ten years, to 2016, and we kind of had it made. We just didn’t know it.
Back then we were probably complaining that Netflix had already dumbed things down, that there wasn’t much to watch, and that the best entertainment was from ten or twenty years earlier. Little did we realize that here in 2026 we’d be decrying the bad writing of Stranger Things Season 5 and missing shows that were genuinely binge-worthy, not ones you casually glance at on a boring snowy weekend.
It’s nice to see this category, but it’s also bittersweet. Nostalgia can be one of the most dangerous things… it has a way of creating unrealistic memories of the past. Things weren’t always that great, and tomorrow isn’t always as bad as it seems. But when it comes to entertainment, movies, and television shows on Netflix, things really might be as bad as they feel right now.
So I guess this weekend, as the snow falls outside, I’ll watch what I watched ten years ago… and maybe it’ll feel new again.
In a desperate attempt to change the narrative away from Stranger Things posts for the last week, or maybe just as a brief respite from entertainment and movies altogether, we’re going to focus on dreams. That’s fun. Or, in my case, last night’s nightmare.
Every now and then I have a dream this memorable .. a nightmare that sticks with you .. and last night was one of those sleepless nights. It was the 3:00 a.m. witching hour when I woke up. That seems to be the most popular time for a nightmare to abruptly pull you out of your nocturnal decommission.
In this situation, the abrupt nature was a giant inflatable lumberjack.
Let me explain.
In the dream, there was a bluish tint to the atmosphere and fresh-fallen snow covering a giant yard .. presumably my yard. I noticed something underneath the snow, struggling to move. When I went down to investigate, it turned out to be an inflatable lumberjack. How cute. Have fun.
It started innocently, with the lumberjack now freed from the heavy snow on top of it and able to inflate freely. But as dreams tend to go, it didn’t stop there. Literally. It just kept inflating, to the point where it was potentially 30 to 40 feet high, and that’s when it started to frighten me.
So, in the dream, I ran back to the house for safety. When I looked out the window, the lumberjack decided to grab a giant inflatable axe, detach himself from the strings holding him down, and run at the house at full speed.
What a strange concept — a lumberjack, let alone a 40-foot inflatable lumberjack, charging at you at full speed.
It’s weird because it was just a dream, but it’s the kind of dream that stayed with me all day. There could be plenty of reasons why it happened. Maybe it’s stress. Maybe there’s something in my own life coming at me full speed that I need to grasp or grapple with.
Or maybe it was just too much vino at the hotel bar. Either way, I asked AI to make a gritty four-panel comic based on my very detailed description. It didn’t quite capture the full inflatable rendering, the size and ferocity of the lumberjack, but it’s good enough for me.
So I present it for your approval, with the help of our ever-increasing spy device known as AI. Enjoy: The Inflatable Lumberjack Dream, comic-style.
Picture it: Christmas 1990. You’re sitting there playing Zelda, and you just can’t figure out what to do next. You’re stuck, it’s ruining Christmas, your family’s angry, you’re angry, and you don’t want to throw the controller at the TV. What do you do? Well, this is 1990. We didn’t have Google, we didn’t have AI, we only had the word of mouth of others. And in this case, your friend circle has no idea what you should do next.
Who are you going to call? You’re going to call the Nintendo phone number helpline.
Yes, there was a Nintendo helpline where you, as a gamer, could call up and not speak to a computer, but actually talk to a real person. You’d describe the scene you were in, the level you were stuck on, and that person.. who might literally be playing Nintendo games while on the line.. would give you the advice you needed.
Talk about an amazing snapshot in time, right? I think back to it and realize that as a kid, I learned to find secrets or figure out glitches in games through pure perseverance or maybe a tip from another kid at school. There was no internet walkthrough; you either figured it out yourself or called someone who could walk you through it like a gaming therapist. And that was part of the challenge and the fun.
You know, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if I ever end up with Alzheimer’s and find myself in a nursing home, I want someone to bring me a Nintendo. Because no matter what happens to my brain, I guarantee I can still beat Mario 3.
Christmas time is here again. The annual ritual of spending cash you really don’t have. Society expects it!! Get that card out!
Like you, I’m out there right now wandering the stores, scrolling the apps, perusing the malls that still exist and matching the prices up with the Amazon option. I get panicky this time of year because I haven’t purchased much yet. I check my bank account (you do it too), and I realize there just isn’t much time left until the big day … food, medicine? Or Christmas gifts. What do you spend on in December?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9TByT3QlWc
Every year I try to be one of those organized people who gets things done early.. knock a few gifts out in November, finish up the first week of December. Because we all know what happens if you don’t: the Panic Purchases begin.
