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Ride into nostalgia...

Stranger Things Season 1 (2016)

This is the golden age of TV, they say. With the input from companies like Netflix, box sets and internet TV streaming, binge-watching had never seen a better time. For a television addict, abstinence is becoming a Herculean task by the day.

This latest offering from Netflix that is taking the millennial and Gen-Y geeks by storm is 'Stranger Things'. It brings to life all the things we saw in the 80s - BMX bikes, big glasses, striped T-shirts, big hair and the adventures of the nerds ala-Spielberg. It can be summarised as a Stephen King story with the screenplay of John Carpenter and the cinematography of Steven Spielberg.

It can be summed up as a hotchpotch of a potpourri of box-offices of the 80s - ET, Goonies, Batteries not Included, Poltergeist and course the unforgettable X-Files. In fact, the opening music score is a reminiscence of that of X-Files. There are the three school misfits in place of Mulder and Scully to do the brain work. The bad guys are the Government agency, again, and people go missing. They are contactable, yet missing. The story is about rescuing the fourth member of the geek squad. Also on the trail are the police chief, a renegade cop, who had come to terms with the loss of his daughter to cancer, the boy's excitable mother, the boy's brother and his friend.  The only thing sorely missing from the scene is Mulder and Scully's powerful darkness piercing flashlights! There is even a life-sized Ouija Board to set the mood for spookiness.

This series would appeal to all ages as the story is told from many angles, from the pre-teen kid's viewpoint, from the teenager's with their hormone-driven high school romance drama to add and the adult's perspective with the lessons and baggage of hard-knocks of life to carry through the episodes.

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