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Comment by mattl | Hacker News Reader

Stranger Things and other modern movies like Wonder Woman: 1984 present an inconsistent idea of what the 1980s was like.

Case in point, there's a scene in a supermarket with a bunch of breakfast cereals from various pop franchises. That never happened in reality. In reality, the same cereal would be repackaged for whatever was the hot movie/brand at the time.

This is somewhat sent up in this video from UK's The Adam and Joe Show. https://vimeo.com/347912488

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Didn't know that. I googled 1980s cereal and sure enough: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/70437468476516/

One of the things I do is edit movies and it makes you notice anachronisms and mistakes more than normal. Kinda ruins watching stuff.

yeah, I think know what you mean. you see the errors in the details and can't appreciate the vibe

> Case in point, there's a scene in a supermarket with a bunch of breakfast cereals from various pop franchises

Yep, Season 3 Episode 1. Also seems like everyone went to the mall to hangout :-)

The mall hangout thing was pretty spot on though in the 1980s (I was born in 1970). So much so that eventually a lot of mall security started making a point of harassing teens that weren't actually actively shopping though.

I think mall culture came down to two things: fewer ways to communicate, so the mall was an obvious central gathering location, and secondly fewer things to do, so the mall was where bored teens hung out.

I grew up in the UK and moved to the US in my early 20s.

In UK cities people hung out at different places, not a lot of malls.

Slightly tangential but I read this article recently on how deregulation and Reagan "created your childhood" - pretty interesting stuff. https://www.everything80spodcast.com/deregulation-and-advert...

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