We’ve all been there. You see nervous husbands frozen in the appliance aisle. You see kids staring at some sad-looking afghan blanket, trying to convince themselves, “Yeah, Mom would probably like that.”
Let’s be honest: most of us already have enough stuff. We don’t really need much of anything on Christmas. But we’ve been programmed for decades to think we have to buy, buy, buy.
So go buy. Be a part of something.. 🙂
As you get older, it actually becomes more fulfilling to buy something for someone else that genuinely makes them smile. The only problem is that we still wait too long to start looking for that “special” thing. So we end up right back in that blender aisle, trying to justify why someone in life might really want to circular-saw their fruits and vegetables into mush all year long.
That’s a different story for a different post. We have digressed too long.
Toy Ad Nostalgia: The Real Christmas Catalog
One of my favorite things about this time of year isn’t the new stuff… it’s the old stuff. Specifically: old Christmas ads. Especially toy ads.
We all feel those toy ads, right?
For me and many, the sweet spot is the late ’80s and early ’90s. That’s when my childhood was starting to age out of toys, but not quite yet. Right before everything shifted into “I just want money” mode. You may be prompted into the inebriation of nostalgia from the 70s, maybe the 50s.. Maybe even the 2010s! Any way you slice it, the same effects on the mind and body occur.
Those were the years when the toy spreads in the Sunday paper or the department store flyers looked absolutely magical:
He-Man figures lined up like plastic warriors
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in all their neon glory
The Nintendo Entertainment System taking over living rooms one cartridge at a time
I remember one of the greatest Christmases of my entire life like it was yesterday. I got:
A Super Mario game for Nintendo
A Batman game for Nintendo
A red bean bag
A blue bean bag
The colors matched Mario. That was it. That was the list. And somehow, that simple combination still stands out in my mind as the Best Christmas Ever™.
Before that, when I was younger, I remember getting Tonka toys—real metal, heavy, practically indestructible. That was also the year Christmas collided with a stomach bug. I spent part of that magical morning sick, but here’s the thing: even with that, the memories still come back warm. A little queasy, but warm.
Old Ads, Old Prices, New Reality
So here’s what I want to do with this post:
I’ve got a couple of old Christmas toy ads I want to share with you. Take a good look at the prices in those ads. The toys, the games, the “big” items.
Below each ad, we’ll break down a few of those prices and talk about what they’d roughly translate to in today’s money. How much would that Nintendo, that action figure set, or that Tonka truck actually cost now if you adjusted it for inflation?
Because back then, a toy that cost $19.99 felt like a big deal. Now we blink at $49.99 like, “Eh, that’s just what stuff costs.”
We used a typical inflation calculator to see what the Nintendo was.. $237 in today’s money. and even in today’s dollars that would be VERY affordable compared to the high priced almost $1000 dollar gaming consoles of today’s gaming market. And you ca n OWN a game then, BATMAN, for 40 bucks.. That would be $96 today. So yes.. we are being taken advantage of in today’s gaming market, right?
But just stop and appreciate that 1990s. That was the year I got the bean bags, BATMAN, and MARIO 3.. life changing childhood moment.
A year before the greatest Christmas ever I most likely before the $3.99 BATMAN action figures.. My parents got me BATMAN and the JOKER and BOB THE GOON. They spent $15 bucks on those, and in today’s money about $11 each. But yet in 2025, action figures in stores are 20 bucks or more… Again, are we being used by corporations?
Kids drooled over the SEGA by 89 as Nintendo faced competition.. It was pricer at $189
So now we are talking bigger money.. that is almost $500 in today’s cash. We are getting closer to the Playstation or xBox..
Ad for the heck of it in 1986 when you may have craved a Wuzzle at the Schuylkill Mall.
$1.99 then! Not even $6 bucks now .. Great deal. I am sure if they were existent today they would be $20 on sale. And if you kept it in a box, you could sell in on eBay TODAY for $99 bucks (according to sell prices), which by the way was $33 bucks in 1986. Reverse.. deflation.. See how that worked?
So money talked.. Money was spent. Bills long paid, or ignored.. We have moved on.
What make it all so special in the past?
Maybe it wasn’t the price. Maybe it was the bean bags. They meant more than anything else..
