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Cranmer's Replies
Great post! One of the reasons I'm here is because I can't cope with posting on political sites like I used to. It's just too depressing. So I come here for a bit of escapism and movie chat.
Hawkins did seem to grow from a small 'main street USA' town to almost a small city by S3.
However, I was around in 1985 and you did get big crowds like that in shopping malls, swimming pools etc. There weren't so many places to go and people, especially youngsters, tended to 'hang out' in public rather than sit in their bedrooms at home chatting on social media.
Eg, I grew up in north London and every Saturday night the forecourt of the local tube (subway) station was packed with teenagers - at least a hundred - who just sat around chatting, smoking etc. It was just treated as a sort of open air youth club. Hard to believe now.
OK I'll have a go at those.
Hopper isn't the only cop in town. A giant monster roaming around and nobody phones the deputies? I know it's a small town, but nobody drives anywhere. Nobody but the kids notice mayhem at the mall?
- my guess is multiple people phoned the local police department who in turn alerted the feds who alerted the army. When the monster was roaming there would have been chaos - jammed switchboards etc and it would have taken a while to summon the military.
Soviets with machine guns and children decide to investigate instead of contacting local law or FBI?
- the kids learned early on not to trust authority in these matters because they could be in on it, so it was safer to do it themselves.
No security cameras on the elevator or warehouse entrance to warn the Soviets of intruders?
- I can't defend this one. The soviets must have had a considerable number of people working on the top-side of the facility, in order to get food, supplies, new recruits etc. It's laughable that anyone could just walk into the lift.
Alexei just happens to blab everything to the Americans? Why?
- He was terrified and wanted to get away from the Russian military - they already said they would kill him if he didn't manage to get the portal open.
Alexei shot and nobody calls an ambulance?
- Murray hid him by the side of the trailers, presumably nobody noticed him until all hell broke loose with the monster, and by then he would just have been ignored anyway in the chaos. What was less easily explained was how the Terminator guy was able to just wander around the funfair with a pistol in his hand without being noticed. Guess people were just too busy having fun.
How would Hopper leave facility when place was flooded with U.S. security? Why would Soviets take him anyway?
- If Hopper did survive, it could be easily explained in some way. Eg he fell down a shaft when the laser beam exploded, he was concussed and not found for a while, the feds assumed he was Russian and put him with all the other prisoners who got deported, or something like that.
I was around then too, and most, or at least half, of all adults smoked. Most public buildings always had a haze of cigarette smoke in them. So I think Stranger Things is fairly accurate with regards to smoking. A lot of smoking in films is now done with CGI anyway. If you look closely, you'll notice and you'll also see many actors don't take puffs on their cigarettes, they just light them then the camera pans away then they hold them, but you don't see them inhale or exhale.
One thing you don't see much in period dramas is pipe smoking, which was much more common in the old days than it is now. Probably because smoking a pipe takes a bit of practice and it's not something that can be easily picked up by a non-smoker.
Sadly I don't think even most British people nowadays have a strong grasp of how British people interacted in the 1940s. I'm old enough to have known a lot of people who lived through that era but I supposed directors, writers and other film/telly people under 40 don't really have that experience.
I'm glad some other people noticed the period inaccuracies. We had one right at the beginning - a telephonist answers the phone with 'Manchester Police Department'. There are no 'police departments' in Britain. She would just have said 'Manchester Police'. There were quite a few other ones, such as Hugh Alexander using bad language and sexual references to a middle class woman he had only just been introduced to; couples 'jitterbugging' at a local village pub (highly unlikely before the arrival of GIs later in the war). Also highly unlikely that a middle class woman would drink a pint of beer in a pub. The worst one was the ridiculous modern stubble on the face of the 1951 police officer - until the 1980s only a vagrant would look like that!
Somehow I don't think we're going to get a movie adaptation of 'Tintin in the Congo' anytime soon.
Remember that this is a cartoon series, not a documentary. Nations are often mixed up in cartoon land. For example the British children's comic 'The Dandy' had a character called 'Desperate Dan' who was clearly a cowboy but who lived in some sort of Scottish village. Similarly the comic 'Film Fun' had regular strips featuring American comedians such as Laurel and Hardy who were depicted as living in British working class towns.
Although Tintin is clearly Belgian, aspects of his life were changed to fit the countries in which the stories were published, hence why Dupont and Dupond become 'Thompson and Thomson' etc. As a child I remember not really noticing Tintin's nationality, I just assumed he was British.
As someone else points out Tintin was based on a 15 year old boy called Palle Hudd who went on a world tour in the 1920s ( as a prize in a magazine writing competition IIRC).
Don't forget in the days when Tintin first appeared, most people left school at 14 and there were journalists as young as 15-16 working on local newspapers (I think the writer Georges Simenon was one such). Adulthood began much earlier in those days; there were 16 year old boys who fought in the Great War, for example.
I've always assumed Tintin was supposed to be about 17 years old, which explains why he has a flat and a job and can drive a car, but isn't that interested in drinking, smoking, girls etc (although partly that's because he was created as a role model for Roman Catholic teenagers). In most children's fiction, the hero is a little older than the age of the intended readership, because it gives them someone to aspire to and look up to .
His father taught him. In one of the flashback scenes we see Truman being shown by his father how to sail a little Wayfarer type dinghy. Although Truman escapes in a bigger boat, the principle is the same.
Some good points, I'll try to counter:
1. I think they are available but very expensive and need to be tailor made. Not the kind of thing you can just pick up at a toy shop.
