Ah the ’80s!
Gaudy, colourful, pastel-hued fun – hypwercolour T-shirts, shoulder pads, Duran Duran … and the rise and rise of the mall.
How big a deal were malls in the 1980s? They were BIG and just how big can be seen in the new teaser trailer for Stranger Things season 3, which according to Den of Geek is still filming in Atlanta, which celebrates the arrival of “one of the finest shopping facilities in America and beyond” to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.
As Variety notes, there’s a whole lot going in the glossy, cheesily-gushy piece of time-specific promo liveliness:
“The promo video is full of 1980s mall-culture references, from the vintage logo for retailer to Gap to a shoutout to the now-departed bookstore chain Waldenbooks and music retailer Sam Goody. The teaser depicts the character of Steve Harrington, played by Joe Keery, as working in the Scoops Ahoy ice cream shop in the mall’s “state of the art food court.”
Given the otherworldly terrors unleashed on the poor unsuspecting citizens of the town throughout seasons 1 and 2, you could forgive the likes of Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Will (Noah Scnapp) and their various friends and family members including good old fraught Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) for needing to indulge in a little, or a lot, retail therapy.
But I fear they won’t get much of that, nor some downtime in the state of the art foodcourt, if past season are any indication.
The care taken to single out Starcourt Industries as the great retail-enabling benefactor would seem to suggest that some more underhand corporate shenanigans, and the monsters, both metaphorical and literal they let loose, are on their way to blight good old Hawkins once again.
Best get your Demogorgon spray ready …