Television

The Most Unbelievable Thing About 'Stranger Things' Is That The Dorky 1980s Kids Don’t Wear Enormous Glasses

Look at some old class photos from the '80s and see how many people are wearing glasses. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

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(Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Netflix)

“Stranger Things” is, obviously, a pretty great show. Throw together a lovable ensemble cast, a healthy sprinkling of 1980s nostalgia, a well-paced script that has clearly been honed to perfection during many long hours in the writers’ room, and a weirdly dark world of sci-fi horror, and you have a recipe for some great television.

The critics apparently agree. The latest season of “Stranger Things” (for which, I suppose I should mention, this column will contain some very minor spoilers) has garnered 13 Emmy nominations.

This isn’t some stuffy niche darling mostly ignored by the public either. “Stranger Things” broke Netflix’s previous record for most hours viewed during an English-language show’s first 28 days in just 17 days (sorry, “Bridgerton” Season 2).

After the first full 28 days, the first volume of “Stranger Things” Season 4 clocked in at a whopping 930.3 million hours viewed. Second overall only to the Korean hit “Squid Game” (which had 1.6 billion views during its first 28 days), “Stranger Things” Season 4 had the most hours viewed over 28 days for any English-language series in Netflix’s history.

To give you a little context, that’s roughly equivalent to condensing the time spent for a full year of work for about 447,260 full-time workers into only 28 days. “Stranger Things” just took up a whole work year for the entire population of Minneapolis over the course of a month.

People sure do like this show, and I’m proud to count myself as a fan too.

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I do have one complaint though. The entire show centers around four core dorks who recruit another youngster: a lab escapee who has mysterious powers. She also turns out to be a pretty big dork. These nerds, living in the 1980s, use their knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons to make useful analogies and plot strategies pertaining to the dark alternate world that is increasingly permeating their own reality.

I don’t have any problem whatsoever with the monsters, the telekinesis, or the better re-imagining of Project MK-Ultra (in reality it was pretty much an excuse for a bunch of bored CIA agents to dose each other and members of the unsuspecting public with hallucinogens). No, my beef is that out of a big group of nerdy D&D kids in the 1980s, not one of them wears a pair of big thick glasses.

Now, don’t send me emails pointing out that a handful of ancillary characters do have glasses. I know there are a few characters with glasses in the show, including such luminaries at Ted Wheeler and Dr. Alexei. But none of the bespectacled are main characters, and almost all of them are either killed off fairly quickly or severely lack in screen time (with the possible somewhat notable exception of Murray — I see you, Brett Gelman, don’t ever change).

I know a little something about kids with big thick glasses in the 1980s because I was a kid with big thick glasses in the 1980s. I had surgery for congenital cataracts when I was 2 years old, but people didn’t have to have any eye problems that serious to be wearing glasses back then. Contact lens technology had neither been perfected nor incredibly widely adopted. There was no LASIK — shooting lasers into people’s eyes would have sounded like a Soviet plot. Even a little nearsightedness or farsightedness, and you were probably huffing on your glasses to rub off a smudge 10 times a day and routinely going to the nurse’s office after your glasses broke when you were forced to play sports.

Look at some old class photos from the ’80s and see how many people are wearing glasses. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

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It’s not just the sheer volume of glasses wearers though. I became a D&D nerd myself in no small part, I’m sure, because of my glasses. The more experienced D&D nerds, my very own “Eddie Munsons” you might say, saw my enormous, half-inch-thick spectacles, and thought I looked like someone who might want to play. The invitations appealed to me, having spent a great deal of childhood squinting through glasses at a book, already building worlds in my imagination.

Maybe the Duffer Brothers wanted to avoid this particular cliché. Yet, a lot of really nerdy kids in the 1980s really were wearing a lot of big thick glasses back then. I find the fact that they’re not to be the most unbelievable thing about “Stranger Things.”

All that being said, it’s still one hell of a ride.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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