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Netflix's Stranger Things has always been about two things: the nostalgic allure of a time long gone and the weird stuff that we imagine lurking just out of sight there. The 80s were a time when you could legitimately be uncontactable simply by being outside your house, which is perhaps the most frightening idea of all. It is an era that will forever be 20 years ago in our heads even though it is now closer to 40 years ago, something that struck Stranger Things star Winona Ryder particularly hard when she produced a seemingly common item her younger castmates couldn’t identify.

It happened on set of Stranger Things season one and it apparently reduced the actress to tears. Winona Ryder held a vinyl record up and watched the kids stare at her blankly. “I cried,” she says in a recent interview where she is described as a “lover of physical things: books, records, clothes.”

Before you start rioting, remember that the cast members in question were between 10 and 14 when the first season of Stranger Things was filmed, and Winona Ryder has been a major Hollywood star since the late 80s, so there are going to be some things that are going to be lost in translation between them. However, we did feel a small part of us turn to dust at the thought of the cast of Stranger Things starting at a record with the same curiosity and confusion that we might reserve for a vacuum tube.

We’ll be spending the next year while we wait for Stranger Things season five pondering what else the cast had never seen before being cast in a nostalgia-driven series. Have they ever known the satisfaction of actually “hanging up” a phone in anger rather than awkwardly pressing a button on a touchscreen? Or felt the resonating click of changing the channel on an old CRT TV? We bet they’ve never blown on a video game cartridge to get it to work again, either.

Just… excuse us while we sit down for a moment. This is all a lot to take in.

Netflix's Stranger Things is heading into its grand finale - of the main show that is. While you wait, make sure you've watched all of the franchise (including the spinoffs in books and comics) with our Stranger Things guide, know who the Stranger Things season 5 cast, and what Dustin actor Gaten Matarazzo things would make the show better (more deaths). .