2. It's possible the dye pack was hidden inside a false wad of cash.
3. Description would be for two men of a certain height and build wearing hoodies carrying bags. The police in the car couldn't see their race because they had hoods up, so it's plausible they would ask them to stop.
4. True - my guess is that Connie took Nick because the plan was for them to get away together as soon as possible after the heist. If he had left him with grandma he would have had to go back and get him while on the run from the cops. Either that or being a lowlife criminal he just thinks Nick is better off in that lifestyle instead of talking to a shrink who makes him cry.
5. He saw that Nick was crying (which the therapist didn't seem to notice). Probably Nick had told Connie previously that he didn't like the sessions so Connie turned up to take him away and the tears just confirmed it.
6. Yes probably for adults only. Some fairground rides that are very scarey/rough/violent are sometimes adults only.
7. The park was broken into recently (when Ray and his gang stashed the acid) so it's possible that there wasn't normally a guard on duty but they stepped up security for a short period. The Somalian guard probably got told if he doesn't do a good job he won't get kept on.
8. True, but he had to think quick and it probably seemed a safer option than running around outside in view of CCTV cameras.
9. We know Connie had a plan and a place to go (with a driver to take them) after the heist. But when the dye exploded, the car crashed and Nick got arrested, the plan fell apart, he could not go back to Grandma because the cops were looking for him. His back up plan was to get his girlfriend (the permanently drunk 'mature' lady) to pick them up from the black lady's house but that didn't work because Nick turned out to be Ray.
10. No idea. It was probably worth a lot hence why Ray didn't mind making the guard swallow a bit. I think the fluid may work through the linings of the mouth and doesn't actually need to be swallowed.
11. My guess is the neighbours called the cops when they heard the dog barking and the argument (we see a neighbour looking out into the corridor) and at some point the cops made the connection.
12. True. Ray says he didn't remember all of what he did that night. I wondered if he actually did something more serious like killed someone but didn't remember becaues of the acid; that could be why he was under armed guard at the hospital. Or it could just be that he couldn't stand jail and didn't want to go back. Remember he was very drunk in the last scene and probably not thinking straight.
13. The cabbie got annoyed because Ray told him to stop talking. If Ray had been polite the cabbie probably would not have minded - I have been in taxis when I didn't have enough money and the driver has been ok with taking me home and waiting for the money.
He saw red.
I had to laugh when Connie says 'you look older' and Crystal says 'yeah I get that'.
I thought she looked about 12.
It is a bit creepy I agree (also the age of consent in NY is 17) but you have to remember that Crystal is a child of the ghetto and has probably been sexually active since puberty, we know she had a drug dealer boyfriend who was probably much older than her as well.
It's fairly common in the underclass for men in their late 20s/early 30s to have girlfriends aged 16 or even younger, so I thought this was perfectly realistic.
In '41 Hitler had the option of invading both Britain and the USSR; he chose the USSR and by September 1941 the invasion of England (Operation Sealion) was postponed indefinitely. In the alternative timeline of SS-GB, presumably the Fuhrer decided to carry out the invasion of England and so the Nazi-Soviet Pact remained in place.
One inaccuracy I noticed was that when Archer and Woods are in the school chapel, neither remove their hats. No Englishman (or Scotsman) of their class would keep their heads covered in a church in 1941. Similarly with Silvia calling the King 'Georgie' all the time, such informality would have been unthinkable for a middle class woman then.
She does look a bit older, but what ages her is her voice. That's the voice of a 30 year old woman, not a 16 year old girl.
I think the effing and jeffing (filthy language) is to show that she's a bit messed up and lacks respect for her parents because of their lifestyle. For the same reason she calls them by their christian names instead of 'mom and dad' and gets into all that 'self emancipation' legal nonsense.
I'm British so I can't be sure, but I always thought Missouri was the 'gateway to the west'. It was neutral in the Civil War I believe, so not really part of the north or the south. But all the hillbillies seem to speak with accents from the deep south like Alabama.
If you look at the site where the Langmores live everything is set high off the ground, including the trailers, which suggests the site is prone to flooding. This also makes it likely that the ground is marshy with lots of insects. I expect that's why it's offered at low rent, or possibly the Langmores bought it way back in the past.
In one episode in series two Ruth goes to look at a bungalow but just before she goes in she sees a respectable couple coming out with the estate agent (realtor) and she realises she can't live up to that level of respectability. Also, her daddy threatens her about moving into a house, because he doesn't want her improving herself. For some reason (possibly abuse/incest, which is hinted at in series one) Ruth is in thrall to her daddy and finds it hard to stand up to him.
LOL I was thinking the exact same thing. I actually thought the interior scenes of the boat were supposed to be a hotel they had built nearby.
When the boat is shown from outside, it doesn't look more than about 100' long. In the interior shots it looks twice that size and has a huge grand internal staircase and all kinds of little offices and rooms off the side.
SPOILERS I agree there is a gay agenda in a lot of writing (and also the pushing of inter-racial relationships) but actually I thought the Russ/Petty storyline worked quite well. Russ is secretly of the gay persuasion but is in one of probably the last places in the western world where it's not 100% openly accepted and actively encouraged. He is probably very lonely. Along comes Petty who he not only finds physically attractive but they also have things in common (fishing) and Russ sees a future together. That level of trust was the only way Petty could get Russ to work undercover for him. I'm not sure a heterosexual relationship could have established the same level of intensity and betrayal.